Quantifying the Intuitive
I went to an interesting conference a couple of weeks ago–the Academy of Marketing Sciences meeting. I haven’t spent time with marketing academics before, and what I frankly thought would be a dry day being lectured at by people who didn’t really know what the “real world” is like was instead an engaging and challenging look at how people who really think about marketing think about marketing.
The most fascinating parts were, in effect, attempts to put data around things that designers tend to intuit and fail to explain to clients–things like the fact that it’s the whole experience of a product that affects the consumer’s perception, not any single detail. Obvious to designers, but when a client makes some minor change to a product that kills the designer’s intent, we tend not to be able to say why it killed the intent. Designers tend to run screaming from the idea that a design can be broken down into components to be individually analyzed–but instead we handwave around the reasons why we do what we do. And I’m not sure anyone believes us.
These hardcore marketing-types are, in effect, giving us tools to explain ourselves and do better work. I think we designers are so used to wrangling with marketing that we forget that they’re trying to do the same thing we are.
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