Design Psychology: How Taking Risks Can Get You Noticed

In this webinar, learn from our SUDS design expert, Derrick Burton, how taking risks can get you noticed and make your brand stand out. 

Derrick - All right, let's get started. So today we're going be talking about design psychology and how taking risk can get you noticed. First off, before we get started, just a few things to point out about how to communicate with us during the meeting. 

In this case, the chat button is actually enabled for feedback during the presentation. There's a couple points where I might ask for your guys' feedback. So feel free to throw your stuff in there. If you have a specific question, please put it in the Q&A via the Q&A button because those get captured. And then we're able to send that out in like a document at the end. If you don't see the QA button, try clicking View Options, then Exit Full Screen. This will put the webinar into a smaller window and it should be right at the bottom. If anyone has any technical difficulties, our team will be monitoring the Q&A, so just let them know there. We'll have time to answer the Q&A towards the end of the webinar and we'll answer as many questions as we have time for. All questions answers will be documented, like I said, and sent out along with the webinar recording. So if we can't get to everybody's questions, just know that we'll be sending that out later. 

Well, my name's Derrick Burton. I'm a Junior Art Director at SUDS. I've been here for, I think this is my seventh year now, SUDS to present, or 2017 to present. I've been doing design and stuff for 12 plus years. And what I do here at SUDS is mostly campaign and design oversight. 

So with design psychology, there are really three key takeaways that I want you to have at the very end of this presentation. We're going to talk about what is risk appetite, why it's important to take risks in your marketing and design, and how to take risks effectively in your marketing and design. 

This day and age, there's more competition than ever and we need to be able to stand out and taking risks is the way to do it. So what is risk appetite and how does it apply to design and marketing? The definition for risk appetite is it refers to the amount of risk a business is willing to take in order to achieve its objectives. In marketing and advertising campaigns, how far outside of the box are you willing to go to stand out is what we're rating our risk appetite around. There are two different ends of the risk appetite spectrum. There's risk averse and really risk tolerant. From our perspective as designers, this is how much of the industry, the car wash industry, thinks about risk currently. Most believe it's better to be risk averse or take less risk with their marketing than to be risk tolerant or take more risks. But the leaders in the industry will tell you that that's the wrong way to think. You want to be more risk tolerant. If you're more risk averse, you end up having uninspired brands, emotionless interactions, a very transactional relationship with your customers, and most importantly, really stagnant growth. Brands that are more risk tolerant with their marketing are more unique, they're more expressive, they have a more organic conversation with their consumers, and it has been shown that they have exceptional growth. 

So now that we know what risk appetite is and how we believe that risk being more risk tolerant in your marketing is more beneficial, let's show why it's more important to take those risks. I'm going to use an industry parallel here to kind of explain a way to kind of go about being risky. 

So the drinking water industry is a really great example of a very competitive and oversaturated market. The car wash industry isn't oversaturated yet, but it's definitely getting more competitive. Many of these water logos that you see here have a similar approach to their design and the way that they market themselves. They sell you the refreshing aspect, where the water comes from, being mountain water and things like that, pH levels, maybe even how it tastes. Then there's Liquid Death. Now, Liquid Death is a brand that sells an image or a feeling rather than its features. 

They were originally conceived around the owner's newfound sobriety and he didn't want to feel excluded from drinking buddies, so he made a brand that looks like a Tall Boy or a beer, a Tall Boy beer, or a canned cocktail. People actually thought it was a canned cocktail when it first came out. With their vastly different looking logo and rebellious brand positioning, Liquid Death has capitalized on a very specific demographic.

Liquid Death has grown its revenue by doing this 100% year over year since 2019. They've taken a slice of the pie out of an industry that focuses really one directionally, and they've gone a completely different direction, and that has allowed them to breach a demographic that nobody was even talking to in the industry. And this kind of homogenization of logos is very, very similar to what we see in the car wash industry. What I have here and what is populating here are two different types of logos that we see very often in the car wash industry. The ones on the left being these kind of silhouette car logos that have water droplets or things coming off of them.

All of these logos that you see here are real logos from real companies. I've just removed the names to not call people out too harshly, but these are all real logos and what we kind of call these is low-hanging fruit logos because they scream car wash at you. It's the first idea that any designer is going to come to, well, yeah, it's a car wash, so let's show a car getting washed. When you started a car wash 20 plus years ago, this would be fine. It would work just great. But with the advent of the internet and the competition that you're now not just competing with other car washes, you're competing with everybody else on the internet and on social media, then you have to really differentiate yourself and make a splash to make a difference. So I want to ask everybody, and this is where the feedback part comes in, what are some words that come to mind when you look at these logos? So I'll give you guys a couple seconds to throw some stuff into the chat. Okay. Seeing some populating stuff, we've got fast, we've got exciting, emotional. Yeah, that's really right. Happy, yeah, exactly. So what's really interesting about these logos is that they don't scream car wash. As a matter of fact, none of these logos even has a car in it, and that's a certain level of risk that these companies have taken. They're not using an exact, like, they're not screaming or telling you exactly "we're a car wash" without spelling it out. Now, in most cases, these logos, the companies that have these say car wash with these logos, but these marks specifically don't have a car in them. They project an emotional response, whether it be nostalgia, laughter, professionalism, simplicity, aw as in like, aw, that's cute. I can say with confidence, what's interesting about this too is I can say with confidence that every single one of these brands has either paid an agency to build their logo from scratch or to update their previous less than professional logos and brands. And we call this a light touch update. And what that really does is it helps you update your brand without losing the equity that's already in it. 

So I'm going to show a few different brands here in the next steps, the original brand, and then the update that we made, and I'd love for people to pitch in, and say like, what do you notice? What's the difference between the two? How do they feel differently? So first off, this was one that we did where we took Wash Wizard and we updated it to the one on the right. What do you really notice? Why does it feel different? Why does it feel better? Give you guys a couple seconds to interject. Throw some things in the chat. Less busy. Yeah, absolutely, it's easier to read. It's clearer. Yeah, the logo angles forward. Oops, sorry about that. Logo angles forward, it's got more movement. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's simple, it's fun, it's exciting. You know, he's losing his hat so it conveys that speed. It feels more to the point. Yeah, totally. Here's another one that we did for Ultimate Shine Car Wash. What about this one? It's more modern, cleaner, looks more professional, streamlined. Yeah, definitely. This one really, what we did here was we paired it down, we took out the stuff that wasn't super necessary. In this case, the 3 Minute and Express felt like it was cheapening the brand. They wanted to be a higher end brand. So we were like, both of those things just kind of cheapen it. Let's just really hit the brand name and make sure that people know it's a car wash. 

All right, I only have two more. We'll keep them quick, but here's another one. Top Dog Car Wash. Do you guys, similar stuff, similar things, right? We've pared it down, we've simplified, we've streamlined. It's still, it feels that we've kept that equity, that feeling of speed that came from the first one, but we cleaned up the character, we made him more dynamic, more iconic, and we brightened up a lot of the colors. So it's more bold, more fun. Now this one's really interesting and I want to talk about this one a little bit because this one is a very, very light touch update that we did. And if you really look closely, a lot of the updates that we made were actually very, very small little updates to the typography in this one. Clean Freak, the words, the letters have actually been spaced out to help with legibility and the crossbars of the E and the F have been moved up to give it a little bit more confidence, a little bit more structure. And then with their logo mark, their logo mark felt very simplistic and honestly not really ownable, it could have been anybody's mark. So we took it and said, can we make a monogram out of it, something that they can own? And so we made a CF mark out of their logo mark, it still feels really similar to the original, but it's different enough and it has that extra little bit to take it to the next level. Josh, I love the added darker color. It's a contrast which draws the eye. Yeah, totally. That was an additional thing we wanted to expand on the brand and so we added an extra color so that we could play more when we actually got into campaigns and things like that. So these light touch updates are really beneficial and you're going to do it as you create a business and as you grow and as you get more money and more, just you want to be more professional, this is a great way to really showcase that change and that maturation of your brand. 

An interesting one that I want to just touch on, kind of a case study around this is Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Now a lot of people love to talk about this in the branding world about how Coca-Cola's logo has never changed. The reality is that that is not entirely true. Coca-Cola's logo has changed, just very, very subtly. 

If you didn't know, Coca-Cola's logo is the most recognizable logo in the world and it's worth billions in equity. And if you look at the timeline here, you can see it's changed a little bit, but it did change and just slightly over time, but each time it held onto that equity of the old, except for maybe the 1886 one to the 1900s, the 1900s is really when they landed on that quintessential Coca-Cola. 

Now what I found really interesting about this was Pepsi, on the other hand, did something very similar. And once they hit around the 1940s, their logo looked remarkably similar to the Coca-Cola logo. And the marketing team realized this and said, "Man, people are getting confused. They're confusing us with our larger competition, our larger competitor, Coca-Cola. We need to make a change to something else that makes us uniquely us." And so they looked at everything that they had and they looked at their bottles and said, "Hey, we have this red, white, and blue design on the top of our bottle caps. Let's use that as our equity. We've got that equity, people recognize that on the shelf, let's bring it into our logo." 

And so, in 1962, they changed that, and they turned, they changed their typeface to something much simpler and really leaned on that bottle cap and the rest is really history. This isn't even the final Pepsi logo, they've even updated it one more time and they've actually gone back closer to what they had in 1962. But this is a great showing of just how they recognized we don't look different enough from our competition. We need to take a risk, change our logo just so that we can differentiate ourselves. Coca-Cola is just one of many companies that keep design in mind when advertising and building their brand. Same thing with Pepsi is just one. 

A massive study done by McKinsey & Company of over 40,000 publicly-traded companies shows that companies that have prioritized design outperform those that don't buy as much as two to one. So not only are they helping to differentiate, they're also, by focusing on design, gaining more money and gaining more loyal followers because of that. This is a really interesting case study, and I brought this one, it was a lot smaller, but I wanted to bring this one in because it looks at not just publicly traded companies, this looks specifically at law firms. 

Most law firms are not publicly traded, but they have to report their earnings and information just because of the law and what they deal with. So this allowed this research company to look at all of their income and do essentially the same study but on a much smaller scale with a smaller industry, specific industry. And what they found was it was pretty much exactly the same. Law firms with stronger brands are two to three times more profitable than their peers. 

So at this point, I guarantee that there's probably some questions that people have about changing their brand and I'm going to address a few of those because we have heard a lot of these over and over and over again. And I think this is a great place for me to kind of talk about it and give you our thoughts on it. So one of the fronts that we hear all the time is "We have years of equity in our branding. Changing now might cause us to lose customers." Well, as I've said in the previous slides, brands go through changes and every brand gets better as they get larger. And you don't have to make massively drastic changes to your brand to differentiate yourself and to grow as a company. It can just be hooking, pulling out pieces of equity from that logo, from that brand that you think resonates the most with your clients or with your consumers, and really using that as your main point of focus. It could be as simple as just cleaning up the logo and expanding on it. 

Another question we get a lot is, well, we just had all of our signage made, I don't want to have to spend a ton of money to have all of that changed. I just bought it, and this is totally fair, we get it. Signage is super expensive, especially for car washes where it's very much an onsite specific thing. But here's a way to think about a brand update that may help you to kind of go down that route and be ready in the future is that it's all about being prepared. So, likely at some point, you're going to change your prices with inflation, with the change in the market, you're going to change your prices. Maybe you open a new location and you're going to have different prices and you're going to have to make new signage for those. So wouldn't you rather have your brand ready, your brand update ready for that to happen than to have to scramble or use a brand that you feel like is too homogenous or doesn't differentiate yourself enough from others? The last one is, "We're just starting out, we can't afford an expensive agency to build the brand." Totally get it, this is super valid. You're in the stage of starting out when you just need a brand so you can get started making income to make ends meet, get it. 

Luckily, branding isn't the only place that you can be disruptive when it comes to marketing. Advertising campaigns are really great for this because they're smaller, they're short term and you can really kind of try different things out. Advertising campaigns consist of three parts and we're going to use this kind of as reference points throughout the rest of this presentation. 

So they have a hook, a message, and a call to action. In the advertisements that we have here, these mockup advertisements, the hook like on this one with the raccoons could be, the image of the raccoons in the car is a hook in itself. It's silly, it's funny. People see it and go, oh animals and they kind of laugh and then you have wild savings while they're clean. That's that message that combines with that hook and sells it. And then your call to action in this case is a social media thing, is down inside the social media copy and says, you know, get 50% off any unlimited plan. The one to the next side of that, the one with the little car families, stick figure families crossing from a dirty car to a clean car, once again, it's a really interesting image that might get somebody to stop, stop moving, stop scrolling, and go, "Whoa, what's going on here?" And then, North Coast Car Wash: Adventure to Savings. Once again, that's kind of your message. And then your call to action, get 50% off any unlimited plan. So your risks, generally, will take place in the hook in the message and very unlikely will happen in the call to action. You want your call to action to be very straightforward and intentional because you don't want to confuse your consumer or be so vague that they don't know what they're supposed to be doing with the advertisement. You want to catch them, you want to tell them something, and then you want them to do something. So how do we take risks effectively? 

In design, there's a lot of design decisions that go into anything that we make, color, size, tone, hierarchy, layout, balance, repetition, line, shape, so many different things. But at the end of the day, the risk comes in by saying something new and I'm going to come back to Liquid Death because they're just such a great case study for something like this. When saying something new, what takes risk tolerance is being like no one else around you. 

So, there's a reason that we call these risks. We're afraid that we might miss the mark, we're afraid that we might cause offense somehow, maybe at the end of the day we're afraid of throwing our money away. I'm going to talk a little bit about each one of these and how we mitigate these at SUDS by designing things in specific ways. So first off, how to ensure you don't miss the mark. The main point here is know your demographic. If you look here at this Liquid Death advertisement, they say proudly not for everyone. Michael W., "I'm not sure if there's any way possible to make water seem less appealing, disgusting name, decomposing head on the can, water's not actually visible." The thing that's great about it with Liquid Death is that's exactly what they're selling. They are selling an image, they're appealing to specific people, they're appealing to sober people, they're appealing to teens, they're appealing to counterculture enthusiasts. They know who their demographic is and so they sell it that way in all of their marketing. Now you don't have to be that crazy and that out of the box and crass humor and everything like that, you can just be you. So Pony Express is a car wash client that we've worked with for a long period of time. They're actually here in Idaho where SUDS is at and we were working with them and they were afraid of the competition that was moving into their location and they wanted to create something that reminded people that they were here first and that they're local and they're part of the community. So we came up with this, what we call the Proudly Local campaign. It was all about living local, love local, wash local. It was all about the owners and they specifically are here in Idaho, which is a state of farming and rural tight-knit communities. 

So just by being authentic and utilizing who they were, we were able to capture a lot of people and a lot of loyal fans for the Pony Express Car Wash. That authentic aesthetic really resonated with all of their consumers. So now we've talked a little bit about that, how do we mitigate causing offense? It's always scary to do any advertising campaign because you're afraid you might say something that's going to ostracize a section of your demographic. 

And in the car wash industry, for years, it's always been the demographic has almost always been whoever drives a car and drives by my car wash. As it gets more competitive, you're going to have to start differentiating and picking specific demographics to market to so that the market share can be spread out among all of the businesses. I have two really fun case studies here about causing offense that were very fairly recent, relatively recent in marketing terms. One of them, very recent, is our next one. So we're going to watch a little video. 

This is a commercial that Apple put out just recently and it caused a massive outcry online. So if you have any ideas on why this might be, throw them in the chat. ♪ Sometimes when I'm down and all alone ♪ ♪ Oh, all I ever need is you ♪ ♪ Winters come and they go ♪ ♪ And we watch the melting snow ♪ ♪ Sure as summer follows spring, all the things you do ♪ ♪ Give me a reason to build my world around you ♪ ♪ Some men follow rainbows, I am told ♪

- [Video Narrator] The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest. ♪ All I ever need is you ♪

Derrick - So why do you think that there were, there was a massive outcry online? Any thoughts? It's crushing a bunch of things. It's a little dreary. Yeah, so the overall tone of the video feels really oppressive and grim. Not to mention that right now, oh, I like what you said AI, not to mention that AI is populating right now and it's a really contentious thing. There's a lot of people who are not very happy with AI and that's a good call out. 

The video, from a tonal standpoint, has really dark shadows. It has a very industrial look which didn't really help the message, but it sure did add to a false message. And that false message is it looks like it's literally crushing creativity. It's crushing a guitar, it's crushing paint, and video games and things like that, which is the antithesis of Apple's creator, innovator archetype. They forgot who they were speaking to, not to mention their demographic, a huge part of their demographic is made up of graphic designers and artists. So they weren't thinking about that and they created this ad and they ostracized a huge chunk of their demographic. 

Now I don't put this out here to scare you into like going, "Oh my gosh, if we don't think through every possible little thing, like our ad could offend people." Because the reality is that yes, there have might have been a massive outcry, a lot of that was mob mentality online, not to mention, consumers have pretty short memories when it comes to things like this. I guarantee that in a month or even now, nobody's even thinking about this anymore. And Apple is such a big company that they aren't so worried about one little demographic being or not, you shouldn't say one little demographic but it's a massive demographic but they're not as worried about it 'cause they can put out other things. They did apologize for this ad, which I thought was kind of an interesting move. I feel like owning it might have been better but whatever. 

Now, sometimes, causing offense can work in your favor. So we're going to talk about Liquid Death again and we're going to show a commercial here that they put out. ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪ ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪ ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪ ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪ ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪ ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪ ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪ ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪

Derrick - The whole premise of this campaign was that they had a bunch of kids jumping around in a room drinking Liquid Deaths, and at the time, this was back in 2022, Liquid Death was not as large as they are now. There were a lot of people who didn't know what Liquid Death was and they thought that it was a cocktail and at the beginning of the commercial it would cause some offense. People would look at it and go, "Oh my gosh, there are children drinking in this commercial. Like what's going on?" And then there's even at one point they have a pregnant woman like come in and like wink and drink some from it and then at the very end a giant jug slams down and it says, "Don't worry, it's just water." 

And they used this, so they used offense and causing offense and shock and awe to their advantage to grab people's attention and then counteracted it at the end of it. So the hook for this was that like offensive kind of feeling to it. I think the music in this also is the song "Breaking the Law." I can't remember what it's, ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪ Anyway. So yeah, just really fun, exciting campaign that really speaks specifically to their target market. Now one thing that you might have noticed in the Apple campaign and this campaign also has it at the very end is that there really wasn't a CTA. ♪ Breaking the law, breaking the law ♪

Derrick - The music somehow playing, sorry, technical issues. But they didn't really have a CTA at the end. It was just, here's a product and it doesn't say go buy it or anything like that. What we call these are brand awareness campaigns and they're really, really important for your brand but a lot of people are afraid of doing it. Rather than trying to increase revenue through discounts and deals, they've created an ad that sold a feeling just to gain followers or loyal fans. They're selling the good night's sleep rather than the mattress itself. 

These types of campaigns are hard sell to a lot of small businesses who need to make ends meet, and understandably so. Brand awareness campaigns have one major drawback. It's a lot more difficult to show ROI metrics when you aren't telling your user to do anything other than to pique their interest, in your product or your service. This is why a lot of business owners feel that it isn't worth their marketing dollars since they don't see a quick measurable increase in memberships, ticket sales, or revenue. However, it is extremely important to do this even especially when you're a smaller business. 

There was a study done by Statista in the tech industry, a very competitive industry, that showed that 63% of consumers are more willing to buy from familiar brands. And it takes right around seven times of seeing something before people have a strong recall for that item or brand or product. So the smaller your business is, the more important it is. I want you to try something and throw this in the chat as well. I want you to think of a soft drink company. It's the first one pops in your head. We got some Pepsi, some Coke, Dr Pepper. Nice. I would say that a large group of you thought of Coca-Cola or Pepsi and I'm seeing that here and that's because they're the 900-pound gorillas in the industry. They're giant, right? They don't have to do nearly as much brand awareness because they've been around for such a long period of time, and they were one of the first ones into that industry. 

There are three different types of people or three different types of ways to enter into industry. You've got the industry leaders who started the industry who jumped in it. This would be the car washes who started 24 years ago. Then you've got the people who have followed as the hype has gotten larger, and they started to kind of build that hype. And then you have the people at the very end who are just kind of getting into it. There's nothing wrong with any position there. You just have to try a lot harder as that industry starts to get more competitive if you're later to the game. 

So I love this saying, and I said it earlier too, "Sell the good night's sleep, not the mattress." Emotional appeals are much stronger than just selling features of your product. If you can convince somebody that they're going to feel a specific way from something, then it's going to resonate with them much more than you just saying, I want your money, I sell these things. 

You need to connect with your consumer rather than just telling them what you do. I liked this image. If you were saying something to the effect of like, "Our car wash makes you feel like a million bucks," this might be a fun kind of crazy image that you could use to convey that, it appeals to that emotional feeling, it makes people kind of laugh. Why is this guy in a crazy top hat? It's a little bit out of antiquity there and it just captures people's attention. 

I wanted to call out a really amazing campaign that came out, I think it was like a few years ago now by the Take 5 marketing team. They did this amazing campaign which was, did this pigeon poop on your car, the official Take 5 pigeon. Love this, and I'm just, I really want to pick it apart with you and show you why it works so well. The pigeon head is so capturing when people are driving by, like why is there a giant pigeon head? The yellow, bright yellow, high contrast text here grabs your attention and everybody has had a bird poop on their car. So it captures everybody's feeling but it's like it's a moment, it captured a moment of like, "Ugh, a bird pooped on my car, I need to go get this clean." And they're utilizing that to sell their wash. 

I also really like the CTA in this because it really hints at like you just might get a free car wash and it makes you want to go to that website and that's the whole point of this entire billboard here is just to get people to go to the website, not to try to sell them necessarily the car wash, it's to try to get them there and then get them on site. Props to the marketing team over there, I wish I had thought of this and that's the highest praise I can give any marketing campaign. 

So let's kind of do a recap here. 

Three key takeaways:

- What is risk appetite? Risk appetite is on the spectrum from risk averse to risk tolerant. And the leaders in your industry know that being more risk tolerant with their advertising is beneficial in a competitive market. 

- Why is it important to take those risks? It helps you stand out, and with that, it helps you make more money. 

- And how do we take risks effectively? You don't have to be wild, funny, or edgy, crazy out of the box, you just need to be true to your brand and know who you're talking to. 

With that, I'm going to open it up for any questions that anyone has, and I just want to say that here at SUDS, we are open to work on any kind of project and bring this kind of expertise and knowledge to it. So please, you know, reach out, we'd be happy for any size project. We're happy to help, that's why we're here. Just a reminder, if you want to ask questions, use the QA button, not the chat. It allows us to collect questions, if we don't get to them all, we can send them out with the recording. Cool, I must have done my job well. Not seeing much in the questions point. Alright, well, cool. 

Thanks everybody for joining and I hope we hear from you soon.