Firebrand

On the Accidental Creative podcast, John Winsor mentioned a new book that he is writing about redefining the relationship between Industrial Design and Marketing. Preliminarily, Winsor‘s book is entitled “Baked In” as in the marketing process has to be baked into the design process. I am eagerly looking forward to reading his thoughts on the topic because I am so passionate about it myself. In fact, my passion for that topic is why this blog was created; I have always positioned myself as a industrial designer with expertise in marketing because I recognized the need for a tangible common thread throughout the design and marketing process.

Marketing and Industrial Design are traditionally to siloed, and try to limit the interactions they have with each other. Traditionally, marketing identified a need in the marketplace and design generated the product. Then marketing would reenter the process and try to sell the product. Now, design is often doing the market research to identify product needs and market shortfalls themselves. So marketing has started to be eliminated from the beginning of the process. The industrial design lead market research I have been part of is people centric, and often generates a list of user problems that can be solved to improve the experience. That leads to an overall better product and a long term brand advantage but not a marketable advantage over the competition in the short run.  Marketing’s market research is market centric. It’s not that people are left out, quite the opposite. The product opportunities marketing is looking for are dramatic changes that will pull on someones heart strings enough to get a new product or switch brands. Every product needs that one line powerful advantage. Marketing’s research also identifies opportunities in the supply chain, pricing, and distribution.

I don’t think this doors should be opened between the design department and the marketing department; I think the walls should be knocked down and it should become one department all together. Both marketers and industrial designers are people focused, creative types. Both are focused on problem solving, for both the business and the users. Both understand that happy customers create happy businesses. Both work with the brand of a company every day. Both have the ability to pre-visualize.

Designers and marketers are cut from the same cloth, but chose different paths based on sills and interests. But while they are similar, they have different enough backgrounds and focii that they have different things to bring to the table. While I think that industrial designers should know more about marketing, and marketing hsould understand the design process more, I am glad they are seperate and distinct professions. But they do need to work hand in hand. Together they need to create tangible threads to run through the product design and promotion processes; I will elaborate on those in a upcoming post.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an industrial designer that works with large brands everyday designing displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.