Brand Value
The excellent WNYC radio station program, On the Media, recently aired the conversation here between host Bob Garfield and Michael Samson, the co-founder of crowdSPRING.com. The website is a crowd sourcing resource for designers and those seeking design services. The question, which Garfield explores, is whether this is putting established design businesses out of work and exploiting cheap labor or is it advancing the democratization of design, and many other fields of collaborative creativity?
You can read/listen to the full discussion at the link above, but without rehashing the conversation, I would suggest that it is for established design businesses to assert their own value to clients. Crowd sourcing as a phenomena may or may not be an integral part of our market context in the future, but the need for any business to demonstrate the value of its service will continue to be necessary.
Value demonstration is especially relevant when Garfield and Samson discuss the demand for and resistance to speculative work. This agency does not do speculative work. There are many reasons, but the most important is tied to our showing the client where and how we add substantial value beyond the crowd source methodology. We do this because our process,which we call BrandCore℠, involves a comprehensive, intense and detailed investigation of external, internal and broad market topographies that relate to that client’s holistic business experience and aspirations. That is before we even get to the artistry of branding. Even where a client’s budget or logistical constraints prohibit that degree of robustness, we still work through a streamlined version of that process to ensure that the design concepts align seamlessly with the brand.
Fundamentally, we do not compete with the crowd source model. Instead, we offer a different and thorough value proposition. If a client has an objective that is met by a $500 design, so be it. If a client has a need for a deep and wide understanding of its brand, then that is where we deliver.
Written by Stuart
David Day | Associates
About the Author: Stuart is constantly curious and believes conversation matters, for business, people and community. Feel free to join in...
March 23rd, 2011 at 10:33 am
[...] senses has included the rise of crowd sourcing, the ethics of which I wrote about on this blog, in this post about Brand Value. The New York Times’s Rob Walker declared that “A big part of being ‘pop’ anything [...]
May 23rd, 2011 at 9:53 am
[...] about the use of crowd sourced spec work (you can read one brief piece about our approach to the ethics of spec work here and another about crowd sourced design for bananas (yup!) here), so it interested us to see that a [...]