Despite the obvious benefits of great design, consistently realizing this goal is getting harder and harder for companies to achieve. But it’s essential for both disruptive and sustained success in physical, service, and digital channels. And as an extensive five-year McKinsey study has unveiled, companies with strong design outperformed industry-benchmark growth two to one. How? Here are four ways these top performers—and you too—can stand out from the pack.

Prioritize & Measure Design Choices 

It starts with understanding your audience from the designer to top leadership. And then following the performance of your design choices. In the McKinsey study, companies that measured their design performance with the same rigor they used to track revenues and costs consistently performed best. 

Design For Every Touchpoint

The lines between products and services are blurring into integrated experiences by the day. So it’s important to consider your customer’s journey at every touchpoint of your brand. This design approach requires solid insights from firsthand experiences while understanding your customer’s underlying needs before they even interact with your brand to followups about their experience.

Design is Bigger Than One Department

Great design does not begin and end with the designer or art director. It’s a team effort. One of the strongest correlations uncovered in the McKinsey study linked top financial performers with companies that integrated designers with other departments. Working together with analytics, strategy, and designing against insights ultimately leads to better customer experiences and greater opportunities for growth. 

Adapt to Feedback

Just as successful Kickstarter campaigns invite potential customers to test prototypes, great design blossoms in environments that encourage learning, testing and iterating with the end user.  From testing stages of a new website before launch to focus grouping iterations of package design before sending them to press, learning from user feedback boosts the odds of creating breakthrough products and services while reducing the chance of costly misses.

Make Great Design Work For Your Brand

When it only takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about your website and only 10 seconds to form a first impression of your logo—great design is essential to your bottom line. 

That’s why at Push, we’ve developed a proprietary Brand Convergence Model to plan, execute and evaluate everything we do for our clients. No matter the size of the client or project, strong design combined with the right messaging, deep consumer insights, and strategic media can push your brand to its full potential.

Whether you’re looking for an AOR relationship, want support on a project, or need a complete rebrand or brand developed, contact us to learn more about becoming a client.