Marketers No Longer: Now We’re Designers
Fifteen years ago,
when Jerry Hirschberg was starting up the U.S. design studio for
Nissan, he was invited to the long-range product planning meetings
as an observer—a courtesy extended to him by the marketing
people.
The meetings were
all about vague pronouncements about future cars (“all entry-level
cars should be as generic as possible”) and plenty of spreadsheets
about advertising spending and projected income. They were also the
most important meetings the company held to plan its long-term
future. The designers were mere tacticians.
Jerry proved, in
short order, that he was much more than an observer. He
demonstrated that designers not only had an important role in this
process but should in fact dominate it.
If post-design,
post-manufacture marketing is dead, what replaces it? Design. Not
the pure design that they teach at Parsons, but a market-centric
design that builds the very success of the product’s marketing into
the product itself.
The semantics get
funky, but the facts are clear. The person with real influence on
the success of a product today gets to sit at the table when the
original seeds for a project are being sown.
If you are a
marketer who doesn’t know how to invent, design, influence, adapt,
and ultimately discard products, then you’re no longer a marketer.
You’re deadwood.
Make a list of all the remarkable products in your industry. Who made them? How did they happen? Model the behavior (not mimic the product) and you’re more than halfway to making your own.