Conference Reflection
This week I attended the Forrester Marketing Forum in Los Angeles. A few observations:
- Marketers and Designers face exactly the same thing. The marketing types at this event were mostly concerned with digital content: web sites, ad click-through rates, search-engine-optimization. But at core they’re struggling with new technology that shift the balance of power from all-knowing broadcast marketing to you-know-more-than-us participatory marketing of social media, bloggers, on-line ratings systems, etc. Product designers are learning how to use technology to create a deeper relationship with the consumers; marketers are learning how to use facebook to do the same thing.
- Marketers and Designers do exactly the same thing. Product designers are expressing the brand through/as the design of the product, the packaging, etc. Marketers are expressing the brand through/as the design of messaging, web sites, advertisements, etc.
- Marketers and Designers are equally confused about how to do this as ever. Many presentations at design conferences are high-level exhortations to practice “Big-D Design” and think about the consumer experience holistically, and any given product as just a piece of the picture. Many presentations at marketing conferences are high-level exhortations to practice “Big-M Marketing” and think about the consumer experience holistically, and any given marketing communication as just a piece of the picture.
- Marketers and Designers, at the practice level, are constrained by their organizations to think narrowly about whatever they’re designing or communicating.
- Consulting companies, like Continuum and Forrester, aren’t doing a particularly good job of getting companies to change their practices to take advantage of any of the big thinking we’re advancing as the “right” way to do things.
It’s hard to believe that we still have to recommend to companies that they consider the consumer’s entire process of learning, deciding, buying. The new things that are changing the interaction between company and consumer–like the “social media” stuff that presenters at this conference talked about–aren’t changing the fundamental need to know the consumer. Maybe they’re changing the processes we use to understand what the consumer is doing, wants to do, and can do, but it seems like it shouldn’t be necessary to tell that to a room full of marketing (or design) professionals. On the other hand…it doesn’t take much web surfing or window shopping to realize that it probably is.
