Using design to expose the values of your brand and a means to greater profit for your company.

A Rather New Branch

Although design is a well known and well established art form in different kinds of art and design, design-management is a rather new branch in the design field. It exists for only 20 years or so, and it’s a more theoretical field of work, giving consultancy and advice to middle-sized and big companies. It gives an overview to the ways design can be best applied at which moment in which area of your brand and company. Certainly it has to do with adding beauty to products, to logo’s, to shop, and to packaging. It is is field based on knowledge of when and where to use different kinds of design mostly in order to activate and establish a certain brand and/or product. It relates closely to Brand-designing but it it is a higher thinking about design and hovering above various situations in medium sized and big companies to out-picture when and where to use certain specific kinds of design for a particular reason especially in relationship to your brand identity. Therefore the products of a design-manager are written design-audits, written advice-reports, briefings and debriefings to designers, CEO’s and design-plans for companies including financial tenders. 

Beauty 

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It is a fact that adding good design to your brand and products, the product becomes more in value gives your brand a bigger value and this you can express in your pricing, customers are willing to pay more for a good looking product. Good looking products sell better and gives your brand a good image. It is a big area to work on so the knowledge on this subject can’t be contained into one article, it will become a series of articles before you get the clue. Let’s get start walking together on this road.

Four Main Design-Area

There are 4 main area’s where design-management operates:

  • logo design and all printed material of a company based on it’s brand (incl. all cars and signs.) 
  • product design (industrial design)
  • retail design  (shop designing, this includes a website which is considered as shop-designing) 
  • packaging design 

Investment

A big question is: why should entrepreneurs invest time, energy and money in design, be it product design, retail design, packaging design, logo design, house style-designs on printed paper, websites a.s.o.? Is it worth the investment? If it is an investment then you should expect a certain profit on this investment. Does this mean you can use design consciously as a means in your company? Then you would expect certain profit from it? Can design help companies in this way? 

this article is part of a continuing series, next article from the same author on Design Management:

http://bizcovering.com/marketing-and-advertising/design-management/