Impact of Good Design

Why the best design elements should tell a simple story and make the complex easy to understand.

By Andrea Fitting
President and CEO, Fitting Group

One of the challenges companies face in their marketing endeavors is how to know good design when they see it and why they should care in the first place. To answer the second question first, Lawrence J. Lasser, President and CEO of financial industry giant Putnam Investments, says that "in an increasingly crowded market, communications and advertising become ways to rise above the crowd and distinguish yourself." Lasser ought to know. Since 1985, he has led Putnam Investments to top performance in management of more than $345 billion in mutual funds and retirement assets.

About five years ago, Lasser ordered the redesign of Putnam's entire communications program in addition to a redesign of the company's corporate offices. With Putnam's growing range of products and the great growth experienced by the industry, Lasser felt it was becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate the company. The intermediaries, brokers and financial advisors who recommended their products and received their sales material, were being inundated with materials from competing firms. This made it all the more important that Putnam marketing materials stand out, not simply as provocative design, but as workable sales tools that would enable these partners to do their jobs more easily and enhance their affinity for Putnam products and Putnam as a company.

What the company didn't know then, but has since learned, is that good design starts well before a particular piece of marketing literature is conceived. The design professionals taught Lasser that design was not just about packaging, but also about content. They began with an overhaul of the company's logo and brought more parts of the company into an integrated look so that they could project a consistency and rationale for what they were doing in all of their markets.

The designs didn't need to be identical or cookie cutter, but they needed to be consciously related.

Redesign of literature usually leads to a shift in the approach to presenting information. In the case of Putnam, the company went from a one-off technique to a literature system that had elements of sales support attached to everything. The two objectives were to visually differentiate Putnam from its competitors and to simplify the presentation of information ditch the jargon and make the stuff user-friendly. Key phrases and key messages were highlighted so that if you just read the headlines and subheads, you got the story. Collectively, the whole thing became much less intimidating.

So how do you know if it's good? It's a fact that there is more than one way to define "good," some highly subjective. But the truth is, with all the clutter and overwhelming number of messages out there, good design will tell a story in the simplest possible way, make the complex understandable and move the audience to action.

What is the impact of good design in business today? As marketing plays a greater role in the business of every company, design as an element in the marketing package becomes much more important. There is hardly a part of society today that does not have the equivalent of a marketing department.

And there is hardly a product or service today that is the market leader but lacks good design. Which came first?

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