“This isn’t going to work, they’ll never pick it up”!
“Who approved this direction”?
“This isn’t what we asked for”!
“The target audience won’t respond”.
Pick one, it’s been used a thousand times.
It’s no joke, whenever a client prepares a brief for a designer they rarely understand how many assumptions they’ve built the brief on, or how these assumptions will affect the outcome of the design.
Worse still, nobody believes their brief is a bad one. Generally speaking, clients are good at providing details on who the target audience (TA) is, how much time the TA has available to them during the day, TA age range, etc…the problem is…
“How does management know that their information is trustworthy”?
Treading on toes
If you’re in management you are more than likely using assumptions about your TA to base the direction of your marketing material, website and brand. The horrifying thought is that you probably don’t believe you’re wrong in any of your assumptions, because you believe that they’re facts.
If quizzed on the ‘facts’ you’ll lean on the ‘I deal with my clients everyday and know them very well’ line.
Time for some humble pie. If you want to develop a design that will engage the target audience then it must be based on solid fact. Not what management thinks the TA does, not what management thinks the TA reads, not what management thinks interests the TA — FACT!
In the absence of fact there is only assumption
Designers often get asked to design a marketing piece that will “…engage the target audience”. The question that the client doesn’t ask themselves is ‘how do you know what the target audience will respond to if you don’t engage them’?
Q: when you look at a design and decide the picture, font, colour or messaging is ‘wrong’, on what fact are you basing this view on?
A: you’re making a judgement based on your assumptions but don’t realise it.
If a 40 year old asks a designer to create a brochure that engages teenagers, how do you judge whether or not it hits the mark?
If you’re a marketing manager that asks a designer to create a pamphlet that will appeal to engineers, how do you judge whether or not the pamphlet hits the mark?
Let’s face it, you are making assumptions on what you think engineers will respond to. Be honest about it before you ask your designer to change something because “the target audience won’t respond to it”. And please don’t be offended when the designer rightly asks “how do you know”?
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