Interaction design

Almost every company that produces consumer products has this tension and internal fight between the ‘marketing’ and ‘design’ department. They speak different languages and they are continuously talking about different things.

Marketeers talk about positioning a new product in the portfolio for the high end segment for this specific customer group. And that is were marketeers are invaluable, they discover new markets and keep in contact with customers to define costumer needs and the proposition of the product. They are responsible, especially product managers, for pricing, how the product is distributed and sometimes for logistics.

As it is hard to admit, in most companies marketeers and product managers decide if a new product has to be added to the portfolio or not. Designers have to develop a product that meets the costumer needs and value proposition defined by the marketeers. And it is this handover where most problems occur.

Example

For example, the marketeers defined a ranking of customer needs for a coffee machine; 1. Quality of the coffee, 2. Easy to use, 3. Easy to clean, and so on. Directly engineers will ask to marketeers what do you mean with ‘easy to use’ or ‘easy to clean’? And frankly in most cases marketeers don’t know this as well, they have done their surveys and research based on customer needs not on what it really means. In the eyes of engineers this task cannot be done because the marketeers don’t know what they are asking.

In most cases mareketeers have no technical background and do not know which technical limitations there are and what drives the cost of a product. So what is actually is happening is that designers have to start working without a clear design brief. So guess what happens if the designers present their first idea sketches to the marketeers? “This is not really what we had in mind”. And then it is back to the drawing board, and after a few iterative cycles there will be a good product but a lot of time and energy gets wasted.

What is the solution?

A common language for both marketeers and designers, so they can effectively communicate about the product. One possibility is that both designers and marketeers are involved in doing the research. This not only shows what the customer needs are both also what they mean in terms of product characteristics. They can find out what ‘easy to clean’ means for customers.

A second solution is that designers get the time to do research themselves to find out what ‘easy to clean’ means for users. Problem with this is that marketeers believe they already did this job so it will be hard for them to accept this.

Sony discusses its product ideas based on prototypes with its designers and marketeers. This changes how they argue, it serves as a platform decide to proceed with further development or not.