…because any of the marketing execs who support the design staff will end up fired. Now back to square one again trying to prove how design will increase sales and why fuck’n marketing needs to put their balls on the table a take a risk once in awhile.
no wonder marketing people suck in north america, they’re afraid to get fired. SUCKS…sorry, had to vent out somewhere…can’t do it at work cause I’ll end up fired.
Marketers do not suck. They are just too affraid to sell ugly products from designers like you.
Marketing people think they know design, because of a fancy MBA…
to GUEST idiot…I didn’t say all marketers suck, only the ones who can’t manage to perform a proper RIT/Risk assesment analysis…which to my surprise accounts for about 70% of the ones I run into.
in addition, in the past three months the “big wigs” let go two marketing execs who had the ability to perform a qualitative analysis of the market. Which is necessary when launching new products. Now I have to defend my designs against those marketing individuals who base decisions off of their “numbers” alone and do not have a clue how to evaluate the return of entering into new markets or how to become a trend setting in their existing markets.
In short, before you post a neglective comment I suggest you put on your knee pads and pucker up to your marketing a-holes.
Sincerly,
pissed off amp…
What industry are you in that allows your company to survive without strategic design?
and I also hope you start doing the same thing cause you will be sucking your marketing buds’ balls in order for your design to go thru.
Amp you suck…cocks that is
forgot to log-in…oh yea…not RIT…ROI on the above reply…oops
we are in the SOHO (small office/home office) products, traditionally a price driven market but a number of smaller competitiors have gained market share through “good design”.
The design dept. provides innovative concepts but none of the marketing managers want to be the first in. Similar to the caution that consumers have when a innovative new product is introduced on the retail shelves. Way too many barriers, even after getting it past our own marketing, we have to convince the buyers to accept it. Unfortunately, marketing sells to the buyers and the design department is left out of explaining the market advantage. Anywho, like I said above…frustrated and wanted to vent.
I have worked with great marketing people and some real idiots. Its best not to prejudge or generalize.
I have also worked at a place that had no marketing. Trust me, you would rather have a mediocre marketing person then none at all.
I agree completely…but its exciting to a designer when an organization has marketing execs oriented towards the design side and not everyone is bias towards the pricing/inventory side. But, it is extremely frustrating as a designer when you see these individuals released in a short period of time and all that is left are the number guys.
AMP, I agree that there are way too many marketing execs who are only focusing on the existing, numbers. The scarry thing is that the number of companies loosing sight of the importance of design as a sales tool is in my day to day experiances increasing. Well let me refraise that, I have many companies who come to me saying they want to be the industry leader in design driven products, but then in the same breath say they are not willing to spend any money on consumer prefference research, market evaluation, or even design because they also need to be the lowest cost product in the catagory to ensure the most sales potential. It always leaves me speachless and dumbfounded in my head, and leaves me thinking…what the hell world are they living in?
Then the ones I really love to hate are the ones who after you sit down and have a couple of meetings with them, you develop the proposal, and then sit down to present it say…Why would I pay you to do that when I can just hire some graphic designer to sit with me and put into illustrator the idea i have in my head and then send it to china they will figure it out.
Sorry just joined the rant, but with the consultancy spin on it.
You’re not going to be able to survive long if low-cost is your strategic differentiator. Wal-Mart has destroyed companies like yours. You need to sell the business case for differentiation through design.
we’re not a distributor or retailer…but a manufacturer…Wal-mart would be considered a buyer of our products. And low-cost is exactly what Wal-mart asks from their suppliers.
My latest marketing peeve was a marketing guy sending out a design drawing (that he did in PaintShop), of what the product should look like!
But the one I get all the time is marketing guys that have no information to backup their decisions- other than personal opinon. As engineers and designers we have a reason for how we design details of a product and have to sell our ideas so hard- then the marketing guys are just like…no I think it should be like this. But I must say, after working for my company almost 3 years…things are slowly changing for the better! Dare I say, that we (engineering/design and marketing) are starting to (gulp) work together.
Designers unite!
Let us kill all the maketing people, take back the power and rule this world with an iron fist.
AHAHAHA…I agree, lets create a design monarchy!!! Work would be so much easier if everyone just agreed with me…haha
Yes, I know. My point is that it’s practically suicidal for an American company to be playing that game, and it’s definitely not a healthy environment to “design” in; meaning almost everything that design stands for is out the window in the quest to MINIMALLY differentiate. It is almost impossible to add value, usability, innovation etc.
For that you need a business model based on ARPU (Avg. revenue per unit) instead of VOLUME.
Ahhhh…interesting…wait, this may be the first posting that someone actually offered good advise!..lol
Seriously, ARPU…I’ll definately look into this. Thanks cg!
CG,
So true a statement, in fact that is my value proposition to potential clients. If they continue to follow the low cost provider methodology, they will low cost themselves into bankruptcy. However it is easier to explain than to convince. Especially the market exec who deals with WM buyers all day long. But the clients who understand this are great clients and truly trust you, but they are few and far between as of yet.
Amp,
Wal-mat is your companies customer. As a designer your customer is the individual looking for a desk to fit his/her needs, and is sick of the crappy sawduct they are made out of. Do not loose sight of the end-users, and do not let the marketing department loose sight of this fact. Do you research find data and information that support your design suggestions, work to convince the marketing department to have a consumer focus group were you bring in consumers…not wal-mart or k-mart buyers…and present them with concepts both 2-d presentations and 3-d mock-ups. let them tell you what they are looking for in RTV furniture, let them suggest what is the most important and rank their presserences in order of importance. Then present the concepts let them describe what they like, dislike, or would change in them. Ask the question on price vs quality and price vs value. You will be surprised, trust me I completed two such projects for an RTV furniture company while freelancing prior to my current gig. I have also completed such a project for a promotional goods company, were their sales team was very suprised to findout that price was actually middle of the gamet of improtancy to thier customers. At the top of the list was item differentiation and percieved value of the item. ___________________________________________________________________
…O,Sullivan, other company in Washington MO forgot the name? just curious.
I’ve run into this problem with a few clients as well. The buyer every one of them is trying to please is WALMART.
WALMART seems to squeeze the life out of these companies, and the companies seem content to let them do it.
The last few jobs have posed the challenging task of increasing value and desire to the end user, while taking cost out of products that already cost less, and have smaller feature sets than their competition.
I’ve tried many ways of conveying this design paradox to my clients, but none of them seem to get it…
They don’t seem willing to change the way they do things, thus making it our job to make products stand out from their competition while costs and features…
Signed,
Dumbed-down in SoFla
The business reality is that Wal Mart is impossible to ignore. The best strategy as always is to diversify your high-volume, low-profit (Wal Mart) products with your medium to low-volume, high-profit products.
Read this story about how Wal Mart forced Vlassic pickles into selling a “years supply of pickles” for under $3… At which point they only made ONE CENT in profit and destroyed their “premium” image while putting them in bankruptcy: