The economics of innovation

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MARKETING AND DIEING
Your marketing sucks. But then again so does everyone else's. It's been driven to blandness by a combination of focus groups that couldn't "get" your new idea, repeated changes from your management team, internal squabbles and marketing ideas from a time when advertising spend equalled market success. But maybe there is a deeper problem...

Put simply, in 2009 if you don't have a great product then no amount of sales, marketing, branding or advertising will help you. What might just help is design. In particular, a way of approaching new product development and marketing problems called design thinking. You still need traditional marketing to execute but for new ideas or new brands you need a new approach.

I work in a field where design thinking is well defined, well understood and well appreciated. But today a marketing manager stopped me in my tracks in the middle of a meeting. She asked me, "So everything you've told me about design thinking just sounds like good marketing. What gives?" I was lost for words and this blog post is my attempt at an answer after the fact.

Design is not just good marketing. It's a fundamentally different way of approaching problems within your business.

Marketing thinking is all about seeing people in aggregate so that you can communicate with them as efficiently as possible. Design thinking is all about seeing people as individuals so you can delight that one person and extrapolate that out to others.

The best place to see this is in a focus group. Focus groups that are reviewing a concept will tend towards the views of the average. This results in the overwhelming blandness of the products that you see on your supermarket shelves. There is a very healthy place for focus groups in the insights, research and needs identification parts of the process. But not in testing or reviewing your new brand or new product.

A wise old friend (stanford MBA), a successful company CEO and entrepreneur recently reminded me that in business you only have 3 options:

a) be the biggest and win by being the cheapest,
b) be the smallest and win by staying under the radar, or
c) be different.

If you choose option (c) you'd better get aware of how design can help your whole business understand your customers and create difference. - And fast. Because someone pursuing option (a) with an army of marketing experts and someone pursuing option (b) with an invention in their garage are both after you.

To be fair, you still need a marketing strategy and you still need to tell your story. But maybe it's worth having your own story to tell first. We've found that using a marketing approach too early on in the process leads us to ask:

• What will please the greatest number of people just enough to buy our product?

Using a design approach at first tends to lead us through empathy, user centrednesss and creativity to ask:

• What will delight those who buy our product so much that they tell people about it?

Fundamentally, marketing is about talking to a group, design is about listening to an individual. Both are important skill sets at different stages of the process. But in the end, would you rather buy from a company that talked or one that listened?

 

comments:

Anonymous said...

Great topic for conversation..I too was asked the same question in a meeting:So I get the fundamentals of the design process, and they sound similar to those of a good marketing process, but what is the fundamental difference between marketing and design? I too was unprepared for this question...but I am a great believer in the fact that in your darkest hour, lies your greatest opportunity.....I think you are onto something with the whole argument of mass versus individual and I do believe a lot of designers go into design for the right moral reasons. I saw this at University and have also witnessed it in my 10 year design career too.My answer (and it took me a while to arrive at it) is: Marketing is focused on the story and brand proposition..how can we tell it in a different light or put a different spin on it? How do we come up with a different and meaningful proposition through story and brand communications?Where, design has and will always be focused on experience..becoming intrinsically involved in the thing you are designing, putting yourself in the shoes of the person you are designing for. When I worked in the consultancy field we had little to no money for research, which meant we did it ourselves, which in turn meant that if we were designing something, we would have to first understand how it was used in context. We would have to empathize with the users and listen to their needs, and put ourselves in their shoes to fully understand what they were experiencing. Only when we went through the experience of use would we understand the problems, which in turn would lead to the opportunities...The business case for design

This site exists to help designers, marketing managers and design thinkers use economics and financial metrics to convince senior business executives of the value of design thinking, empathy and innovation.