Five Tips to Successful Design

Kelly Kovack, co-owner of Purpose-Built, offers her best advice on achieving a great package design.

By Kelly Kovack

While there seems to be a full-blown love affair with innovation and design, there’s only so much design can do on its own to make a brand successful. The marketplace is inundated with perfectly adequate product offerings all clamoring for the consumer’s wallet while consumers have never been more educated or discerning. For this reason design can play an effective role in creating product differentiation while communicating a brands DNA. There are plenty of examples of strong design-driven success stories, such as Method, Go Smile and recently 21 Drops, but they are the exceptions, not the rule.

Here are five simple tips to achieve successful design:

1. You can’t be everything to everyone. In the current competitive landscape if a brand fails to identify a clear strategic target it is destined to fail. As a brand tightly define what you stand for, who are you are designing for and why. Design succeeds when it serves as a differentiator.

2. “Me too” brands don’t work. The result of mimicking someone else’s success is very often an inconsistent experience that feels disingenuous to consumers. Good design does more than serve a functional need it must be aligned with the brand’s purpose and values. Know your company’s limits and deliver an authentic experience within them.

3. Don’t treat design as an add-on. Approaching design as a menu of services and applying it here and there on bits of a project that need sprucing up, might be tempting because it appears to be an economically controlled approach. However, this usually leads to fragmentation. The best designs are integrative and incorporate all a brands touch points ensuring a consistent consumer experience while reinforcing and building brand equity.

4. Establish clear and realistic expectations. Some brands need radical shifts, but others simply need to refine or pay closer attention to existing creative assets. If a company doesn’t know what it needs the design effort cannot succeed. Do a 360-degree brand review to determine the needs before seeking solutions.

5. Execution. Execution. Execution. Many clients are interested in the look and feel of final design outcomes but would like to outsource or bypass the actual process itself. Design can improve a brand but it is only as effective as a brand’s ability to execute it. The most brilliant concept poorly executed will fail.

Successful design requires the client to enter the design process with a clear goal, an understanding of the role they must play, clearly aligned expectations, the ability to articulate the essence of their brand and ultimately the skill to execute. The key to getting what you need from design is letting it influence and be influenced by other aspects of your business.

AUTHOR BIO: Kelly Kovack is co-owner of Purpose-Built, a talent collective dedicated to conceptualizing and developing new and existing brands in the personal care marketplace (beauty, grooming, spa, wellness and lifestyle).