Turning your design into a best-selling product and selling it to the world to grab everyone's attention is a dream and lifelong goal for all designers. In the process of design branding, you may hear someone tell you that you should be a businessman rather than a designer! In fact, this sentence makes sense, but I think the more accurate expression for this sentence should be finding an effective way to market your design, which of course will cost you a mounting amount of time to try and search among infinite mistakes.

Once a product that has drawn the attention in the exhibition begins to reach backend channels and open up new markets, it is no longer about simply designing a product. Next, you need to start to define a brand's annual marketing plan, understand its own consumer community, examine the price and cost structure, expand the channels and stipulate contract content, and specify the production standards of product and long-term media cooperation. All of a sudden, the graphic design becomes the literal specification, causing the designer to enter an unknown realm.

To look for the buyer of your product should be your first step. There are basically various types of buyers, and the end consumer is your most important customer. All your products are designed for this group of consumers. But if the brand designed by you is a new comer, you are recommended to enter the creative market so that you could directly face this group of consumers and get aware of their feedback and preference immediately. However, this is a time-consuming and narrow-market approach for the early-career designer. Alternatively, you can also market your products by attending the exhibitions that match the attributes of your product and visiting your preferred channel outlets in person, meaning that you are not selling the product to the end consumer, but to the channel provider. Simply speaking, the channel provider offers the space where the consumers could enter to make consumption. These channel providers are divided into many different categories: self-employed small shopping malls, chain shopping stores, temporary cabinets in large shopping malls, department stores, shopping stores attached to department stores, online shopping malls, self-operated online shopping stores, and others. These channel providers are like the opinion leaders of your end consumers, and the products that end consumers would like to purchase gather in the space of these channel providers. Thus, from a different perspective, the channel providers are the best choice for a fledgling designer brand to enter the market, because each channel represents a gathering of consumer groups, making the choice of channel suitable to your product become a significant decision.

You need to acquire the corresponding condition and pay the cost to enter each channel provider. The condition and cost mentioned here do not necessarily stand for the fund, but the following questions: are you able to pay the cost of labor for marketing? Are there enough varieties of commodities? Are you able to produce the enough products stably? Many of such questions test you in terms of how to make the first step. But before you take the first step, I recommend that you first make a Branding Editorial, the description of your own brand containing the product description, helpful for you to understand your brand more deeply. How can you find the suitable channel if you don't have a detailed plan for your own brand? The content of your plan will include your brand's settings, the target consumer group, the expected selling price, the packaging you can provide, and even the way of presentation, which will assist you further to have a better intersection when communicating with the channel and empower you to find a suitable channel more easily.

 

To understand your cost structure and set your price will be the second step for you to consider. I am often told by the seniors that there are only people who do not know how to sell goods, but there are no goods which cannot be sold. What the correct truth. But when you define your selling price, you also naturally decide to sell the goods to which kind of consumer group. Designers always think their products are priceless. Therefore, they may feel the sense of earthliness when it comes to the price. But it is definitely a long-term and never-ending war for a brand to strike the balance between the price and quality. For consumers, of course, they want the sold goods to be as cheap as possible, but the opposite is the case for the seller. Thus, how to set a price satisfactory to both sides is your second task. The best way is to consider this condition during the process of design. Each consumer group has a preferred type of product and the price range they are willing to pay, requiring you to understand this condition so that you will not design a product satisfactory to a consumer group, but unaffordable to them. You have to get aware of what must be included in your selling price. Too many designers feel they're selling very well when they just start to sell for not too long, but after a while they keep wondering where the money is going. In short, except the cost included in your price, when you try to decide on the price, you have to think about the wear and tear of materials caused by the defective product at the time of production, the cost of subsequent packaging, the expenses of human resources, the expenses of transportation, the cost of the passage, the cost of returning and replacing the goods, as well as the expenses of your exhibition and the expenses of the display and finally your profit. It may exhaust your eyes and mind, but it is the key. Thus, the above content must be highlighted.

 

To stabilize your production quality and quantity is something you should pay great attention to. If there is no good and stable production quality, your brand will only get increasingly worse. Of course, the balance between cost and quality is an important issue, but how to produce sound quality in a pre-estimated space is something you must think about. The more the quantity you produce, the more your cost can be adjusted downwards. This means that your profit can be improved, but the quality maintenance needs to be noted in mass production, and it is a key point for a brand to communicate with the manufacturer and establish a good relationship. Sometimes it may help you solve the problems caused by the overall production cost and decrease of subsequent production, if you take a little time to think about a simpler production process at the beginning, because these are absolutely related to the development time and production cost you spend. Branding is a process of making choices constantly, so the earlier you can think clearly, the more likely you can prevent the time and money from losing due to mistakes.

To build a sound customer experience relationship is the absolutely-necessary law for a brand to survive. Without the support and recommendation from loyal consumers, a brand will be difficult to be promoted. There are many ways to expose your brand promptly, and more clearly explain your brand philosophy, but I would like to express that you need to focus on the sound shopping experience relationship between you and the consumers who buy your products. I believe that no consumer is willing to continue to visit a shop after having a terrible shopping experience. As for the news that the owner of a popular snack shop has a bad temper, and the customers visiting that snack shop enjoy the feeling of being bullied, I think it is really rare. In most cases, it is not about giving consumers the honorable customer experiences, but more about creating a sound experience for consumers during the process of shopping, which will start with how to let the customer see your goods. What ensue are letting the customer experience your goods, giving the customer commentary without pressure when he or she enters the shop, providing the packaging services when the customer is paying the bill, providing the after-sales services and resolving subsequent problems. All of these require you to prudentially design, consider, and formulate the sound experience route, which will never happen naturally.

Ultimately, the concept of design standard is the original intention that must not be forgotten. In the process of sales, you will hear a lot of suggestions from customers for product improvement, or the customers may regard you as a wishing pool, expecting you to design specific goods. But these suggestions are just suggestions, you have to return to the brand's standard, seriously think about whether to overall accept these sincere ands sound-good suggestions. Maybe you will think why not accept all these suggestions, since the acceptance of them could lead me to the path of selling goods better. But a brand has its own path to be forged. If you can't maintain the quality and style which are created not easily, you will face the questioning of style change from consumers, and the risk of brand inconsistency. Therefore, when faced with any opinion, you need to think whether this is the brand you want to create. If the answer is no, you need to seriously think about how to create a new product to respond to and meet consumers’ recommendations through the settings of your own brand. Although there are various matters worth noticing for the branding of goods design, the luck of timing is also one of the factors that are key to success, which depends on not only the quality of your design, but also whether you could choose a path suitable to your brand. So, do not be afraid of making a choice, no matter it is a correct one or incorrect one, because you will never know which path is right if you fail to actually take that path.