Why design is the most powerful force to grow your business – PART 2

Welcome back to Part 2 of our quest to discover “why design is the most powerful force to grow a business”. If you haven’t already read the previous article, you should definitely go here and read Article #1 now. In that article, I explained the first benefit that design can give a business: how can achive great product design to predictably win the prospect’s buying decision in the big moment.

Today I want to continue this conversation and explore the next set of design tools that definitely will bootstrap your business!

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Predictable and constant income is often the difference between owning a growing, thriving business or having one that is constant struggling to maintain.

Therefore in fact the most important sales that you make is not the first, but the second one – in other words when your prospects come back and buy again your product.

It is much harder and more expensive to win completely virgin prospects’ trust and convince them to buy your product, than selling to customers who has bought from you before and they not only already have trust in you but keen on buying your next product.

Imagen how much lower can be your marketing and sales costs and how more predictable your income if there is a magic that provides that your customers will buy from you for the second, third and fourth time.

Well, design is exactly that magic. It helps to win that magical second buying descision.

Design helps to evolve product and brand loyalty through user experience no matter how small your business or what kind of product is it about.

When your prospects buy from you for the second time, they don’t do it because of being persuaded by the first impression but because of having a convincingly positive experience during using the product.

There is a common misbelief between business owners that only big companies can evolve brand loyalty and build a fan base for a product and it needs a marketing campaign with huge budget.

The truth is that yes, a huge marketing campaign do helps to make the public aware of your product on a wide level, BUT does not guarantee that people will be willing to pay for it!

So how can design build product and brand loyalty? How can design achieve that people go crazy for Your Products whoever is your target market: young/old people, bankers, factory managers, suppliers etc.

Why „Aesthetic-Usability Effect” can raise your sales?

Why does it raise your sales when your product’s aesthetics compensate the difficulties and frustrations of using and handling it?

Last time, when I was in an Apple store I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon. Two customers were talking about their recently updated operating system, that seemed to them unstable and freezed sometimes. It was very interesting how they talked about it. They talked with empathy and patience like it would be a completly natural phenomenon. However I experienced that the PC users usually talk incredibly frustrated about similar issues.

This phenomenon is caused by the „Aesthetic-Usability Effect”: Aesthetic products are percieved as easier to use than less-aesthetic products.

The effect has been observed in several experiments, and has significant implications regarding acceptance, use, and performance of a product in the eyes of the customer.

Aesthetics has a highly important role how people use a product. Aesthetic products are more effective at fostering positive attitudes than unaesthetic products and make people more tolerant of usability problems.

One of my favorite example for lack of tolerance is the “pay-off” sceene in the Office Space film.