Is your web challenge a symptom of a greater business opportunity?
Joanne Kerr and Paul Campbell, strategy partner and digital partner respectively at Brandpie, explain how digital thinking from the creation of a business can save a lot of time and money in the future.
Whenever we receive a website brief, we often hear the same challenges:
“Our website’s a mess. It’s hard for our clients to navigate. It looks old fashioned. We keep bolting on new initiatives. We can’t organise our content in a sensible way.”
These statements will all undoubtedly be true. But so often the big, internal question that hasn’t been asked is why are we doing this?
The problem gets contained within ‘digital’ or ‘the web team’. And there is usually genuine hope (and allocated budget) that a magical, new homepage will solve years (sometimes decades) of time spent building on the wrong foundations.
Without a hard look at what comes before – purpose, brand and identity, businesses can end up spending a lot of money to end up right back where they started. As a consultancy, we've been guilty of separating these different specialisms out too.
We would work diligently on a purpose or positioning project, develop a new identity, and then engage with our digital team to create a website at the end. It worked fine. It was neat. It was linear. But was it transformational? Probably not. We knew we could do better.
We now believe every project must have digital thinking from day one. There is so much to gain from joint immersion and insight discovery that accelerates and improves the project synergy and quality of the output.
Likewise, when we are asked to ‘build a digital experience’ or ‘create a new website’ today, we ask some brave, pointy questions before we even talk about the website’s challenges. It would be unethical not to.
Big questions uncover where the challenges really are. And how much more powerful and enduring a change could be.
More and more we are seeing businesses (and entire sectors) rocked by changing societal demands, investor expectations and increased competition. It’s catching many businesses on the back foot. But it doesn’t have to.
Now is the perfect time to take a step back and look at the foundations of your business. Now is the perfect time to ask the big questions like:
- What do you stand for?
- What challenges do you solve for those who matter?
- Why you are the right choice to buy from / partner with / change the world?
- How are you distinctive in the hearts and minds of your audiences?
If these are solid, compelling, and universally understood – amazing. You are ready to dive into a great web project. If not, then maybe your web brief is much more than just a web brief? Maybe it’s symptomatic of a bigger, greater opportunity.
Brandpie are shortlisted at the Transform Awards Europe 2022. Join them at the awards on 30 March 2022 by reserving your table here.
