Haste Makes Waste or Paralysis Through Analysis: Finding the Middle Ground
I don’t begin to pretend I know much about graphic design. After all, I’m an account executive and not an art director for a reason. However, my boss recently forwarded a spam email newsletter he received from a local retailer, and even I knew it was not a good marketing piece. For starters, it addressed him as “Dear (Customer Name)”. The layout was very crowded and unorganized. The graphics looked like really bad clip art from PowerPoint.
This got me thinking. Did this company really believe this email made a positive statement about their brand? Or, did they just need to get the email out as quickly as possible, and therefore, a mediocre piece was “good enough”?
This can be tempting to all of us. There isn’t enough time or money to do the job right, so we settle for “good enough". After all, at least your company’s name is in front of your customers, right?
I believe this is the wrong way to present your brand to the world. Don’t get me wrong, getting your name out there is extremely important. However, it’s even more important to take the time to deliver the proper message about your brand.
On the other hand, if you spend too much time tweaking and fine-tuning non-essential parts of the project, you could fail at the other extreme. In that case, an unnecessary demand for perfection might slow your marketing efforts and make it difficult to react to your customers’ needs. It’s possible to waste a lot of time and still not get your name in front of your target audience.
The goal is to be somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. You need to move fast enough to keep up with the changing business environment and make sure that your messages remain in front of your customers at critical purchase decision time. But they shouldn’t be produced so fast that your work is sloppy and hurts your brand image. Which extreme do you struggle with?
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