How are you going to speak with one voice?
Imagine you are visiting a first-class restaurant. A well-dressed head waiter welcomes you in from the cold. You pass by an elegant, well-stocked wine cabinet on the way to your table. The table is attractively and elegantly laid out and adorned. The art on the walls and pleasant lighting create an intimate atmosphere.
The surroundings and aroma of delicious dishes would have anyone seeing Michelin stars. You take a seat. Then you are given the menu. It is thin and threadbare, a bit grubby, and it's as if all the text is in the Comic Sans font.
There are designers who would simply have stormed out in tears from the premises there and then. There are many others who would also have reacted strongly to the failure to provide a coherent experience.
The fly in the ointment
If your language suggests a great deal of exclusivity then the cheap paper menu spoils the overall impression and burns an impression on the retina. If part of the restaurant's personality involves combining the most outstanding French cuisine with an extremely down-to-earth approach or you need to be prepared for all kinds of surprising tastes and visual contrasts here, then it is possible, in theory in any case, to imagine such a concept. But a balancing act like this needs to be incredibly precise with all its casual style.
Weakest link in the chain
General communication is strategically important, even if there are countless ways of being general. There are good reasons for speaking with one voice in everything you do. If the advertising depicts the product so beautifully that we are bound to be disappointed when we encounter it in the store, the company has a problem. The problem may also lie with other parts of the purchasing process. Whether at petrol stations or clothes boutiques, if there are assistants who give you the feeling that you are interrupting them from something much more important, something they are doing on their mobile phone, then we are talking about a service company with a job to do.
In the case of a car dealer, this could mean the feeling you get when you enter the showroom and if fails to live up to the advertising and the quality of the car. In the Scandinavian world where IKEA dominates with its fast flatpacks, a waiting time of 3 months at the producer could be a bottleneck for a furniture supplier. It needs to be exclusive for you to be willing to wait.
Electric or not
One version of the agonies of having to make decisions is your stance on electric cars. Many people would like to get an electric car. They want to contribute by being sustainable. They want to care about the ecological footprint they leave behind. The message from these cars has been clear enough but people haven't felt like driving around a little dodgem that needs to be charged after a run to the local shop. In this case, it is the actual product that has been the weak link in the chain.
Now we have Tesla, E.ON, the e-Golf and others, not to mention favourable electric car schemes from the Government, so that it has now become easier in Norway to communicate to the target group for electric cars. And gradually as the cars themselves and their batteries improve, it doesn't need to all be about sustainability and the environment and other aspects are becoming more topical.
When it comes to cars in particular, especially electric cars, it has actually become very popular to join the waiting list for the next model. In the case of the Audi e-tron, which arrives in 2018, at least 1,500 Norwegians have been happy to pay NOK 20,000 to join the queue for this car, without anyone yet knowing how much it will cost. Here, unpopular elements like waiting and standing in a queue have suddenly been turned into something positive. Good things come to those who wait...
Decide where the message should stand
Try to avoid communicating too many messages to a poorly defined target group. If you spread yourself too thin, the message may lose its impact and barely get across at all. Choose your battles. Ask yourself some questions:
What is the most important thing for me to communicate ?
Which target group will this be of most interest to?
Which media channel (s) will get my message across best?
How can I stand out from the crowd but still remain faithful to the company concept?
What surfaces should I be very visible on instead of being barely visible on many surfaces?
If I change to an interactive dialogue with potential customers on social media will I have the capacity to follow up this dialogue in a proper manner?
Am I throwing away valuable market communication that is not making its mark?
What can I get rid off without having an effect on the company?
Am I justlittering, or saying something that means something for my target group?
Is there a smarter, cheaper and equally good way to achieve the same results?
If an alternative is much cheaper but not as good for your overall profile, steer clear of it if you can. Use social media for what it is worth, but don't totally crumple up the old Caution First poster. Produce content that is in keeping with the core of your brand. Try to be personal. Create a dialogue and commitment in the the target group.
One of the greatest things about social media is that you can get direct feedback from the target group. One of the worst things about social media is that you can get direct feedback from the target group. Worse still is if you don't get any feedback from the target group. If you use social media properly, you have the chance to become even better and then, in the best case scenario, you may be fortunate enough to acquire good brand ambassadors!
The more evil the troll, the less control
It has become more difficult to speak with one voice. Because in today's individual-based society, we do not control our own universe in the same way as we used to. For good or bad. The social media that many of us resort to as though they were close friends are never far away. If you have 100 employees, there is a a risk in certain workplaces that there will be up to 90 amateur journalists in the premises. Keyboard heroes with different degrees of intuition.
Some of them are good ambassadors for the company and talk up the company and people who work there in a positive, but hopefully not annoyingly positive, manner. But at some companies there are people going round who look completely normal in the daytime but when they get home they put on their online troll costume and position themselves under some cyber bridge or other ready to scare all the goats coming along and trampling on their opinions. And remember, it is not them who are negative, just everyone else who is against them.
It is of course not fair for a company to be judged on the basis of what individual loose canons end up saying so you need to do the best you can in the arenas you can actually control to some extent.
How do you sharpen the message?
We often have a lot of things on our minds. Everything is equally important. The messages cancel each other out. Nothing sticks. This is why many designers swear by the motto Less is more.
As a design agency, we want to help the customer to structure and prioritise information. In order to manage this, we need to move the focus away from the customer's own eyes to those of the recipient. This can be a heavy and difficult process, particularly because something needs to take lower priority and be sacrificed. We challenge the customer in a number of areas in order to give the recipient a clear message and an educationally designed structure.
Is everything actually important?
That may sound like a stupid question. But a different way of putting it is, what is most important? Many things are included out of habit or because “everybody else is doing it”. Focus on what is essential.
Create a list with the most important things at the top
Sometimes there are many things that are apparently not important. Try to put everything on a list where you need to put them in order. Sometimes this can make it clear what needs to come first and last and what is actually not as important.
Hierarchy
A clear hierarchy is important in order to be able to communicate clearly. This is also employed as one of the most important principles in design.
Ensure a contrast
Once you have defined the hierarchy, it is time to go even further. Prioritise whatever is at the top of the list and give it your entire focus. Ensure in any case that the recipient takes away this one thing if nothing else.
Make space for the most important thing
There are several ways of making the main element in your communication stand out. This could be the picture of the product, the heading, your logo or something else. Instead of just making it biggest, consider allowing it a lot of space and a feeling of airiness. This gives a natural feeling of quality and importance.
Remove/hide anything that is not essential
Several messages and elements will detract attention away from each other. So the more you can get rid off or remove, the stronger the most important elements will appear.
