There's something deeply satisfying about spotting a problem that everyone else has been walking past for months.
A website that makes buying something feel like applying for a mortgage. A booking process that requires three separate browser tabs, a degree in cryptography and the patience of a particularly saintly monk. A business offering something genuinely brilliant but explaining it with all the enthusiasm of a council tax demand.
Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.
And there's a wonderful temptation to stand back, point triumphantly and announce, “THERE! That's your problem!”
Lovely. Well done. Have a biscuit.
Now what?
Because identifying a problem and knowing what to do about it are two entirely different skills.
Not everything needs a new website
Let's start with the obvious one.
Business isn't booming. Enquiries are down. Sales aren't quite where they should be. Someone looks at the website, notices it isn't particularly shiny and decides that must be the culprit.
Cue a new website.
New colours. New photographs. Lovely scrolling effects. Perhaps a video of someone looking thoughtfully out of a window, because apparently that's how we communicate professionalism now.
Six weeks and several thousand pounds later, everything looks fabulous.
The enquiries still aren't coming.
Because perhaps the problem wasn't the design. Perhaps customers couldn't understand the offer. Perhaps they couldn't find the prices, didn't know what happened after they enquired, or weren't entirely convinced the business was right for them.
Or perhaps nobody was visiting the website in the first place.
A new website might have been exactly what was needed. Equally, it might have been a very expensive way of rearranging the furniture in an empty shop.
And the same applies to branding, marketing campaigns, social media and pretty much every other thing a business can spend money on.
The most visible problem isn't necessarily the most important one.
The solution shouldn't arrive before the diagnosis
Imagine going to the doctor with a dodgy knee and being told, before you've even sat down, that what you need is a new haircut.
It might be a very nice haircut. It might make you feel considerably better about yourself. But your knee is still knackered.
Yet in business, we do versions of this all the time.
We decide we need more social media because everybody else is posting. We decide we need a rebrand because the logo feels a bit tired. We decide we need SEO because someone at a networking event said we should.
And sometimes those things are absolutely right.
But shouldn't we establish what we're trying to achieve first?
Over the years, I've worked on projects where the answer has been better messaging, a more straightforward customer journey, an entirely new digital shopfront, a brand that could grow with the business, or a clearer way of communicating what an established company actually does.
Different challenges. Different solutions.
The common thread wasn't a particular service or a favourite marketing trick.
It was working out what would make a meaningful difference.
And please, can we stop fixing things that aren't broken?
This is another favourite.
A business has something that's working perfectly well. Customers understand it, people are buying it, and the process is doing what it's supposed to do.
But someone has seen a competitor's website, or attended a seminar, or discovered a new bit of software with a very exciting dashboard.
Suddenly, everything needs changing.
Sometimes innovation is necessary. Sometimes standing still is genuinely risky.
And sometimes the most useful thing anyone can say is, “Actually, I'd leave that alone.”
Not particularly glamorous, admittedly. Hard to put in a proposal. Nobody's winning a design award for recommending that the perfectly functional booking button remain exactly where it is.
But there's a difference between making something better and making something different.
And if we're spending money, time and energy on change, surely we ought to know which one we're doing?
A lovely diagnosis won't pay the bills
Of course, finding the right problem is only half the job.
There's a particular kind of frustration reserved for receiving an impressive-looking report that tells you everything that's wrong with your business, then leaves you staring at forty-seven recommendations and wondering whether you're supposed to implement them before or after making dinner.
It's all very well knowing that the customer journey needs improving.
Who's improving it?
If the messaging is confusing, somebody needs to rewrite it. If the website isn't doing its job, somebody needs to fix or rebuild it. If the brand no longer reflects the business, somebody needs to work out what should take its place.
And if the booking process requires customers to sacrifice a goat under a full moon, somebody probably needs to simplify that too.
Sometimes the changes are relatively small. Sometimes they're substantial. Sometimes the business already has perfectly capable people who just need a clearer direction.
The point isn't to create work for the sake of creating work.
It's to get something working better than it was before.
The bit that actually matters
I've spent a lot of time looking at businesses from the outside, asking awkward questions and following the routes their customers are expected to take.
I've also spent a lot of time doing the less glamorous bit afterwards: writing the copy, planning the structure, building the website, developing the brand, working on the marketing and generally making sure the recommendations turn into something useful.
And if there's one thing those experiences have reinforced, it's that there's no universal fix for a business that isn't quite getting the results it should.
Sometimes the answer is a major change.
Sometimes it's a handful of small ones.
And occasionally, the answer is to stop fiddling with something that was perfectly fine until somebody got bored with it.
At Vector & Verse, that's the approach: find out what's happening, work out what actually needs to change, and help make it happen.
I've recently pulled together a short portfolio of selected projects, covering everything from customer experience and marketing strategy to website development and brand repositioning. Not because every business needs all of those things, but because different problems call for different answers.
And that's really the point.
Finding the problem is the easy bit. Knowing what to do next is where the real work begins.
Vector & Verse — Strategy, Design & Customer Experience