What marketers should know about design

What marketers
should know
about design

Every project starts with a brief. But the best brief isn't always the one you start with.

Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper to find the real problem. Be flexible. Let the brief evolve. Because solving the wrong problem brilliantly is still solving the wrong problem.

This is the first thing I wish more marketers understood. A brief is a starting point, not a contract. If a designer comes back halfway through a project and says "I think the real issue is somewhere else," that's not the designer going off track. That's the process working.

The second thing follows naturally from the first.

If your packaging is trying to say everything, it's probably saying nothing.

Marketers are often under pressure to include every claim, every feature, every reason to buy. I understand where that pressure comes from. But a shopper's brain doesn't have room for everything at once. The job of design isn't to fit more in. It's to work out what actually needs to be there, and to say it clearly.

I've always believed the best creative work comes from a good, honest partnership between client and designer. Not a client who dictates every decision. Not a designer who works in isolation and reveals a surprise at the end. Somewhere in the middle, where both sides trust each other enough to disagree productively.

Which brings me to budget, because this is where I see good intentions go wrong most often.

The cheapest design option can become the most expensive one if it doesn't work. A pack that doesn't perform on shelf doesn't just fail quietly. It costs you in stalled sales, in redesign fees down the track, in market share handed to a competitor who got it right the first time. Cheap and quick rarely stays cheap once you count everything it costs afterwards.

And finally, the thing I'd want every marketer to hear before a project even begins.

Give the designer the problem to fix, don't try and fix it yourself.

I understand the instinct. You know your brand, your customer, your category better than anyone walking in the door. But if you've already decided the solution before the brief is written, you're not hiring a designer anymore. You're hiring a pair of hands.

At the end of the day, that's what you're paying us for, isn't it? Not to execute your idea. To find the idea you couldn't see, because you're too close to it.

The best marketing and design relationships I've been part of over the years all share the same quality. The marketer brings the problem, the context, the constraints. The designer brings the outside eye, the pattern recognition, the willingness to ask an uncomfortable question or two.

Neither one works properly without the other.