Random Stream of thoughts on messaging & brand identity….

You can’t really create an effective marketing campaign without understanding first and foremost what kind of person should be reading it.  The Messaging strategy for any business should be based on a clear understanding of who the ideal audience is and what result they are hoping to gain from the product or service.  Despite this it feels most common to find website content that focuses primarily on product or service attributes, ignoring the mentality of the audience.  Let’s look at what works.  Nike rarely tells you about the specific details of their shoes.  Often you don’t even see any particular product advertised.  Mostly their strategy is to piggyback off the personality of their sponsored athletes, Michael Jordan has already established his personality as congruent with the values that the purchasers of their products want to see in themselves.  People purchase Shoes that cost several hundred dollars without knowing hardly anything about them.

Your brand needs to fulfill a certain set of criteria for it to be memorable and attractive in the minds of consumers. At at the very least they need to be inspired to think of ways that they can see themselves using your product and it improving the quality of their lives.  The biggest mistake I made in my early work was getting caught up in functional descriptions or product attributes.  That isn’t what works. Problems are solved in an instant, your sense of identity is carried with you every waking moment.  If anyone could respond “so what” after visiting your website for the first time. Then my job is not complete.  

The goal for me is always to move beyond functional descriptions of what you do and instead, focus on showing the profound value that you can create in the lives of your buyers.  A consistent identity that zeros in on what it is about your solution that makes people’s lives better is always in the back of my head and the goal of my design.