design & marketing blog

Some great advice from the design sage John McWade from Before & After Magazine

I want to point out a great post that Seth Godin made a couple years ago. It’s one of my favorite short articles to reference before starting a branding or design project —The inevitable decline due to clutter.

As is his gift, he does a great job of articulating minimalism; a principle of design and communication that has become critical for success in this age of massive information overload.

I’m having a hard time not quoting his whole post because it’s so good, but in the spirit of minimalism here are the best parts:

• “As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it’s free.”
• “Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention.“
• “More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.“

Out of the thousands of ads we’re exposed to each day, what is it that makes only a few stand out?  It’s emotional connection. Those ads that don’t have it, no matter how technically precise, are noise and filtered out by our brain.

Here’s great example from The Richards Group of how it’s done right.

As a follow-up to the great Google Chrome ad I posted a few days ago, here’s another great TV ad from Volkswagen. As mentioned about the Google Chrome Ad . . . there are two keys to  branding that both these ads excel in: authenticity and emotion. If you don’t connect with your customers in these areas they really won’t get the true value you’re offering with your product.

The emotion of this ad is obvious, but notice too how authentic the laughter is. If the laughing in this commercial came across even with a suspicion of being staged the ad would lose a lot of its effectiveness.  Another important key to this ads success is the very personal nature of the content . . . for a moment we feel like we’re sharing a intimate moment with someone we know.

This ad exemplifies the sales  axiom . . . people buy from those they know and trust. In a matter of 30 seconds Volkswagen takes us from being a stranger to making us feel like we know and trust them. Every bit of your branding and marketing communication needs to be created with this same axiom in mind.