Why aren’t marketers part of the design process? Design is where your product or service touches the customer. Bad design is bad customer service. Bad design is bad marketing. Bad design is bad for the brand. Yet marketers ignore design.
Good design creates an emotional ease within your customers that causes them to seek you out – even if they don’t quite know why they feel good about you. Bad design makes your customers reject you or at best, avoid you – and you never know it.
For example, Starbuck’s, touted so often as the modern marketing brand experience, yet I avoid it at all costs. It’s not the coffee. It’s because every single store I’ve gone into has a nano-shelf that me and at least 5 other people are jostling around just so we can add a little sugar to our drink. There is barely room for one person to set a cup down, much less maneuver that tiny space along with purses, newspapers, laptops and hot coffee. Is it because they want this to be so annoying that I’ll pay for an expensive pre-mixed coffee drink instead of my plain old house blend? Probably. Someone at Starbucks thinks this is okay, maybe because I’m not their top-tier, “best” customer – I’m just the low-end guy. My Starbuck’s brand experience is that they can’t be bothered thinking about me once I have a cup in my hand.
An inexpensive 50-cent hook makes me choose a particular oyster bar over hundreds of other restaurants in my neighborhood – even others where the food is better. It sounds unbelievably minor, but that 50-cent hook gives me a safe and convenient place to hang my purse when sitting on a high bar stool in a crowded restaurant. It keeps it within reach (rather than way down on the floor or over the back of the stool where it could be easily lifted). I can relax, spend a lot more time (and therefore money) because I’m slightly less distracted about keeping my pocketbook safe. It is such a small thing, but it shows someone was thinking about my use of the space.
How about restaurants that don’t take reservations, yet provide no space inside (other than the bar which is also crowded) for waiting guests? Retail counters that are so overloaded with stuff being pushed in our face that customers don't have room to sign for their purchase? How about hotels where you have to fumble with a heavy door while trying to locate the light, while dragging a suitcase to enter your room after long hours of travel? Or an online computer store (Dell that would be you) which contracts with a finance company that doesn’t let customers pay their the bill online?
Good design is good customer service.
Comments