Emogen and Design

In a recent interview with a graphic designer (who will join the E-team in a few weeks!) Brian asked about Emogen’s reputation among the local design crowd. That reputation isn’t necessarily directly impactful to our bottom line, but being thought of as a cool place to work certainly makes hiring all the easier.

Interestingly, the interviewee shared that designers are aware of Emogen and that we hire graphic designers, but it’s not well understood how design relates to what we do here on a day to day basis.

What’s hard for me to understand about that is how the relationship between marketing and design is anything but obvious. I’ll elaborate, though, so we’re all clear.

Stepping back a moment, let me begin with a quick discussion on “core competencies.”

A core competency is what a business does that’s really the heart of the business as well as what makes it unique from competitors. A core competency can truly be anything… a process, a special talent, the corporate culture, key customer or supplier relationships… really anything, so long as it’s hard for competitors to duplicate.

Emogen’s core competency, we think, is the combined talent of our team (which hopefully doesn’t sound egotistical!). Here’s why we think this is the case…

Part 1 - Brian’s talent is selling ideas. Maybe it’s the idea that a product can save you money. Maybe it’s the idea that a service can help you achieve more. It could even be the idea that an organization can make an impact in a particular area of service. The bottom line is that he’s a gifted salesman, which is based on his intrinsic talents of reading people and communicating with them.

Part 2 - My talent is refining Brian’s ability for mass consumption. What he can do on an individual basis, I can extrapolate and reshape for application to a larger audience. Unlike Brian, I don’t have the best interpersonal skills, but I’m good at written communication and making what may be complex ideas concise and easy to understand.

Part 3 – Enter design. Graphic design is all about presentation of a message.

Take a simple business card. A piece of paper with your name and contact info will do the job, but a card with a professionally designed logo and layout is more likely to catch someone’s eye and draw their attention to your name… which helps with recognition and recall.

The same works with advertising and sales collateral. Could you imagine a newspaper where “ads” were typed out just like the rest of the paper? Or a plain Jane sales flyer that looked like every other one in your mail box?

So, Brian figures out the sales pitch, I figure how to put that into words and our designers figure out how to present it. All those parts together—sales, marketing and design—create Emogen’s core competency, which is sharing an idea with people, either individually or en masse, to elicit a positive action from them.

~Sarah, Emogen marketer