Ignorance, Needs and Wants – The psychology of brand choices

Lining up at the supermarket checkout waiting to buy the shopping, I look in my trolley and see around 50 items. I wonder who put them there and how he chose them. I know I physically took the items off the shelves and put them in the trolley, but I have no idea of why these particular items?What ignorance, needs or wants of mine made my brand choices? What unconscious forces were at work and how and who brought these into play on a simple trip to the supermarket? And most importantly, when presented with many different versions of the same product, why did I choose one brand over another?

In this article I attempt to define what branding is in the context of our consumer experienced lives, and how we come to make our on-the-spot choices when under pressure. I posit that buying choices are generally made by a combination of emotional responses to the product or service masked as rational thinking, and our ignorance, needs and wants. Furthermore, that branding agencies know how and do manipulate these in order to ‘nudge’ us towards their products, which is ultimately, if we are honest, what we want and need them to do in order to help us live our lives.

Review of ‘Design as Art’ by Bruno Munari

Design as Art is Munari’s 1966 book of essays bringing together his thoughts and musings on design and art. Is there a difference between an artist and a designer today he asks? Munari thought the designer was the artist of his day.

‘The designer of today re-establishes the long lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing….There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.’

Review of ‘The Language of Things’ by Deyan Sudjic

The first thing that strikes me about this book is its design. It is a hard back with a faded red mock hessian feel to it, purposely creating an illusion of age and importance. Immediately this provides a feeling of congratulatory ownership. I feel good about owning this book because it feels worthy of me. I immediately recall a memory of browsing through a second hand bookshop in Charing Cross and finding a wonderful second hand penguin edition of The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. Aged perfectly in all the right places, it elicits that warm feeling of a humanity and knowledge read and passed on down through many lives and many hands. And so it seems that before even reading a word I have already been pulled in to The Language of Things by the thing itself; the book as an object.

The Future of Digital and the evolution of the Digital Agency

In this manic early-decade confusion I propose that a new type of Agency is emerging – the Creative Tech Agency – which is digitally creative, innovative, agile and hungry. I also propose that the traditional Advertising Agency is soon to become a symbol of what we will very quickly look back on as the bloated past of pre-digital communication channels. The future is small, specialized and digital.

Why you cannot afford not to get into Social Media

It is easy to dismiss the things we don’t understand

It is easy to dismiss the things we don’t understand as irrelevant and of no use to us. Take Twiiter – it’s just a load of pointless chatter about nothing. Or Facebook – just a load of needy people collecting online friends because they have none offline. Or YouTube – a load of silly banal videos. Or blogging – wannabe journalists and writers writing their diaries online for all to see in a pathetic attempt to get someone interested in their little lives.

Article in this month’s edition of Design Thinkers

My article entitled Design and Psychoanalysis: Siblings in Empathy is in this month’s Design Thinkers at www.design-thinkers.co.uk.

http://www.design-thinkers.co.uk/design-and-psychoanalysis/

The Value of an App

The App store – over a billion downloads, more than 200,000 apps and lots of PR and profit for Apple. But is there any profit in it for anyone else?

Certainly there are some high profile cases of apps that have and are making their developers a load of money. But how about the standard developer or company that spends £20k on an app? Are they able to get a slice of the pie? Can they make any money? Or is it just luck and the whim of Apple and their ‘What’s Hot’ choices that do it? I guess the question we are asking is:

Is it possible for a good quality cheap app to make a profit?

The 8 Disciplines of Successful Web Design

‘The words on their own are perfectly respectable words, and understood in their more general sense, but when combined they make an unholy matrimony bringing disrepute to design, and a whole industry of cheap, low quality, badly executed sites to the web.Web Design is design without the user, it is the web without the technology. Never has the word design been so misrepresented than by those that call themselves web designers.’  A.Designer

And thus spoke a designer I met at a recent networking event I attended. I found myself wondering why Web Design, as a branch of design, is so maligned, misused and so misunderstood. Why is this? Why has the web not been capable of implementing a definitive set of heuristics across the board? Why is it that from SMEs to Fortune 500 companies there is still such a ignorance of how to successfully translate offline branding and experiences to the web?

Low Income Branding

This article is about the heroes of low income design, Netto, LIDL, Waitrose as a surrogate mother, evolution of the urban species, emotional branding,  Argos, communist East Germany and Krispy Kreme.

When one walks the streets of London looking for the unsung heroes of low income design one sees some unexpected things. Who would think you could find  a great example of logo design on Rye Lane, Peckham?

Design and Psychoanalysis

This article is about Psychoanalysis and design, empathy, shopping to recapture your lost mum, Google as your mythical dad and Volvo as your mummy’s womb.

Design and Psychoanalysis – like brother and sister.

Psychoanalysis is a very interesting prism through which to view Design. The two seemingly disparate disciplines connect and unite in many different ways.

Working Class Graphic Design

This article is about pebble dash, the Barbican, the Queen, ugly projections and working class graphic design.

Bad design – it’s everywhere it seems. The ugliness of our world stalks us like a malevolent clown, laughing at our grey displeasure as we rush from here to there, stressed by how effectively we manage to project the lack of beauty in our selfs into our urban surroundings.

But, does bad design actually exist or is it just an internal experience? After all, one man’s beauty is another man’s ugly. And what does the term ‘bad design’ actually mean? Ugly? Not fit for function? In fact, is ‘bad design’ the actual opposite of ‘good design’? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is ugly is it not?

Good and Bad Design

This article is about morality, guns, nuclear bombs, sharks and post-modernism down the pub.

What can survive the present? How can one thing, one object, one design, manage to infiltrate our minds like dirt in an oyster and grow over time to become something timeless, a ‘classic’, an object left alone by the winds of style, not eroded by the rains of progress, not left to rust in a corner by the whims of modernity? That is, what is Good design? And what gives it longevity?

From Beauty to Ugly

This article is a about human beings, babies, having children, the Ugly, the end of the world, and quality.

Human beings, aren’t they lovely. All fingers and thumbs. Nice folk. No harm to anyone. Until..? Until they became ugly, until they fell for the Ugly.

Ugliness, a disgusting habit humans have acquired. A plague of it runs riot in every city and town of the world. The Ugly is now everywhere you turn, cheered at every corner. Like a uninvited weed it spreads through our land and our souls. Politicians and markets push it through, walk with it, talk with it. The Ugly is in. It’s cool. It is the DUDE.

The 5 Rules of Commercial Web Design

So, you have a multimillion pound brand, created over years of creative hard work and advertising expenditure specifically designed to communicate effectively with your target market and to give them the user experience you have tailored. Everything is under control. And then you go on to the web and mess it all up. Doh!

Lack of Continuity between Offline and Online Branding

This is a particularly bad blunder because the lack of continuity of brand experience between offline and online sets up a customer for a big disappointment – with the accompanying loss of brand credibility. It could be because of laziness that this happens, or  the lack of communication between the offline and online parts of a company. Or it could be due to a lack of understanding of how customers build up an impression of brand from multiple touch points – billboards, tv ads, web banners, magazines, high street shops, website etc. If they experience brand inconsistency across these different touch points they will feel confused and will be unable to identify with the brand in a cohesive manner. This will mean the brand message will dissipate and be lost.

The Online Ugly in the Top 100 brands

There are some websites out there which, even though they do the job well enough, and haven’t knocked down pedestrians when drunk driving a car, are just so damn ugly they might as well have. More than this, the companies below are top 100 brands in the world. You would think they could buy some one in with a bit of taste, with some knowledge of space, of typography, some one with a bit of feeling for this kind of thing. It’s funny, because companies at this level spend massive amounts of money on making sure their products elicit the correct feeling in their consumers, but when it comes to their website that aim disappears. It seems the main aim of some of these websites is to get as much info in as small a space as possible. They seem to lack direction and a target. The website becomes a box to throw things in with no thought for the person who needs to find something in the box.

Cookie Cutter Web Design Agencies

There’s a special type of web design which really gets to me. Especially when it wins awards or the companies concerned are making thousands of £s in the process. It is what I would call ‘cookie cutter’ web design.

Instead of fitting a design to a customer, and the customer’s market and products, these agencies use the ‘cookie cutter’ approach – they fit the customer to a design. This type of approach results in the customer experiencing the website as atonal, off-centre, and in some way disconcerting. There is a mismatch between the product/service and the design i.e. the relationship does not work, has not gelled and results in a feeling of incompatibility which in the end effects conversions, sales and brand value. It is a basic rule of design – design follows function, or in this context, design follows products and services. This can be taken one level deeper – design follows brand, and also design follows brand experience. Therefore any web design must be an increment to a product. For example, a doctor’s website is part of the doctor’s surgery and must function as such ( as a holding, containing, secure environment building trust and calm). This kind of design is derived from a much longer discovery and exploration phases  than a lot of the ‘web design’ agencies are willing to do. The conceptualisation of the website design, in relation  to the end user, must be re-engaged with. Less bish, bash, bosh please.