Marketing & Design Sofía Lorenzo Lago

Relationship Between Marketing

and Design
Nowadays, in order for a company to perform well, designers need marketers, and marketers need
designers. The relationship between design, marketing and branding has became increasingly complex in
the interweaving of products, services and experiences.

Designers and marketers both have the same end goal in mind: a happy client and a satisfied customer
who will return over and over and tell everyone he or she knows about their experience. Good designers
and good marketers also wonder about the same questions: Why do people choose to buy one product
over another? Why do people fall in love with a brand? What would happen if we changed this feature or
added that functionality? How do we get our brand to stand out in people’s minds? How do we create a
great user experience? Basically it is Why? What if? and How? If marketing and design manage to answer
these questions collaboratively, grate user experiences would be the norm, not the exception. This process
has already started.

Why has this relationship became closer in the last years? Why is design gaining more and more
importance over time? Here there are a some factors that brands need and have helped to get marketing
and design together:

First impressions do matter: the brand or company’s design is normally the very first thing that a customer
will notice and immediately sets the tone for the entire marketing message. The first impression is no
different with a brand than it is for a person. Like it or not, we are judged based on our appearance and that
judgement often happens in a split second. The key here is that we can take advantage of this to effectively
set the stage for our company: what our company does, stands for and what it represents; and positive
influence the impression the company gives off.

Lasting feels: a good design characteristic is that it lasts beyond the initial first impression. Boring or bad
design does not. All of the emotions and feelings we sought to conjure up through the first impression can
last for hours, days, and even weeks after seeing great design. When done right, good design makes
people feel better about your company.

Recognition: Imagine Coca-Cola or McDonalds; while certainly not beacons of health, their design, colors
and logos are recognizable worldwide. This isn’t applicable only to global brands, even small local
businesses can reap the rewards of consistent design across all of their marketing channels. Over time the
recognition does add up to form lasting brand impressions (which is also why it is so important to make
design an intentional part of the marketing mix).

Easy to use, navigate and understand: good design helps people move from A to B seamlessly, easily, and
without pain or distraction. The key to this is to first decide what B point looks like, and then make sure to
do everything we can to help our customer get there as quickly and easily as possible.

Encourage social sharing: social media is now everywhere. There is no hiding from it, so it does not make
sense to even try. Instead, embrace social media and create design that is worth sharing, talking about and
interacting with. There are very few examples out there of companies that cannot find some way to
embrace the shareable properties of social media to help spread their ideas, message, and design.

Sometimes design can be ugly: in some cases having an ugly design may actually work in our favor. This is
often the case with various e-commerce websites where changes in the design have led to reduced sales
and lower customer satisfaction. Your business may also have a case for going against current design
trends and making your own path. Ugly design is ok (sometimes) when it is tracked, analyzed, and
intentional.

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Knowing this, rather than investing in huge marketing budgets, organizations might do best when they
invest in actively designing the organization around the customer and in growing a great culture and
company. Adding good design to a remarkable content gives your content marketing strategy a much
better chance of success. Content and design work better together. The most successful content marketers
know this and are using design skillfully in every single piece that they produce. The most successful
companies know that design is key to overall success.

If for example a website is difficult-to-navigate and too ugly people will get scared away. Your marketing
effort cannot be focused on making a website that make people confused about what it is that your
company actually does, how to find your core services, or how to navigate logically to the resources they
need (and that you have toiled long and hard to create). If you do this, you have lost the game. This is were
good design is mandatory, not just a nice-to-have.

Design gets your point across quickly and effectively. Design is a powerful tool that can get a point across
more effectively than words alone. Many of us are visual learners, and prefer images to words to take
information. It is not about making every company a design-led company. It is about make design an
integral part of the content marketing efforts. It should not be and afterthought, it should be something that
we are always thinking about.

Having said that, we can confirm the following: design communicates a brand, marketing creates interest in
a brand. When we think about this two disciplines separately we find most of the times differences in
approaches to working practice. Designers are innovative and creative via design, and also non-profit
orientated; for sure, most companies cannot create just for the sake of creating or allow their designers to
design something that is beautiful but no one knows about. Marketers are also creative, but more profit-
oriented, driven by the requirements of target customers. Marketers accuse designers of being dogmatic
and snobby. Designers accuse marketers of being sleazy, manipulative, pushy, and unethical. Similarly there
are stereotypical views of designers as “impractical idealists” concentrating on the shape of products and
looking to the future, whereas marketers can be perceived as lacking imagination and focusing mainly on
how products fir with consumer needs at the present time.

These differences are now less present than in the past. Nowadays we notice a huge improvement between
them. Relationships between marketers and designers have been enhanced via the development of
“cultural intelligence”, which should contribute to improvements in new product development and focusing
on what really matters: endearing customers and building loyalty by delivering positive experiences.

While working together, there are key factors of co-operation between the two specialisms: attitude towards
the product; professional identity; attitudes towards corporate identity; relation to value creation; and
approach to consumer and market research. Practical solutions to integrate design and marketing
effectively still have to be proposed.

As is has been said before in this essay, design has become progressively more significant, specially in
bussiness-to-consumer markets in recent years, with increasingly design-led products, retail environments
and promotion now being the norm, in differentiating retailers from their competitors in a volatile financial
climate. Twenty-first century design has moved away from the design of simple objects of the previous
century, its complexity has grown. The designing process and outcomes now hinge on unpredictable
factors, characterized by a social economy with a variety of actors and motivations and the dynamics of
social novation. The designing process concerns entities in the making, whose final characteristics will
emerge only in the complex dynamics of the real world. Now, design thinking is seen as a virtue, an enabler,
helping to unlock latent creativity, developing solutions to problems and shaping the future. A design mind-
set does not worry about restrictions: it always sees ways around them. In so doing, the definition of
designer has changed; its functions have changed. From being a lone problem solver, engaged in the
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processes and outputs of design, designer has transformed to a facilitator and navigator of interdisciplinary
teams. Marketers can benefit from design thinking when approaching creative tasks and equally, designers
can gain valuable insights from marketers’ consumer-oriented approach to business, largely via market
research into customers and competitors. Marketers need to understand that features and functions on
their own do not motivate decision-making behavior. But when they are combined with good design, they
can. Designer have to come to terms with the fact that they are not artists “their job is to solve problems
with design” [Don Draper].



Lately organizations have generally moved away from a production orientation towards a more market-
oriented approach where customer needs predominate, and production issues have become secondary. If
we take this one step further we find that organizations of all types are primarily service-based. However,
while it is a popular concept in the marketing field, it could have the potential to create tension between
designers and marketeers, since it changes existing design’s focus on products to one of engagement,
participation and co-creation.

But even if this tension appears, it may be necessary for design to be steered away from its original focus.
Because ultimately the end goal of a designer is to sell their product to the consumer. And this will be
achieved by building a close relationship and understanding between marketer and designer. This means
that the designer’s vision and DNA can be translated into a campaign that represent what they have created
and can be put to the customer in a desirable way.

Increasingly, collaborations are happening with unusual disciplines coming together to solve new problems.
When people collaborate things get done, walls are broken down and you can develop a common language
and understanding of how each other’s discipline works. Other advantages are solving problems and facing
challenges jointly. The role of the marketer and the role of the designer are becoming increasingly nebulous;
the traditional designer and marketer are dying out. People who are creative and open are able to work with
people from other disciplines. In this case, to encourage designers and marketers to work together
effectively in practice, the two functions should be open with each other and willing to share their
knowledge, showing each other the processes they go through, in order to build mutual understanding.

Marketing is about system and process, design is about ideas but there is system and process involved in
creating a design and there are ideas and creativity involved in the marketing process. So traditionally
someone makes a product, gives it to a marketer, the marketer strategizes and the designer designs the
product and the packaging for it to go in. Each stage is separate. But this does not work any more. The root
cause may be ownership, so the designers want ownership of what they do and the marketers also want
ownership of what they do. The thing is that the new model of economy that is emerging is about
collaboration, co-creation, creative commons and sustainability. Thereby, relationship between marketing
and design must continue becoming closer, even more enriching and friendly in order to give better service
to customers. Users would be better served if marketing and design could work more collaboratively.
Combining this two areas of expertise and understanding of the wants and needs of the users would make
everyone more powerful. Together marketing and design can create a holistic customer experience built on
the emotions the brand evokes. And when this is accomplished, everyone wins.

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Information sources

https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/design-marketing-collaboration/

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/JFMM-04-2016-0041

https://www.peterjthomson.com/2009/08/difference-between-marketing-and-design/

http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2012/8712/how-marketers-and-designers-can-work-together-
more-efficiently

https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/why-cant-we-be-friends-finding-the-balance-between-marketing-
and-design

http://adamerhart.com/why-great-marketing-needs-great-design/

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/yin-and-yang-oil-and-water-creative-and-marketing/

https://uxmag.com/articles/a-designer-and-a-marketer-walk-into-a-bar