Reality of Design + Marketing
Designers need to face facts: if marketing folks aren’t thinking about the big picture, design-wise, and we know they’re not thinking it, and we fail to deliver something that makes sense to the way they are thinking, the design is a failure. It’s our fault.
True, many of the marketing folks I meet are not thinking about marketing. Instead of the strategy of selling, they focus on the selling itself. Moving units. They can’t leave the “how can I get one more person to buy one more product” mentality behind. As a result, the direction they can give a design team is purely tactical and feature-oriented. Though there may be some nod to a brand personality in the direction we get from marketing when we start a project, it’s often very watered down. Instead many marketing managers are focused on what this or that buyer from this or that big-box retailer will say if they put this or that price on a feature. There’s no overall experience defined for the product, the company, or the brand. It’s hard on the designers, because we have nothing to go on, so we flail. We make up our own story about the relationship we want between the consumer and the product and cross our fingers that it will be consistent with the way the product will eventuall be marketed.
I’m not sure why many marketing people are not Marketing people, but they’re not. And it’s a problem that designers can’t fix by wishing it away. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton (a principal researcher at Microsoft Research) proposes the best way to think about designing products is to have the designers start, then bring in the marketing and engineering people later as the designers tail off. That’d be interesting, but it’s just not realistic. Almost no company is set up that way, that’s not what marketing means to most corporations, and marketing managers won’t just up and change because designers think they should.
So: stop complaining about it. If design isn’t getting what it needs from marketing, design needs to understand what marking is supplying and how to use it. And if marketing can’t seem to use what design is delivering, design should be delivering something else. Maybe it’s just a matter of how we present, but it’s probably the content itself. I’ve been involved in very large projects that delivered great, insightful design solutions that the client couldn’t use because they weren’t set up to use them. As a result, those designs went to waste, as did the time and money it took to produce them, and it wasn’t just because our clients’ marketing departments didn’t understand desgn. It was also because we didn’t understand the consumer — the consumer of our work, that is.
It’d be great to drive the new product development process, but failing that, we need to find a better way to play.
