The subject of good design has been popping up a lot recently both in our business and out on the web.

In 2007 Apple went from 0% to 27% market share in the smart phone market via the introduction of well designed hardware and intuitive software that the average person can access and utilize. Further, through both software and hardware design differentiation Apple maintains a gross margin of 33.6% versus Dell’s GM of 18.5% .

A nice visual analogy of Apple’s design approach versus Microsoft’s is depicted below:

An even more interesting stat comes from a January Reuters article:

In data provided to the New York Times, Google disclosed that it received more traffic from iPhones this Christmas than from any other mobile device, despite owning only 2 percent of the smart-phone market and less than 1 percent of the overall mobile-phone market. That means that while fewer people own iPhones, those who do possess the device use it to access the Internet much more than those with competing handsets.

Apple is essentially a design company. Their hedgehog principle is good design. They innovate and command market share by making technology simple to use by everyone. The simple fact that both of my parents are making active use of the web, web services and multiple (and synced) devices illustrates that with good design, you can teach an old dog new tricks (sorry Mom and Dad!).

As the world becomes more technically complex, design is commanding a more important role in our lives. Tech has been notoriously bad at making its amazing advances and productivity tools accessible by a mass audience. This is changing rapidly. The devices of yesterday are becoming real products before they come to market by necessity…the market is demanding it. William Davidow wrote a great book about the difference between devices and well designed products years ago…and its a worthy read for any marketer, product manager, engineer or CEO.

From a January article in the Journal:

With all the fuss, PC makers have begun hiring more people with degrees in industrial design and related disciplines — and listening to their opinions. “We found people designing from the outside in, not the inside out,” says Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel’s mobile systems group. “This was the revolution.”

So as we go about marketing our customers campaigns and offers via our Advaliant performance marketing platform, we are seeing the fruits of this ‘differentiation by design’ ethos.

Our customers come to us with a simple goal in mind: acquiring new customers. Many of them have their own creative that they wish to use and some of it is very well designed and the user experience is well thought out. Generally, we have seen these campaigns perform better than the lesser designed ones that make their way onto the platform.

Recently, we have been taking some of the offers that don’t convert well into our design studio and creating an alternative design direction and user experience (with client approval, of course). We then split-test these offers versus the original. Nine times out of ten the re-design performs better. The reason: we have taken the time and effort to make sure each campaign is designed to more simply communicate the benefit to the customer.

Not surprisingly, our expertise in the area of helping our advertisers generate more appealing campaigns has kept their loyalty and engagement with our platform. Further, because the campaigns perform better, our affiliates and publishers are happier because better designed campaigns help improve their bottom lines.

While direct response performance marketing can be a complex process, the same principals in the use of design to differentiate has enabled us to deliver our business constituents more value from our platform.

Got any other examples of good design making a “direct to bottom line” difference? Please share below!