or - If You Didn’t Spend Enough, What You Did Spend Was Wasted.

The gist - If the thing that will do the job you need will cost $5,000, and you spend $2,500 on a thing that doesn’t quite do the job, it doesn’t matter how much you saved, because it doesn’t do the job. The money you spent on that thing was wasted. In this entry I use Advertising, Websites and Branding design as a lens to examine the effectiveness of half measures. By which I mean, not at all.

There is such a thing as the bare minimum. Unfortunately for many, there is often a thing that is less than that, less than the minimum, that’s pretty similar to the thing they’re after, and easily confused for it. I see it all the time in Web Design, Logo Design, and Advertising.

For example - Advertising. Running an ad costs money. Running a small ad isn’t as effective as running a large one. Running an ad once isn’t as effective as running it repeatedly. A well-conceived and designed ad is more effective than a poorly conceived and designed one. Ideally, you’d be able to run a well-crafted series of large ads repeatedly. Ideally you can run an ad that is so well-crafted a piece of contemporary commercial art that after you run it during The Super Bowl or American Idol, it gets a ton of attention from the press, goes viral, and manages to accumulate eyeballs on its own.

Ideally.

Chances are that if you work with anything outside of the Fortune 500, you don’t have the budget to even think about the ideal. It’s all about making it work with the resources you have...and this is where half measures come into the picture.

I work with small businesses, which means most of the time if I’m talking to them about advertising, it’s PPC or Banner Ads. If they do decide to venture into the world of Print, TV, or Radio; there’s usually a moment where they look at the cost of running the ads and think, “Wow. That’s expensive. We’ll just have to spend less on...” and that’s where the problems begin.

Running a small, poorly crafted ad once in the wrong publication looks a lot like running a large, well-crafted one frequently in the right publication...except that it costs a lot less, and doesn’t work. It’s that last little bit there that makes any money you spent a waste, no matter how much you saved.

I’ve noticed a similar problem with small business websites. The bare minimum, meaning the least you can do to make it worth spending the money, and the actual least you can do are very very different. While one can still build a static brochureware site using Flash™ and ‘best practices’ from some out of date ‘teach yourself web design for dummies in 24 hours’ book and photos and copy you made yourself, it’s a terrible idea; and it will cost you 90% as much as building a good basic site on a good open-source CMS. Over time it will probably cost you more, because it’s a pain in the butt to maintain, and you won’t be able to do it yourself without learning HTML and probably buying some software.

Design and photos and content strategy are another matter altogether. We’ve all seen sites that cannot decide why they exist or make a poor impression, destroying what little credibility a company has by making them look shady, dishonest, or incompetent. That means that the design, art direction and content strategy aren’t doing their job. They exist by default, but they can’t do the work assigned to them because no resources were spent on their development, starting with the deliberate assignment of strategic significance.

In that case, the actual minimum (a thing that is technically a website, but has bad design, technology, content strategy, no consideration for SEO, etc...) and the bare minimum (that will do any good) can not only fail to create value for your business, but actually do damage to your brand. So, not only is the money you spend on your technically-a-website website wasted, but it may be costing you money in lost sales or destroying brand equity.

Logo design is another great example, and it comes from a really simple misunderstanding of what Logos are supposed to do, and how they do it.

A logo is a simple device. It uses the visual system in your brain to bypass the part that interprets symbols as sounds, and assembles sounds into words and assigns words meaning by assigning meaning directly to a symbol. That’s a logo. Plain and simple.

Simple. Right? Right. Easy for you to say.

A good logo happens to be one of the most difficult things in the world to develop, specifically because of its apparent simplicity...but most designers, much less business owners, really understand the work assigned to them, or the ways that they do it.

Because of this massive misunderstanding, I would venture that the vast majority of money spent on logo design is wasted. Designers focus on cleverness or beauty, and business owners focus on looking professional and and whether or not they ‘like’ it. Business owners also focus on absolutely asinine measures of quality of logo designers: number of concepts, number or designers working on it, number of revisions, and price; in short, quantity.

In reality, it doesn’t matter if one designer works on it and only delivers one concept; or if 100 designers each make 100 concepts. If that one concept is driven by a solid branding strategy that is an accurate reflection of the values of the company, that one concept is infinitely more valuable than the 10,000 generated the other way.

So, why does the market seem to be headed the other direction?

Easy. Half measures.

The client who wants to substitute shopping for strategy is trying to spend a little money on an ‘epic’ logo with unlimited revisions, instead of doing the harder job of writing a marketing plan and a positioning paper and collaborating with a professional. In order to collaborate openly, they’d have to be able to explain their plan and their vision to their collaborator, and if they can’t do that, it’s a lot easier to pay for revisions and ‘know it when I see it’ than do the work they need to do.

The sad thing is that if they have not done that work, any money the spend on the logo, the website, or the ads, is most likely wasted.

You see, half measures don’t work. They don’t even half work. It’s more like they work 10% as well as the thing that you needed in the first place. But let’s say your half measure costs half as much, but works ten percent as well as the thing you need...then not only are you not getting what you need, but you’ve wasted 80% of the money you spent.

Stop wasting your money.

Bonus, if you made it this far - Designers: Stop taking people’s money for half measures. It cheapens our profession to keep taking money for things that we know aren’t going to work, or aren’t worth the money being paid for them. You’re the professional in the relationship. It’s just as much your job to tell people when you think they’re wasting their money as it is to make the thing they’re asking you for.