The lure of cost savings for Brand Design by shopping internationally for branding and packaging design is hard to resist. The promise of quality work at a fraction of USA standard prices sounds too good to be true. And, like most things in life, you get what you pay for. So, don’t fall victim to it.
Many brand design web sites have appeared over the past 10 years that deliver access to brand designers around the World in a competition setting to earn the savvy marketer’s business. The promise is simple. Tons of creative ideas offered for cheap and you pick the winner. And, by cheap I mean, really cheap. For example, one of these popular sites is 99Designs.com. The site allows anyone to setup a design competition for their product’s branding needs (logo and packaging design tips and shopify design tips for your website etc.) And, the going rates for these services are discounted by 90% compared to the national average in the USA. No, that’s not a type-o. The average logo design competition fee awarded to the winning designer is about $300. For this fee, you get literally hundreds of designs presented to you by 20 or more designers from around the World. Need packaging design for your product? No problem. Pick from 50 or more design options and pay $400 on average. I’m not kidding. That’s how cheap it is. You can see how enticing this sounds. And, many startup brands flock to these international competition sites to take advantage of this bargain basement hunting for quality design. But, doesn’t this sound too good to be true? Well of course it does. And the truth is, you get what you pay for.
Sites To Avoid When Shopping for Creative Professionals
99designs.com | upwork.com | konsus.com | logodesigncafe.com | designcrowd.com
What experienced shopper marketing brand design experts know is the value of an experienced creative partner when shaping the character, marketability and manufacturing efficiency of your products. Being able to pick up the phone and call an expert who speaks your language and lives in your culture is critical. And, every seasoned marketing pro can tell you how many things can go wrong with a design that looked good as a low resolution .jpg file on-screen, but when it came to understanding the target market culture, saving linked files in the right format, creating accurate die-line layers with call-outs for trims and scores, setting up artwork for complex color separations and pre-press production (the list goes on and on) the cheap-o designer had no idea how to actually bring that cool looking design through production. Of course, you can’t know this until you have already paid your money and experienced the costly headaches with your printer and manufacturer to find out the designs cannot be produced because the designer doesn’t know real-world manufacturing requirements. And, you end up paying 10X the original cost to have real experts fix all the problems. Now, add to this this frustration, being limited to email-only communication with a graphics person in Russia or India where English is a distant second language and time zones are on opposite ends of the spectrum. When you need the designer to talk to your printer to work out issues with color separation or font problems, good luck. Your printer is not getting up at 4:00 AM to struggle through an “English as second language” conversation with India.
On top of the production knowledge gap there exists a gap in cultural understanding. When you ask a Chinese designer to create brand design or packaging design for your American product, what else can they do but apply their own understanding of American culture to their design work. We are all shaped by the culture we live in. And, our impression of other countries and cultures is created by the filter of home country’s media-controlled interpretation that gives us a colorized view of the fashion, trends and sensibilities of other countries. Take a look at what I mean below.
Real Chinese Tea Packaging | American Concept of Chinese Tea Packaging
Real Indian Tea Packaging | American Concept of Indian Tea Packaging
Real Japanese Tea Packaging | American Concept of Japanese Tea Packaging
When it Does Make Sense to Shop Design Internationally
The value of the international market of brand design works for you when you need to create a brand image, packaging and communications for sale into another country. It’s very easy to find, contact and establish communications with designers and agencies in your target country that are native to that culture. You can hire them to create the brand image that will resonate with your target market and be relevant within their own culture. That is smart use of overseas sourcing.
Deal Design was hired by Tasty Foods, a food and beverage brand, to design product packaging that looked 100% American, for sale in the Middle East. Why? Doesn’t this go against everything I just wrote? The answer is yes and for a good reason. Tasty Foods, being from Middle Easter Cultures, recognized the skyrocketing affinity for American brands. It knew that if it hired an American agency to develop a brand and packaging designs that could sell in America, they would sell like hot cakes in the Middle East. And they paid way more hiring Deal Design than they could have spent hiring an agency locally in Dubai, but they wouldn’t get a truly American brand image. Now that’s understanding your target market and smart leveraging of overseas design–not to save money–but to ensure product success. Here are some examples of this work:
The Moral of This Story:
If it seems really cheap, you are not getting a great deal, you are getting what you pay for: poor quality that will negatively impact your sales and brand value. Isn’t your brand worth more than that to you? Would you shop for a heart surgeon the same way? Don’t hand your brand a bargain-basement heart surgeon and hope for the best.