Product design is the key to brand success

So you’ve been busy building your business. You have focused on marketing. You’ve gotten out there and posted on Facebook and Twitter. You’ve published your story on all of your sales pages. You have created your blog. You have even written articles and published them all over the web. You have stayed on the forums and posted until they told you to stop. You have been building your brand as gangbusters.

But have you forgotten something?

The biggest success factor of the brand is not marketing. It is keeping your promises. It is to deliver a quality product to its customers.

And for those of us who create learning content, that means your biggest success factor is product creation. You will see that it is in the design and creation of products that most of their quality will be built in, or left out.

In the short term, people listen to your branding efforts. Your marketing is a key factor in developing your opinion of its quality. They listen to your promises, both expressed and implied, and then make a decision. Your marketing will convince people that you know what you’re doing. And that you will deliver a quality product.

But in the long run, you’ll be judged on how well you actually deliver. You are judged by the quality of your products. For the quality of its services. And for the quality of the relationship they develop with you. And in the Internet marketing business, developing a long-term relationship with your customers is the key to success. This is why list building is so important.

And when creating courses and eBooks and other information products, the biggest influence on their quality is how you design and develop your products.

The quality in a learning content product is measured at three levels.

The first is happy. But your customers, your target audience, are taking your course precisely because they don’t know the content. They are there to learn the content. So your judgment about the quality of that content is different. It’s not based on how well you know the subject.

Instead, your customers will judge your content based on how well it meets their needs and expectations. Did you design the product to solve a specific problem they have? Did you design your product around their motivations? This is how they will judge your content.

The second thing you will be judged on is organization. Do you seem to understand the topic well enough to present it for them to understand? Are you going to strange regions? Does it make logical sense in your presentation?

Ultimately you will be judged based on delivery. Does it look professional? How is your spelling? How is your grammar? Does he seem friendly and easy to talk to?

But it’s not that simple. You’ll see that the way you deliver quality content involves closely identifying and targeting your customer. And that same target customer that you defined in the product design and creation process will be used for all your contacts with your customers. Including making your marketing target your desired customer. Therefore, your short-term influence ultimately also depends on the quality of your product design process.