About a week ago I booked a long overdue family vacation.  We looked at several options from resorts to villas to cruises, and settled on a cruise with Norwegian Cruise Line.  Needless to say, my 4 and 6 year olds were bouncing off the walls. 

Last night I was thinking about the process we went through in booking our trip.  Many queries started either on Google Maps, Cruise Reviews or Trip Advisor.  From there, it was usually a brief stop on the website for the property, then right back to consumer reviews and photos on a third-party site.  This happened over and over.

When we settled on the cruise, we wanted to look at the excursions the ship had to offer. We found ourselves off the NCL website and on to caribbeanportreviews.com to get what we really wanted, which was firsthand opinions of the excursions. My kids wanted to see every square inch of the ship, so we looked at pictures posted by past vacationers, again off the corporate site.  NCL did provide some nice 360 view tools, but there were large parts of the ship missing.

I have seven different websites bookmarked, and when I put them all together, they answered most of the questions we had.  It shouldn’t take that many sites to get the content I’m looking for.  That just leads to a very poor customer experience.  I know it is a big undertaking, but why wouldn’t NCL want to provide a one-stop platform for this information?  Six of the seven sites (the seventh being ncl.com) I used to make my decision had information on all the major cruise lines.  Do they really want potential customers reading about everything everyone else has to offer? 

Are you providing what your customers want? Have you asked them what they want?  Remember, if they are not getting the information they need from you, they are getting it from someplace else.  Do you know where that is?

People are looking for authentic content when making buying decisions.  You need to provide the opportunity for your customers to provide it.  If you don’t have the capacity to maintain a sharing platform, you need to at least provide links out to sites that have this information, like Amazon reviews, Yelp, or Trip Advisor.  Make it easy for your audience. 

Question:  Are reviews, tips and photos less credible when they are on a corporate website, even if they are not being sanitized?  Do you trust them?  Would you go to a third party site anyway?  Tell me what you think.

WestmorelandFlint Creative Director Ken Zakovich is showcasing Art Director David Sadowski. (We asked them to pose for a picture, but they were too "creative" to just smile for the camera.)

When my colleague Dave Sadowski and I recently spoke to an advertising/marketing strategy class at the College of St. Scholastica, we wanted to emphasize one point: There is a difference between design and good design.

So where does good design come from? It comes from conversation and personal experience, from balancing intuition and facts. It comes from knowing the ‘thing’ you are trying to sell and falling in love with it. It’s knowing the client, their customers and their values—each producing valuable information.

The designer collects information much like a squirrel gathers nuts and uses it to create something that resonates with the customer. We think of the whole customer experience—good design branches out and touches customers in ways you may never have imagined. These are techniques we use every day.

We helped these college students realize how powerful good design is and that it will ultimately:
• Sell more product,
• Create more value, or
• Improve the customer’s experience

These students—these future account managers at advertising agencies, directors of marketing in nonprofit organizations, or public relations professionals in large corporations—went away with a working understanding of the facilitating, collection of data and the listening that good design requires.

Yes, lightning bolts happen. They are real and they are extraordinary. But delivering consistent, timely and relevant creative starts with informed individuals, combined with hard work and ends with a design solution that supports marketing strategy.

What’s your experience with good design?