Marketing and Design: Rivals or Partners?

S T R AT E G Y

Marketing and Design: Rivals or Partners? by Lisbeth Svengren Holm and Ulla Johansson

deally, innovation is hallmarked by interdisciplinary collaboration. In their experience-based analysis of marketing and design cultures, however, Lisbeth Svengren Holm and Ulla Johansson reveal why, across five critical factors, the integration of design and engineering is generally close and effective while the partnership between design and marketing is often characterized by tension and misunderstanding.

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I don’t mind if technology has greater influence than design: We understand each other and can work things out. But when marketing gets power, it’s bad. For example, sometimes marketing gets its way with regard to color. Why should we pay attention to color fads? Just because red cars are popular one year, why should we have a red hair dryer? —Dieter Rams, head of product design at Braun Corporation from 1961 to 1997 1

No one would suggest that Braun Corp., beloved by designers everywhere, lacked coherence between products and communications. Dieter Rams worked well with his colleague Hartmut Stroht, head of market communications, who translated Braun’s product design principles into equivalent principles to be used for advertising. But for the “strategic marketing people” in Braun’s business department, who were expected to

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Design Management Review Spring 2005

Lisbeth Svengren Holm, Lecturer, Stockholm University School of Business

define new-product concepts and conduct market research, it was a different matter. One of the business managers, Gilbert Greaves, gave an example of his view: “The problem with designers is that they think they design for eternity. Rams will hand me a 1965 design and expect me to go for it today.”2 It seemsed, however, that the conflict at Braun was part of a dynamic culture that actually fostered the design strategies. Indeed, Stroht went so far as to arrange seminars and educational programs to remind people about the company’s design principles.3 But not all companies have this kind of support and culture. 1. Karen Freeze, “The KF40 Coffee Machine” (DMI case study).

Ulla Johansson, Lecturer, Växjö University School of Management

2. Ibid. 3. Lisbeth Svengren, “Industrial Design as a Strategic Resource,” Design Journal, vol. 10, no. 1 (1995).

Marketing and Design: Rivals or Partners?

At Stockholm University, we are running a research project to study the relationships betweenamong industrial industrial designers and their colleagues in, engineering and marketing, and engineering. We are not aiming at a how-to-do-it model; we intend rather to get a rich understanding of what happens when the three disciplines work together. We hope to reflect upon this from some theoretical aspects, as well—for instance, Karl Weick’s “sensemaking” construct.4 Results so far have shown us that industrial design and engineering tend to establish a fruitful working relationship once they have seen that they can benefit from a mutual learning process. But what was really interesting was the rivalry that occurred between marketing and design. We approached and were given access to six companies that used integrated processes. Research5 has shown that poor communication and lack of knowledge of the other’s processes and ways of doing and viewing market research often hinder the working relationship between marketing and design. Ironically, from a conceptual point of view these two disciplines have much in common, and we therefore wanted to give the relationship a more in-depth look. We followed our six companies for three years. Following is an overview of one of these cases. The Flooring Company To make a long story very short: The Flooring Company is a medium-size firm that belonged to a larger corporation, a chemical engineering company. This corporation had manufactured laminate material for furniture for many years, and was the first to develop such material for floors in the 1980s. It was successful; revenues increased at a 50 percent clip during its better years, and the company eventually went public. Its products, which looked like wooden floors, were of a very high quality; the design, the scratch resistance, and the durability made them attractive in both private homes and in public 4. Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995). 5. See, for instance, Margaret Bruce and Rachel Cooper, Marketing and Design Management (London: Thompson Business Press, 1997).

environments. The CEO saw that design would be more important in the future. He hired a design manager and began planning a design center for development work and for the exhibition of new concepts. But the success in the US market led to a decision to build a factory in the US. The CEO decided to take charge of American operations. Not only did this mean the financial resources for a design center were no longer there, but also, when the CEO left for America, the company lost its design champion. Laminate flooring is not a complicated product. It wasn’t long before the company’s competitors in the laminate furniture business began to launch flooring products, as well; but they used cheaper technology. This meant lower quality, but also lower prices. The competition became intense. The design manager, left on her own, struggled to develop a soup-to-nuts service that would go beyond choosing a flooring pattern to include the whole experience, from installation to walking on the finished product. The company certainly had multidisciplinary teams in product development, but in most cases design was considered a minor partner. The design manager invited marketers and engineers to workshops she arranged as kick-offs for the development of new designs, but they weren’t well attended. One engineer was even told not to go—because it might be bad for his career. The design manager felt the lack of a clear brand strategy, with the result that she wrote out a proposal for a corporate and brand identity and sent it to the CEO. The marketing department was annoyed.

Results so far

have shown us that design and engineering tend to establish a fruitful working relationship once they have seen that they can benefit from a mutual learning process. But what was really interesting was the rivalry that occurred between marketing and design.


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Innovation in Consumer Goods & Branding

A New Regime The 1990s saw a lot of turnover of CEOs in the Flooring Company, and by the end of that decade, the new CEO had a new head of product development. This new management team saw the necessity of design and decided to invest in a design center. Computers and printing facilities were installed, and five new designers were hired. The design manager became head of future concepts; another designer took over her former job. Marketing, however, was critical of design’s expanded budget; they saw it as taking away from them, and they retaliated by leaving design outside of their own campaigns. When the design department initiated an exhibition at the international furniture fair in Milan in an attempt to support brand development, it took considerable negotiation to convince anyone from marketing to join in their activities. The CEO, however, stepped up to the plate, defending the design department’s increased budget, as well as its right to make decisions on new designs. Another bright spot was that engineers and designers now worked together in the design center, and conflicts about solutions began to be solved in new and more creative ways. When interviewed, the engineers said they had started to regard the products, the design, and the designers with new eyes. One example mentioned was the way in which they were learning to use their materials—even the glue—to create new concepts. The engineers claimed in interviews that the collaboration had made them more creative, but also that they had become more aware of their own role—for instance, having the right to say a particular design was good enough even if it lacked the perfection the designers were striving for. The motivation for collaboration became very high, and mutual learning became characteristic of the relationship between designers and engineers. It took a while for the marketing department to realize that its customers were more excited

Marketing

was critical of design’s expanded budget; they saw it as taking away from them, and they retaliated by leaving design outside of their own campaigns.

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when they visited the design center than when they came to the official showroom, which offered very nice, but more traditional, exhibitions. The marketing department had not found a way to integrate its work with the work of design; and. design and marketing did not develop a mutual learning process as had happened between design and engineering. Why? One answer is, of course, competition for resources. But there was also the concept of brand, which both marketing and design claimed as their own turf. A third answer may be found in the traditional concepts of marketing management, the logic of which is different from that of design. Marketing and Design: Seeing Eye to Eye A closer look at the conceptual foundations of design management and marketing management uncovers many similarities. Differentiation from the competition and a specific expressive brand identity are fundamental to both design and marketing, as are improving the product, searching for the perfect form, and satisfying customer needs. In many companies, this has been the basis for a successful collaboration between the two. What, then, was causing the problem in firms like The Flooring Company? Perhaps, we thought, this conflict was merely one of budgets and power. We found that, as is oft-stated in design management research, the support of top management is essential for the way in which different disciplines integrate and succeed. However, we also came to the conclusion that there are some fundamental conceptual differences between marketing and design. Traditional marketing is based on a positivistic mass marketing approach that purports to be objective. Design is subjective, based on the designer’s skill and an intuitive approach to making decisions. These differences can be at the root of frustration. It seems that the relationship between engineers and industrial designers is more fruitful when they learn together; and other research projects have corroborated this.6 There are reasons to believe that the same mutual learning process could occur between marketers and industrial designers, but as we’ve pointed out, 6. See, for instance, Angela Dumas, “Building Totems: Metaphor-Making in Product Development,” Design Management Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 71, and B. Jevnaker, “How Design Becomes Strategic,” Design Management Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 41.


some of our cases have shown more rivalry than collaboration. Investigating the concepts and beliefs of design managers and comparing them with those of marketing managers, we have been able to identify some of the issues at stake. Design management and marketing management: A comparative analysis While analyzing some of the textbook-oriented literature in marketing management and design management, we used an inductive contrasting method to come up with similarities in terms of themes and differences in terms of emphasis. We found five main themes: 1) attitude toward the product; 2) professional identity; 3) attitudes toward corporate identity; 4) relation to value creation; and 5) approach to consumer and market research. 1. Attitude toward the product Emotional associations between consumers and products are essential, and in marketing management, building the brand is about building emotional associations.7 Increased global competition and the technical quality of products, as well as the development of a consumer society based on image and experience, have made functional issues less important than they once were. Kapferer8 posited that the classical brand concept, which holds the brand equal to the product, which in turn is equal to the customer benefit, is no longer valid. Instead, the brand’s personality creates meaning for the consumer, and the product is just one expression of this meaning.9 As long as the meaning is coherent, the company can launch a variety of products, as for example Caterpillar did when the company launched boots. Design management, on the other hand, has a strong and intimate relation to the product as such. Industrial designers, after all, tend to speak through the products. They work with the manufacturing companies, and even if the brand is important for developing the design, designers tend to have an eye toward innovating10 and therefore lean more toward the technical side. The gap between marketing and technology (or engineering) is also an old theme. As close as design management may be to brand issues, the physical product still has a central role. This difference can also be understood in design management’s attitude toward its own professional identity.

2. Professional identity Most industrial designers are passionate about designing products. Competition for design school is intense, and it is based on talent. Design students are encouraged to develop a personal style; and their idols are often such design stars as Ross Lovegrove, Philippe Starck, or Karim Rashid. A strong individual culture thrives within the design profession, and designers are used to marketing themselves and their individual skills. Marketing students tend to study at business schools, where most of them are selected based on intellectual capacity and grades rather than talent and skills. You will find that many marketing professionals are fascinated by their job, but few regard it as their passion in life. And there are few marketing stars. These are mostly academics—Philip Kotler comes to mind—and not practitioners. Marketers look to general intellectual knowledge as a means to an end, while designers rely on their creativity as the source of their professional skills. There are, of course, many more issues related to this theme, but we’ll leave it at that. 3. Attitudes toward corporate identity In design management, the concept of corporate identity is highlighted by the need to integrate a number of design elements from product, graphic, and environmental design. Design management, after all, began as a means of making sure that different design elements worked together through a coherent visual identity based on the company’s true identity. The discussion of “who the company really is” has been seen as one aspect of corporate identity, an aspect that refers to theories of organizational development rather than to marketing theories. Within marketing management, identity is really 7. See D.A. Aaker, Building Strong Brands (New York: Free Press, 1996). 8. J. Kapferer, Strategic Brand Management: Creating and Sustaining Brand Equity Long-Term (London: Kogan Page, 1992). 9. The issue of meaning creation is often a theme within brand management and postmodern marketing literature (cf. M. Salzer-Mörling and L. Strannegård, “Silence of the Brands,” in European Journal of Marketing, vol. 38, no. 1 (2004), p. 224). 10. Cf. M. Bruce and J. Bessant (eds.), Design in Business: Strategic Innovation through Design (London: Design Council and Financial Times, Prentice Hall, 2002).


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about the identity the company wishes to have— that is, what is the mission of the company, and what are its visions? How can we create an identity that reflects these visions? Many corporate identity programs don’t go far beyond the design of the logotype. In fact, many corporate identity consultants now refer to themselves as brand consultants. In contrast, design management still considers product development to be the core issue. Even if these designers relate their work to the brand, they are not brand consultants in the same sense as are corporate identity consultants.

Initial findings

in our latest research project… show there is a new generation of marketers who are more open to new methods and more interested in design— beyond the brands, the logotypes, and even the control logic of the mass marketing approach. The development of relationship marketing is another example of this kind of thinking.

4. Attitudes toward creating value The way in which brands are explicitly valued in mergers and acquisitions makes it obvious that their worth is such that it goes beyond the balance sheet. Hence, the necessity to manage the brand is obvious. Branding has, within a short period, become not only a marketing concept but also a real financial asset. Design and design management are more difficult to value explicitly. This is not to say design management does not have such a value; it simply has not been recognized in the same way. Attempts to quantify design’s value have always run into the difficulty of separating design from other corporate activities. Industrial design, for instance, is perceived (and should be perceived) as part of a process to which engineers, marketers, and designers contribute. Another issue is that industrial design tends to be regarded as a cost, while branding has become linked to the income side and is regard-

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ed as an investment. This construction is, of course, highly artificial and even ironic, since in many ways the character of the work done on both sides, as well as its aim and result, in many ways areare rather similar. 5. Approach to the consumer and to market research Through questionnaires, surveys, interviews, and focus groups, marketers have developed sophisticated models that purport to discover what consumers want. Designers tend to use observation and ethnography—methods more focused on the behavior of users than on what they are saying. Marketers and designers also hold differing views on subjectivity and objectivity. Where marketers strive for objectivity, industrial designers seem to trust their intuition. This was obvious in one project we shared with a design school in Stockholm. The marketing students and the design students worked separately to interpret the theme of fear. The marketing students brainstormed different problem areas and went out to interview relevant people and experts. The design students went out to experience fear themselves—some of them, for instance, staying the night in a cemetery. Conclusion Whether one is managing design, marketing, or brand, management is about control—more specifically, control of what consumers think about the company, the brand, and the products. Management models and methods are based on this logic. However, the logic of control is not always relevant—for instance, in the case of innovation and marketing. Designers have long criticized what they call the rigidity of marketing. However, initial findings in our latest research project, which focuses on the relationship between designers and marketers in both consumer and B2B markets, show there is a new generation of marketers who are more open to new methods and more interested in design— beyond the brands, the logotypes, and even the control logic of the mass marketing approach. The development of relationship marketing is another example of this kind of thinking. It is based on the interpretive and subjective type of logic that is associated with design.


Designers are participating in the branding culture that emerged in the 1990s, and design obviously is related to fashion, aesthetic appeal, and symbols of consumption. But of course this somewhat depends on the design discipline. Industrial designers must consider not only the aesthetics and functions of a product, but also its manufacturing, distribution, and use—the whole supply chain, in fact. All these issues have to be creatively integrated and developed in teams that include a variety of disciplines—not just marketing. Because some of the rhetoric of design and marketing is similar, there is sometimes an assumption that integration between designers and marketers is a smooth process. However, given different roots, tools, and attitudes, this is not necessarily true. Everyone agrees that innovation is critical, not only for products but for services and organizations, especially in a market where production is outsourced. Marketers are closer to innovation when it comes to services, and this is a dynamic area that will grow in importance. But even when it comes to service innovation, design logic holds an advantage. Companies need to create a better learning relationship between design and marketing to foster this development. Marketing needs to learn from design without asking marketers to become designers or vice versa. There is a need to support the differences between the disciplines if we are to make development dynamic. After all, if we all think the same, there is no innovation! Reprint #05162HOL38

Suggested Readings Gummesson, Evert. Total Relationship Marketing (revised ed.). London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002. Johansson, Ulla, and Jill Woodilla (eds). Irony and Organizations: Epistemological Claims and Supporting Field Stories. Copenhagen: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, 2005.


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