This article is not about cooking or opportunities in the F&B sector. Instead, it is about the importance of design, presentation quality, and visual appeal. And the impact it can have on your business, including your ability to attract employees, mentors/advisors, suppliers, and investors.
MasterChef Australia to me is an excellent reminder that producing a great product is not enough. Presenting it well enhances the appeal, and value, of the product manifold.
Likewise with startups, producing a great product or service is not enough. Even if the product or service addresses a strong consumer need, the adoption rates will be lower if the product is not designed well. In India recently, Indigo Airlines and Paper Boat (Aamras, Jal Jeera and juices) are great examples of how a brand can be built on design and aesthetics. It goes without saying that the product is very good. But the design, look & feel makes you pick it up from the shelf instantly.
But it is not just about making your product look beautiful. To really delight your customer, it is critically important that you design the overall experience around the product or service. Everything that you do can be presented well. Your company website, marketing material, signage in the office, power-point presentations (Oh God… how many times do we sit through ppts that are awfully designed), word documents, PDFs, etc. More often than not, we see excellent content get diluted in impact because of poor formatting of the word document or PDF.
Even excel sheets can be done beautifully. Yes, ‘beautifully’. With the startups that I advice/mentor, I insist that they spend some time, effort and energy to design their excel sheets. And it does make a huge difference. Just redoing the line spacing and alignments well makes documents much better than factory settings. Try formatting your excel sheets – indenting, making the rows slightly bigger than the content so that it looks well spaced out, coloring the different headers etc. – and see how pleasing it looks to read. It takes less than 30 seconds to move from a -10 to a +5 on an excel sheet look & feel by just doing indenting and spacing. Try it.
If you invest time in making your product and everything that you put out to the world – website, documents, excel sheets and presentations – look beautiful, the overall impact on your business can be surprisingly significant. Not only will your consumer/customer perceive higher value in your product, a company that has a culture of design aesthetics also finds it easier to attract employees, vendors, advisors/mentors, and investors.