❯ Evaluating Design: Lessons from Procter & Gamble

"What Engineering was to the 2000s, Design will be to the 2020s" says Scott Galloway. Design is the next frontier. True or not, there's always opportunity to sharpen the saw around design.

I sit in a spot where I'm evaluating creative (UX, design, and content) fairly frequently. Much like cross-functional relationships with engineers, there's a fine balance to strike with designers: provide the right context and feedback, without overstepping or micromanaging insignificant details.

Even with an intuition for creative, it takes trial and error to get the balance right. Pair my systems-thinking with creative, and I will look for ways to standardize the evaluation.

Luckily, I had Vivienne Bechtold in my corner. Vivienne is a Proctor alum, a genius with creative (and all things marketing, really). She provided a shortcut for my design journey and laid out how the best in the business evaluate creative.

HOW TO EVALUATE

If there's anything a Fortune 50 firm loves, it's a checklist. And so, a snippet of the creative evaluation checklist is below.

Review Brief and Strategy - Get the context you need to evaluate effectively. What's the:

• Objective

• Target

• Media vehicle

• Mandatories
  

React - There's time and space for gut reaction. This is it:

• What do you see?

• Is it understandable?

• How do you feel?
  

Evaluate - Take your time and put on different hats: customer, strategy, best practices, overall idea and story. Does it:

• Resonate with target

• Meet the objectives

• Build the brand or product

• Have distinction versus competition
  

I've found higher organizational maturity will look to measure creative effectiveness with analytics. Leslie Wood provided fascinating public research (slide 28) on this. You'll find something similar in every CPG business. Plot previous and new brand or product buyers against category buyers and look at the incremental response to your creative or design.

The creative signature, what level of response your creative or design generates, will tell you (1) how effective your creative is and (2) who it is effective with.

Don't let sophistication scare you away. Less sophisticated methods make great belt tools. Evaluating user flow against drop-off rates in Google Analytics (or Amplitude or any clickstream tool) can identify opportunities for tests or optimizations around creative and design, too.

Snapshot:

I'm thankful for Old Friends. The friends who fell asleep on car rides home. Friends who required a trip to Columbus. Friends whose new house is your home. There's depth and comfort with old friends, and I'm grateful to have them.

Striving for better,

Justin Pichichero