Don t Leave Communication out of Marketing
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 Posted on Harvard Business Review: July 1, 2010 1:10 AMGraphic design, marketing, and communicating are three different things, but all too often they become substitutes for one another, both in language and in practice. This happens at every level of business, from the small entrepreneurial up-start all the way up to the Fortune 500 consumer brand giant. And the stakes are high. If you're starting a new enterprise with limited power for getting the word out and you blow the communication, it's all over. And if you're a multinational and you do the same thing, you're throwing millions of dollars down the toilet, or worse, creating negative effects for your brand that may cost you twice as much as what you're spending. In either case, you'd have been better off to keep your brand's mouth shut.I got most of my schooling in this area marketing social causes, where return on investment has to be measured with a kind of precision and persistence that makes consumer brand ad measurement look amateurish. Our company raised over half a billion dollars for various causes starting from scratch, with no donor lists, generating all of the interest through carefully crafted and targeted advertising. Here are some of the things I've learned over the years:
Communication is king. There's one question and one question only: What are you trying to say? Everything, but everything else has to be in service of that — the media buys, the creative, the colors, the copy, all of it. It cannot be the other way around. You will never get the business result you want by putting something other than the communication first.
If you don't want people to think of pink elephants, don't use pink elephants in your campaign. Many campaigns make the mistake of putting the thing they don't want you to think about front and center. There's a tragic American Express campaign out now that does exactly this. I've deduced, after way more deducing than any consumer's ever going to do, that Amex wants you to think about using your AmEx card for little things like toothpaste and gas (like you do Visa) and not to think of AmEx as the card you only pull out for luxury items. So what's their headline? "It's not just for vintage bubbly." They've used their whole headline to plant an image in your mind that's exactly the image they want to erase. What should the campaign have been? Gigantic picture of a jug of Tide detergent next to a gigantic picture of an AmEx card. Big tube of Crest next to the card. Big can of Pepsi next to the card. With no words, it would have completely rewired your brain. Instead, they strengthened the old wiring.
Everything matters. In my many years of cycling, I've realized that there are a dozen things that contribute to your finishing time: your hydration, the food you're eating, the size of your tires, the weight of the bike, the height of the seat — they all work together to create a final result. Business communication is no different. In that AmEx campaign, not only is the headline bad, but the AmEx logo is tiny, as is the picture of the thing they want you to think about. (I thought the image was a bottle of champagne until my editor pointed out it's shampoo, which only underscores the point.) The three factors combined contribute to a massive failure of communication; like riding your bike dehydrated with a flat tire and a passenger on the back.
A graphic designer is not a marketing department. I feel for entrepreneurs and small businesses headed by people who don't think they have marketing sense. They subordinate their own good intuition about what needs to be said to a designer who may be more interested in beauty and composition than in message. Be wary of copy written by a graphic designer who isn't in on the business strategy.
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