Marketing People Love: Exclusive Excerpt from Turner Duckworth’s New Book

I’ve spent most of the past 20 years making brands work. It’s not brand building or “creating an iconic brand”, it’s just trying to make them work. And it’s difficult. Through some incredible successes and some miserable failures, I’ve developed strong beliefs about how these weird things called “brands” work.

One of the most central is that design is the biggest tool. It’s the most powerful thing you can use to make your brand work. Think about brands that have maintained great results over time. It’s very hard to think of a brand with bad design. There are a lot of weak brands with great designs, but all the strong brands, the iconic groups that we all want to be a part of, have great designs. So why does this happen? I think there are three main reasons.

First, you can’t ignore design. About seven years ago, Bruce Duckworth was assigned to explain design to my team at Carlsberg, a multinational beer company. I will never forget what he said then. “Design is marketing that people can’t or don’t want to do.” Ignore it. ‘Increasingly, we hear about consumers actively avoiding the efforts of marketers to invade their lives and invade their conscious and unconscious minds. They are getting smarter about this and increasingly have easy ways to opt out (at a cost).

But they can’t opt ​​out of the design, and even better, they don’t want to. They like to see the new iPhone, they like to pick up a beautiful product on the shelf (even if they don’t need it), they obsess over the design of Nike’s latest release, and they like beautiful things on their social media channels. I’ll post it. Share with all your friends. All of this is driven by design, not by intrusive content that we have to beg, trick, or pay to see or hear. People welcome beautiful things into their lives. And let’s be honest, most of the things we create as brand people, they don’t do that.

Second, design communicates branding more clearly than anything else. We always hear the cliché that “seeing is believing,” but even in a world where most video content on social media is watched on smartphones and audio is turned off, clients and agencies still need to communicate through words and words. I’m obsessed with storytelling. picture. When trying to explain a brand’s idea, they foolishly start with the question, “What would a TV ad look like?” I see a lot of design briefs that are basically “make things look good.” That’s not an overview. Sometimes I try a little harder and write phrases like “make it stand out/look modern”, but it’s the same thing. You can’t simply ask for something to be “better.” That’s lazy and beside the point. You need to be specific about what you want to convey with your design. All elements of design must be intentional. You have to tell your story. Because it tells. Your job is to make sure it’s telling you the right thing. As Bruce said, “Everything tells something.”