Our super-star designer, Georgia Billman, swapped her Macbook for a projector and delivered a presentation to the very class she sat in 3 years ago, the third year Communication Design students at AUT.

Georgia’s hope for the session was to inspire the next generation of commercial designers while sharing some hard-hitting truths about real life in the design industry today. We’re sure she reframed a few unrealistic expectations, but ultimately sparked enthusiasm as she spoke about her experience, growing from student to intern, and on-to intermediate designer at one of the longest standing big name agencies.

Georgia shared the large scope of projects she has touched with her creative flare over the years, from start-up ventures to established household names, and discussed her insights on the processes involved, as well as the invaluable lessons she’s encountered along the way.

Georgia is grateful for this opportunity that allowed her to “reflect on the wide range of projects I have worked on and what I have achieved”. “I hope my perspective was valuable as the students transition into the industry”, Georgia says. Our managing director Annie Dow is “very proud of Georgia demonstrating her knowledge and very proud having her part of our team”.

If you have a group of individuals who would benefit from hearing straight from the horse’s mouth, please don’t hesitate to contact our team with 30+ years of experience in the design industry.
Call Annie on 021 979 699 or email

It’s the question on every business or brand owner’s mind. How do you maximise your brand performance? For me it’s straight-forward, it’s a “unique (think distinctive, authentic) message, executed consistently.” Sounds easy. Right? Well not really. For me the wild card in the deck is ‘consumer expectation’?

If you agree that expectation drives interpretation, then doesn’t consumer expectation define the way your brand message is received? And judged! And factor in that expectation is built up by the sum total of all your previous activity, actions and messaging. So your brand will be judged on everything it has said, not just the last thing. So consistent execution is key.

And even if your brand has consistently ‘behaved well’, it doesn’t necessarily mean consumers will trust you. A recent Customology study of more than 2,500 Australian consumers found that 74% of people believe that brands ‘lie to them’ in their marketing communications. Almost three-quarters. Wow. That’s a lot. Three in every four people who see your brand’s message start with the view that what you are saying isn’t true! So expectation is a biggie. Because it ultimately defines whether your brand performance is optimised.

Confused. No kidding. How can I possibly know what my consumer wants from my brand? Surely its easier than this? Well it’s not easy, but it’s also by no means rocket science. It’s a process. Which requires discipline. Because to ‘win’, you have to take it step by step.

First, you need to get to know your consumers. You need to talk to them, and ‘stand in their shoes’. This will help you better understand their expectations. Which in turn will help you define your ‘difference’, the message that is intuitively authentic to your brand or service, and ensure that it is designed to deliver against that expectation.

Then you can map out your steps to success, your roadmap if you like. Only then are you ready to execute …. one step at a time. And at each step, you need to ensure you are taking your customers with you. Too many times brands try to move too fast with their messaging, and get ahead of their consumer. Or worse, the message confuses them around what the brand or service is actually offering.

So don’t rush that first step. Getting to know your customer could be difference between good sales and great sales. As Al Pacino’s character (coach) Tony D'Amato famously said in the 1999 movie Any Given Sunday… “Football is a game of inches. It is won & lost on those inches. One inch at a time. Life, like football, is just a game of inches.”

Brands are like humans, they have a life of their own. In our human world, most people agree on the concept of six degrees of separation. In your brand world, the inches you need to succeed are everywhere. But the margin for error is small. You need to fight for every inch. So we like to talk about the six inches in front of you, when we talk about the six-step process we take clients through on the journey to better understanding their customer’s expectations.

Feel like it’s one inch forward and two back? Then please get in touch, and we can take you through our six-step process.

Inch by inch.

 

Customology 2020 Research: https://www.customology.com.au/press-release-research-reveals-7-10-customers-feel-lied-to/

“Having been the 2019 recipient of the DINZ esteemed Black Pin, it was an honour to be selected as a judge at the 2020 Good Design Awards Australia, for the Women in Design Award.

These awards are one of the oldest and most prestigious international design awards, promoting excellence in design and innovation since 1958. The ‘Women in Design’ award was set up only 2 years ago, created to address the significant imbalance of gender diversity of women in leadership roles in creative industries. As something we have championed in the NZ creative sector for a long time, it was an incredible pleasure to be invited to judge this very new award.

A privilege also to be selected alongside 5 other outstandingly talented women from around the globe, to form the judging panel Thankfully with the use of Zoom, we were able to come together to select the 2020 winner. Organising a suitable and respectable time of the day was no mean feat, as the 5 of us resided in various countries; America, Holland, Australia, Kenya, Australia and New Zealand.

Pre-reading of all the nominations was sent well in advance, so that we could each choose our top 10 shortlisted finalists, for the committee to coordinate.

Thankfully there were some clear standouts and all of the judges quickly aligned to whittle those 10 down to 5.

Women from all design sectors were nominated across Australia. I was blown away with the sectors they all represented; Industrial Design, Architectural Design, Human Centered Design, Social Innovation Design, Furniture Design, Interior Design, Homeware Design, Branding Design, Software Design, Digital Design, Health Sector Design and more.

After rigorous debate we selected the 2020 winner. But unfortunately, as she has not been announced yet, my lips remain sealed … for now! What I can say is we all collectively felt she is a very talented lady, and an impressive disrupter and gamechanger in her own category.

I was grateful to be a part of this judging process and to really see how creativity is making an enormous impact in every aspect of our daily lives. Australia - you have a whole lot of powerful women delivering to your communities on so many creative levels.

You may well be one small step ahead of us here in NZ, but I do know this movement is changing here also.

K road business owners: Next generation

My fellow speaker on the night - there to present the second spot on social media - was Jeff Kay of Easy Social Media. He quickly let me know that this was a very different crowd to most local business associations he speaks to - firstly by being a couple of letters further down the alphabet from X!

And they were also exactly the type of eclectic, non-traditionalist individuals you would expect to be habitués of K Rd. The difference being that these ones are the entrepreneurs rather than the party people.

I confess that, looking out into this audience of atypical business owners, I was wondering how the traditions of brand practice were going to wash with them. I was a little nervous.

Nodding heads!

Now that I know that the content of ‘Keeping brand-fit to keep your business healthy’ got such a good reception from these young and inventive business owners I feel even more confident in passing on to you some of what we talked about.

First, why should I care about my branding?

The first section laid out a smidgen of the slew of empirical evidence for how a stronger brand creates more sales and less need to compete on price. Catnip to a business owners’ attention.

In your mind, what do you think your brand stands for?

Then we talked about the importance of knowing what you stand for. This is your foundation. If you don’t have it you are spending a lot of money promoting yourself without a story to tell.

Last, a WOF for self-testing your own brand health

Are you DIRTy? The series of questions in this acronym allows business owners to self-assess their brand health. Sweet, as they might say on K Rd.

Sadly, it’s not straightforward at all.

Ben Dean, our head of production, works on files for print (’artwork’) all day, every day. He’s seen it all.

Like the biscuit image above that a client brought in to us on a hunch that her artwork could be better. You can see the Before and After of Ben’s retouching above. Even more interesting is the close up of the left-hand side of the Before below. That’s a particularly sloppy piece of retouching. Too bad if you wanted to use your biccie image later, up large on a billboard!

Below are some tips from Ben. Call it your ‘artwork intel’. It might save you a lot of money some day.

Tip #1
Retouching trumps photography.

Good retouching can achieve more than is possible by any photographer. So any time you commission or buy a photo, you should also allow extra time and budget for retouching. It will not only enhance and optimise the photo, and set it up right for your printer, but you can create stuff that didn’t exist before - like clear skin (human or vegetal!); sauce where there wasn’t sauce before; or more chocolate in your biccie (not saying that happened in the example above, mind).

Tip #2
There are printers and then there are printers.

Your printer may be offering you any number of print processes - from digital, to offset, dry offset, flexo, letterpress or in-mould labelling, to name a few.

Each type of print process requires your artwork files to be set up
differently. Same design, but different artwork.

But what’s more, different printers using the same process will also potentially require different artwork setups.

Moral of the story: Don’t even start making your artwork files without a consultation with the person who will be printing them.

Tip #3
Some of the things to watch out for

Your printer and their print process will dictate what’s required for your artwork, so your first job is to understand any restrictions that these things could impose on your final result.

They could include:

A limited or alternative colour breakdown
There may be a minimum line weight
There may be a minimum font size
Trapping and/or overprinting may be required
There may be a margin of misregistration that is unavoidable

Covering off these things before you create your artwork will help avoid a bad result.

And disappointment.

Tip #4
Substandard artwork is expensive

If your artwork is not set up correctly, the files will need to be done again and resupplied to the printer. That’s one expense doubled.

If the job has already been printed, you are looking at the cost of your artwork again (+ retouching), and the price of the reprint. That’s not a result that will make your accountant smile.

So remember, artwork is not straightforward, and a patchy approach never serves your business well. But artwork most definitely has the potential to do your business proud.

Close up Before: The ‘patch’ up job

But it’s always worked out ok for me. So why would I change? To be honest, I could never see any reason to. Until now. In my pre-Covid self, I could always reason it in my favour; I work to live, I like being social, I work hard so once I’ve paid my mortgage I can afford to buy something new, or go on holiday. That’s it. I’ve justified it!

Now as I sit here having emerged from lockdown, coffee in hand at my go-to-café, with a much healthier bank balance than pre-lockdown but still deeply worried about NZ’s more immediate economic future, I am contemplating that this is the moment to think differently. To make a choice. Between reverting back to type, or making a real change. A change in me, for me. To deliver better outcomes for me!

I now view my mother’s advice, a by-product of her spending the first five years of her life in the air raid shelters of WW2 London, rather differently. In my post lockdown state, I now see it as an investment, a down payment on a better way of life. On a more authentic purpose, an attainment of a better equilibrium for myself and my family. Oh, and that better bank balance. A better outcome all-round right?

Of course we now live in a world of dollars and cents, but they are no less valuable. In our world today, whether it be in our personal lives or our workplaces, our constant focus is on stretching those ever-tightening budgets even further. And boy are they going to get tighter!

All of a sudden I think back to my mother’s go-to war cry for getting ahead. I never felt I could compromise. I didn’t want to go without, and I certainly didn’t want to be told what to do and how to operate. How wrong I was. I was complacent, and I was already compromising! I was living for the moment rather than planning for the future.

“The ugly truth of it was that I had it all back to front!” 

Now I view my mother’s message as one about spending wisely, and about laying better foundations in my life – in other words really getting ahead. Yes, I’m still going to spend, I’m just going to change the ‘how I do it’ bit. My first investment will be in me, my brand if you like. As a person, a husband, a father and a son, as a friend and as a productive worker. In taking the time to find my me. This is not a story about spending less, it’s about spending better. My brand is unique to me and no one else, so if I lay a stronger set of foundations, every aspect of my world will benefit.

Much like the decision a business makes when deciding when and how to invest in its brand. “So what’s your down-payment?”, as my mother would say. Have you stopped to consider if you have it all back-to-front? And is that stopping you really getting ahead? Is that investment in your new factory, an extra sales person, a new variant or flavour, or a fab new social or digital campaign the best use of your hard earned profits? Or should you first consider the benefit of finding your authentic truth? Your Brand Why? as I like to call it.

So what’s involved? In finding what is distinctive about you? What your audience really care about, and what else you are really up against? (your competition?).

And this is where the rubber meets the road. Do you believe your view is enough? Or could an outside-view-in better help you find your Brand Why?

Which is often where the conversation stops. I know my business. I understand my brand better than anyone else. No one knows my competitors better than me. Why would I spend my money on this stuff, let’s just execute. Just like I thought I knew better than my mother!

What I’m suggesting is that this dialogue is not about whether you can do it well and be successful. Of course you can! It’s about whether you can do it better, with outside help. The opportunity cost if you like, of only relying on your view, could be dollars left on the table.

The question I would ask is “Can your future success be greater? And can you spend differently to really get ahead?”

It’s a decision to be made around whether you can better optimise your effort. Rather than future-proofing your business, why not future-seek a better multiplier. In my view, a better formed brand adds extra layers of value that help amplify the growth off future investment.

Because in five years instead of being an $X sized brand (you insert the value here that’s relevant to your business), how much bigger could your business be if you make the decision to engage outside help to develop a more distinctive vision for your ‘you’.

Because when all is said and done, by investing properly in your brand upfront, you’re telegraphing your intention. And that sets you up for really getting ahead. Because you know where you’re heading. And all the hard earned profits you then spend after that go to a more targeted
purpose. That’s front-to-back, not back-to-front!

And that’s when I think about my mother’s advice. Yes it’s a story about spending wisely! But really, it’s a story about not being all back to front!

Thanks Mum x

Written by David Savidan