I love good design. There is nothing that catches my eye like really good graphic design. There is a misconception in the minds of many business professionals that has them thinking that design is just another word for marketing. The two are synonymous in their reasoning. Therefore, if you hire a really good graphic designer, all your products and services should sell without any further effort. That thinking is akin to the person who washes his car, but forgets to put any gasoline in the tank, and yet expects to drive it down the highway.

Marketing is a broad business discipline. It incorporates a lot of components. Communications is a part of marketing. So is advertising. So is branding. Events fall under marketing. Trade shows and golf outings; websites and social media; logo apparel and focus groups. It all falls to marketing. Let’s not throw good design out of the marketing circle. It belongs there as much as customer satisfaction surveys do. Without good design, your logo wouldn’t be distinctive. Your packaging would be bland. Your website would be forgettable. No one would remember you, right? However, let’s not be so naïve that we think you can put all your emphasis on one component of marketing and the rest will become unnecessary.

The reason I bring this up is I am seeing a growing trend of businesses who believe that if they have a nicely designed business card and website, their customers will beat down their doors to buy from them. When it doesn’t happen, they typically throw more money at design – print a brochure, create a sign, put their logo on a T-shirt. What they find is there is an endless list of design ideas that they can throw money at and it never produces what every business needs to survive: sales!

Let me suggest another route to take. Before you agree to produce one more nicely designed anything, come up with a strategic marketing plan. Such a plan first examines things like your strengths and weaknesses as a company. It helps you define your target markets and figures out the values, attitudes and choices that target market has. In every target market, there are effective and ineffective ways of getting their attention long enough to make a sales pitch. Choose your marketing medium and the message it will carry (we call these campaigns) based on what is most effective with the target market. After you have done some strategic planning, then hire the graphic designer to make the medium as visually appealing as possible.

There is something very alluring about certain marketing mediums and good design. You can get drunk on the creative process, loosing all reason except to drink in more and more of the same without any regard for your ROI. It becomes a money dump! A good strategic marketing plan keeps tabs on the connection between the marketing medium and your bottom line.

Good design in marketing is the kind of design that helps people remember your brand and leads them to a sale. Other than that, it is utterly useless. When you are hiring a graphic designer, make sure they understand this concept.