In today’s fast paced world of content hungry intelligent consumers who have seen every marketing gimmick out there it is becoming increasingly difficult to successfully sell your products and services. Marketers need to constantly innovate and connect with their customers on deeper levels across the entire relationship of consumer to company. A long term approach to marketing communication is the key to achieving this. Usually when the marketing message begins to slip, if a company is even lucky enough to keep a tight view on analytics long enough to determine it has slipped that is, the first reaction is always the same, “Let’s get a new agency, we need some fresh blood.” This knee jerk reaction is based on the idea, at least subconsciously that success happens in creative sprits thus it must be time to find new creative to put some new life into marketing.

Success however doesn’t work this way. Success is more of a series of continual improvements over time rather than a short sprint.

Jim Sterne – wrote in his book, Advanced Email Marketing:

“The secret to truly successful marketing is actionable measurement. Measuring your results alone isn’t enough; the key is feeding them back into your sales and marketing process to make continuous improvements. Many marketing projects fail in this regard.”

This is the basis for the continual improvement process which makes small improvements overtime, learning from each success and failure with each improvement. These small and consistent improvements in design, ad copy and web usability have a much larger impact than wiping the slate clean and starting with a fresh agency.

The first step in the practice of implementing a continual improvement process if to define your business goals, which was discussed in another blog post. Once a clear definition of success has been squared away you will need to be able to know what your current situation is in the form of measurable metrics by defining what key performance indicators are important to your unique business goals. Your key performance indicators need to be constantly measured so that your current conditions can be compared against your desired results. Without knowing the distance of this gap there’s no way of knowing how far design will need to jump to get you to the other side.

The role of designers, like all things in this information age, is evolving. We are entering into a creative age and that will change the way designers think, act and work in the business world and more importantly how they interact with business executives.

In the past and present, depending on where you look, there has always been a clear distinction between the creative department and the business department, better know by ad agencies as the suits vrs. the creatives. With the dawn of the creative age, creativity and innovation are on the next horizon to propel business forward. In this new age “the suits” and “the creatives” will both need to talk the same language and work much closer together than they have ever before. This new collaborative style of working combined with accountability from both sides will lead to breakthroughs in innovation.

Design is being pushed to the forefront through products like the iPod and brands like Target all of which use design as a competitive advantage. With the increasing bombardment of messages all competing for viewers’ attention an opportunity exists for design to rise up. Designers will need to be more accountable for the results of their creative ideas and business managers will need to become a part of the creative process, with neither side directing or leading but working together toward a common goal. Gone are the days where we can point the finger of blame for the failure of a campaign or product launch or low conversion rate, design as well as management must become accountable.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject or ways you may have already propelled design accountability in your company. Let the conversation begin.

Let me begin my making a clear distinction, design is not art.

Simply stated art is created for the artist and the artist alone. The artist paints a picture solely for the purpose of self-expression of how he or she sees the world. Anyone can look a piece of art and like it or dislike it. Art is subjective, either you like Van Gogh’s sunflowers or you don’t.

Design on the other hand is not created for self-expression but for a client with a particular goal in mind. If a design accomplishes the desired goal, for example to increase the response rate of a particular message by 63%, then it has satisfied it’s objective and purpose for being created. If subjectivity is added to the process of design approval the purpose of design has been completely removed and has become subjective.

So someone’s opinion may be that they don’t like a particular color or that the empty white space can be filled with something, but that is not design, that is an opinion.

Design is the accumulation of principals and elements that perform on many levels with several different parts all contributing to a desired influence. Every element in design has been placed or chosen for a reason and to change something that may seem trivial like color or white space just because of an opinion could result in a negative desired outcome.

Truth be told, no designer or copywriter or art director or even you can know beyond any doubt what the best design will be, until it’s test. Design is a process that must constantly evolve and grow.