If you’ve been on a film set there’s a lot of intense focus on what happens in front of and behind the camera. When a shoot is in full flow, there’s a lot of concentration on getting every detail, every nuance of the visuals and the performances right. There’s a feeling that everything you do is important.

A good film director uses the insights and skills of others to help bring their own individual and unique viewpoint to the screen and engage with the audience in meaningful ways though images, words and technology.

Many businesses and brands would be improved by bringing the intensity that a filmmaker brings to a new movie production to their business branding and design projects.

If everything is important in creating a film that has lasting value, then everything you do in your business is an important part of your brand and product experience.

One of the secrets of great filmmaking is great planning. Relatively few commercial films are shot in sequence, so great care has to be taken in pre-production to make sure timings and locations are in synch and actors and crew are in place.

As with film production one of the secrets of great branding and design is great planning. Think though what you want to achieve from your brand and the design and technologies you use, to get the best results and reach your goals. Don’t be afraid to have high production values and to question and refine every detail of your brand management process.

Take a cinematic approach to create a feeling, create an emotion, create a desire, and create a brand. Think about the context, the economic and social theatre in which your brand will appear.

Does you brand stand out or fade into the background with other similar brands and businesses that make similar promises and have similar visual languages? Do your branding and design tell a unique and memorable story that the people you want to interact and buy from you can relate to? Have you thought about what your customers are looking for and what you can offer that will have meaning and value for their business and their lives?

Like a cinematic success a great brand, a great business, will make people sit up and take notice and become part of their lives. A great film director will be able to tell stories and describe emotions through use of visual language as well as colour, sound, music, lighting and dialogue.

A successful director uses every tool that’s available to get the best results for the finished production. As a business owner or marketing professional you should be thinking the same way. And if you work with a team that takes a Big Data approach to branding, you can even have a 3D view of your brand that can give your business objectives more chance of box office and critical success.

As every great filmmaker knows, it’s important to be original and authentic, rather than string together sequences from someone else’s movies if you want to create something that is unique to you and your business. An authentic approach to design creates authentic brands – brands that don’t need to borrow everything from somewhere else as they have a point of view they want people to know about and unique values they are confident in expressing.

Everything that surrounds your branding and design should be an event – like a cinematic success that ultimately helps you stand apart from your competitors and gives you a long-lasting business advantage.

Eugene Burns

If you’re like me you probably spend quite a lot of your time not simply running a business, but finding new ways to grow and in developing new products and partnerships. I spend a lot of time working with business owners to help them use new delivery channels more effectively, helping them find new markets through design and transparent technology.

I’ve written before on how major companies like Amazon and Apple use digital disruption and incisive thinking to create new territories where none existed before and develop new markets that their technology made available to them where others feared to tread.

So what does this mean for you and me? I’ve long stopped being a traditional designer/creative director who designs projects for others and goes away again. Brandlogik operates as a technology-driven virtual agency. That not only works for our clients but also develops and builds our own customer-facing projects with new spin-off brands and services.

You can’t predict the future for your business, but start with the next possible thing your customer needs and let your future find you.

In the same way that Google revolutionized the advertising industry with Google AdSense, a new breed of design agencies are changing how they work and are finding new ways of doing business powered by technology. There’s a lot in this digitally disruptive approach for you to apply to your own business, no matter where you are, or what markets you operate in.

It helps to start with an attitude where you are open to new thinking and this is not as easy as it sounds if your business has lots of stakeholders who may justifiably have cautious viewpoints. But you do need a different mindset if you want to be part of the new business evolution. You have to be ready to keep asking questions such as who are my customers, what do they need now that I can offer them that I’m not already, and what are they likely to need in the future that I can start giving them now?

If you want to see this evolution in action have a look at jawbone.com – a company that started out making premium Bluetooth headsets, then developed their range into mobile audio devices and have now entered the health and lifestyle market with an integrated wristband and app system called UP. ‘What Jawbone does – and what you need to do – is to innovate the adjacent possible.’ (See Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation by James McQuivey).

For Jawbone and other creative brands, business really is an evolutionary process: ‘today birds can fly and (humans) can see because nature invented the adjacent possible.’ (Digital Disruption as above, page 76).

This means that we cannot predict the future for our business or our product, but ‘we start with the next possible thing our customer needs and let the future find us.’

The idea of letting the future find you may sound a little passive, a little laid back maybe, but it needs a positive and creative attitude and the constant questioning of what your customer wants, not just now but in the future, to really be successful. Good design, incisive thinking and an understanding of how to use transparent and nearly free technologies can help you change your market.

Many companies are finding that the juiciest areas of innovation and growth for their business are at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds. Tesco and Converse for example are finding new and disruptive business models through merging their traditional offerings with new information technology capabilities to improve the customer experience.

Is your business and your brand ready for the future? You may find it easier to let your future find you if you have someone who has been through the digital disruption process to help take you though your next steps.

Eugene Burns

For a couple of months now Brandlogik.com has been the number one ranked design agency site in Ireland on Google.com – considering the site was only relaunched earlier this year, this marks a bit of a milestone in our development.

However, there’s more to being a top design agency in any country than a Google ranking and, you may be surprised to hear, SEO has relatively little to do with the secret of our success. In fact ‘the joy of logik’ – our secret sauce if you will – is the sauce that almost certainly flavours many other successful sites in may other sectors.

While we do use SEO techniques, and recently I have been very pleased to chat to and learn from the insights of several user experience experts such as Nathalie Nahai, The Web Psych, the real reason for the success of Brandlogik.com is that I have thought long and hard about the content and communication that gives a site its authority and engagement with the people who use it.

It’s the quality of the design and the value of the experience you deliver that makes your site a useful and worthwhile destination.

SEO can indeed get your website a lot of hits and boost your online presence, but it’s the quality of the design and the value of the experience you deliver that makes your site a useful and worthwhile destination and ultimately helps to grow your business.

Being a number one site means you really need to know what your current and potential customers are looking for, then give them much more than that by grabbing their attention by speaking directly to their intellect as well as their emotions. On Brandlogik.com we never talk down to the people who visit our site.

The Brandlogik approach is a disruptive one. Due to the way we’re structured we’re unlikely to be the top-billing agency in our territory. We don’t have dozens of designers that we must feed with regular briefs and production deadlines, but rather we focus on delivering excellent ideas and results that put our partners and clients at the centre of everything we do. Rather than seek streams of new clients we build long lasting relationships and create partnerships designed to last and we use our website to reflect that approach.

In the same way that Jeff Bezos probably doesn’t lose much sleep worrying about the search ranking of any of the Amazon sites, I focus my attention on the experience and design of Brandlogik.com – making sure that it stays innovative and fresh, while clearly and simply expressing the values that drive the Brandlogik brand.

We value ideas and creativity, not for their own sake, but for what they can achieve for our clients and the people that know who we are and what we stand for. We use our website to deliver our values, as we believe in the power of design and technology to transform your life and your business. That’s an approach that changes our lives too.

Having high profile sites that link to you proves nothing, unless you can also deliver value to the people that visit your site.

Having a website that expresses who we are and what we do is important to how we live and do business and it’s an ongoing design process rather than a one hit wonder approach. There really isn’t any secret sauce except to work hard every day to try to do what you did yesterday – only doing it even better.

Generally speaking people don’t make decisions about the future direction of their brand and their business on the search rankings provided by Google. However, it’s one of many factors that can help grow your business and your brand, and that can make a transparent approach to technology work for you and just about every business you know.

Eugene Burns