Brand (design) esperanto

Or how and why designers need to make some changes (and some of them even make them). Being a designer is one of the most complex, difficult and beautiful professions.

It is a complex job because the designer (the best ones at least) knows and learns constantly from his own work and from the work of others, accounting his successes and his failures, learning and using marketing, psychology, sociology, distribution and market research, while being a man of ideas, but also of pragmatic or technical reality. The designer is (must be) results-oriented and has no choice but to know how to work with and in multidisciplinary teams that include the above specialities and much more.

It is a difficult job because they have to understand all the complex aspects of a product/service and the various markets involved while translating into relevant ideas and practice all this data and information. Designers have it rough because they are required to be polyqualified, polyglot, poly…

It is a beautiful job because no other profession in the world offers you the opportunity to live solidly anchored into reality and to keep with your feet on the ground, but at the same time to let your ideas and imagination run wild, to reinvent yourself every time, to never get bored and to never do something twice. Last but not least, this profession allows you, not only allows you, it even asks you, to always be fresh, open, curious and to constantly ask “why?”.

Today, above all, in the abundance of messages that assail us daily, the designer tends to be an information architect. I recently wrote, in a similar way, about the fate of the brand consultant. Designers are increasingly becoming content and information managers so that their message is relevant to the individuals they are addressing. Nota bene: I wrote individuals and not consumers. Today, I translate relevance by the degree of real interest that an individual or a group of (relatively) similar individuals express towards a certain category of information. If this relevance does not exist in relation to those described above, they will not even access visually and cognitively the message, they will not show interest in that message/information/product/service / etc. Today, the mindset of individuals is different from that of the prior consumer, as the public was generally described not that long ago. For example, if, for a number of reasons, the iPhones finally conquered me, I will ignore or at most I will pay 0.5 seconds of attention to other smartphones. This phenomenon translates into:

1. great efforts for the product/brand to succeed in winning me;
2. increased loyalty to the product and brand if it has proven its promise over time and managed to win me;
3. increased attention to the “mistakes” done by the approved product/brand and critical spirit. More than ever, the credo of any brand becomes (or must become): constancy, homogeneity, honesty.

How does the designer immerse himself in this context? He does this by selecting the strictly relevant, correct and honest information related to the product/brand and by facilitating its transmission through his/her own means of the profession, in an equally strictly relevant, correct and honest context. I intentionally repeated these three words: relevant, correct, honest because to put it in a more universal language: “people don’t take bs anymore”.