Design Kompany | Brand Marketing by Graphic Design studio in Seattle

A week ago, one of our new clients recommended Jim Collins’ Good to Great.

Unless you’re keen to follow a lot of anecdotes about big companies, you don’t really need to buy this book.

This is the gist of Good to Great:

Keep your focus tight and don’t waver.

Fun to read this book. Good to confirm what’s important for business owners who want to see their companies succeed: focus.

“Focus” is the name of our most basic package here at Design Kompany.

I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Good to Great sort of reminded me of Warren Buffet’s “circle of competence” idea. Anyone I met with in any portion of February, March or April got to hear my detailed description of this. Even that guy at the airport.

In a nutshell:

Buffet says don’t veer outside of the bounds of the stuff you’re best at. Concentrate your efforts doing what you’re good at and what comes naturally to you. Do that, and that only.

Here’s how Jim Collins, a former business school professor, puts his take on this idea:

The pivot point in Good to Great is the Hedgehog Concept.

The essence of a Hedgehog Concept is to attain piercing clarity about how to produce the best long-term results, and then exercising the relentless discipline to say, “No thank you” to opportunities that fail the hedgehog test.

When we examined the Hedgehog Concepts of the good-to-great companies, we found they reflected deep understanding of three intersecting circles:
1) what you are deeply passionate about,
2) what you can be the best in the world at, and
3) what best drives your economic engine.

—Jim Collins, Good to Great

This reminded me of another business book, Strategy Maps, also on our bookshelf amidst books on branding and design.

How does this relate to “Focus” at Design Kompany?

In our Focus package, we get to know our clients and find out what their strengths are. In marketing speak, we’re talking about unique value proposition.

Getting this solid is paramount to building a brand that’s truly authentic.

Authenticity will separate you out in this day and age. Shiny and loud worked in the 1980s. Clever and quirky in the 1990s. But today people are flooded with shinyloudcleverquirky and are glad to welcome real.

Talk to Design Kompany to draw out your core strengths. These are the foundation for your brand story.

For the heart of your brand message.

And the form for the product we deliver: your company’s “look and feel.”

The whole shebang for your total brand identity design: your logo, your typefaces to pair with it, your color palettes specified for print and web, your style guide with details on how to apply the logo in a whole bunch of different scales and situations.

See some samples of our design work in our slideshow portfolio.

Other stuff we’ve read for DK projects

We like to get to know how our clients think about things by asking for book recommendations. Some really good ones this year have been:

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• The poem Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
• Leading Geeks by Paul Glen
• The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
• Notes on Synthesis and Form by Christopher Alexander

All of this got started a year ago when a client referred DK to Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees.

UPDATE: August 2008

Just found this article in the Seattle Times about small business owners trying to steer clear of burnout.

One interviewee says he wonders if he and his partner considered too much at times.

“Once you start heading off track, you’re going down a bad road…

You’ve got to have yourself focused on what it is you want to do, what’s the goal. I think I’m over that hump.

I see a clear vision of where we’re going.” —Read the full text of Matt Vande Bunte’s article, Small business owners hit with burnout blues

Focus: The first step of Brand Marketing

How about your business? Do you have a clear sense of your direction? Talk to Design Kompany about our Focus package, created to set the stage for brand marketing.