Why Marketers Must Embrace Design Thinking To Build Effective Marketing Systems
It’s time for marketers to think differently about marketing and not only in the sense of different campaigns or trendy marketing practices. It’s time for marketers to embrace design thinking and think about designing effective marketing systems to better reach their target audience.
Marketers try to think of marketing as a simple linear process of problem definition and problem solutions where the problem definition is how to reach and connect to the purchasing audience and the solution is developing marketing strategies and executing campaigns to reach that audience. This is more aligned with a scientific approach to marketing where campaigns are tested against a hypothesis, then fine tuned and retested until acceptable results are achieved or a complete nullification of the hypothesis is reached. In our current world of big data, as it pertains to marketing, from analytics on every possible channel to help us better A/B test, or obtain unique insights of every marketing action, marketers have fallen into the scientific linear approach to marketing and are essentially adding to the noise. (See the current trend of growth hacking)
Before I go on, I’d like to emphasize that I ultimately believe in marketing data and using this data to gain valuable insights about the effectiveness of campaigns and to gain a better understanding of the target audience. Design thinking utilizes quick prototyping and experiments to gain understanding. Data is also essential to ultimately show the ROI of all marketing efforts as must be communicated to all stakeholders. What I don’t believe in using data as a crutch where marketers are no longer designing effective marketing systems but going through the motions of tactics and best practices they read on blogs and hear at marketing conferences with the sole purpose of getting results and improving numbers instead of designing and building effective marketing systems that enable the creative development of marketing solutions.
To effectively break through the noise and reach the purchasing audience, the logical linear process outlined above is severely lacking. It creates arbitrarily set limitations for marketers and to only adhere to tried and tested methods and best practices. While there’s a need for a scientific method in marketing for small scale experiments and people are accustomed to thinking this way from years of primary schooling, using this method of thinking of marketing as a system creates a false sense that marketing is a logical and linear process and can be solved using these methods. As marketers know, marketing is rarely logical and almost never linear. Marketing is a fluid amalgamation of plans, strategies, software, algorithms, channels, and sensory interactions that looks more like an evolving prism than a perfectly aligned cube.
Marketing itself is a wicked problem as defined by Richard Buchanan in Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. In the article Buchanan quotes mathematician Horst Rittel in defining a wicked problem as a “class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.” This perfectly explains marketing! The problems marketers face are ill-formulated because marketers begin their marketing efforts without a solid foundation and understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Information marketers receive is confusing because it comes from many different resources and can be interpreted as many different ways. The stakeholders have differing understanding of what marketing is and what its role is in the company and have their own reasons for believing (or more commonly not-believing) for marketing. Finally, the results of marketing efforts can have drastic effects across the organization whether it’s a Fortune 500 or a small startup.
To use design thinking to build better marketing systems, marketers must shift their thinking from thinking about marketing itself in terms of campaigns or sub functions to thinking of marketing as an artifact as defined by Herbert Simon in the book The Sciences of the Artificial.
Before defining marketing as an artifact, we must define what is artificial as it was defined in the early thought of design thinking. Simon states the artificial in the following four points:
1. Artificial things are synthesized (though not always or usually with full
forethought) by human beings.
Marketing is essentially created by humans with support from algorithms or automation software
2. Artificial things may imitate appearances in natural things while lacking, in
one or many respects, the reality of the latter.
Marketing is at its core communication between a company or organization and its target audience with the ultimate goal of persuading to buy. Humans, animals, plants, bacteria, even at the atomic level, communicate to persuade in the natural world from trading for services and goods to finding a mate and procreating
3. Artificial things can be characterized in terms of functions, goals, adaptation.
Marketing can be characterized in terms of functions (e.g. social media, product marketing, PR, internal communication, etc) or in terms of goals (e.g. to increase market penetration) or in terms of adaptation (e.g. personalization and automation)
4. Artificial things are often discussed, particularly when they are being
designed, in terms of imperatives as well as descriptives.
Marketing is often discussed as it’s being designed in terms of strategic planning or reviewing results to plan the next phase.
Using these four points to define the artificial in design, we can define marketing itself as an artifact.
Furthermore, Simon defines an artifact as an interface by stating that “an artifact can be thought of as a meeting point, an interface, between an inner environment (the substance and organization of the artifact itself), and an ‘’outer” environment, (the surroundings in which it operates). If the inner environment is appropriate to the outer environment, or vice versa, the artifact will serve its intended purpose.”
Marketing can also be thought of as an interface between the inner environment (internal to the organization with all the stakeholders, procedures, discussions, etc) and the outer environment (the target audience and the channels used to reach the target audience). How often in an organization is the inner environment aligned with the outer environment and in sync? I’d venture a guess that this is not as common as marketers would like. One of the biggest struggles marketers face is gaining consensus and backing from internal stakeholders. This is itself a constraint, to use design thinking language, and the topic of constraints for marketers will be visited at a later time.
Marketing itself is more than the strategies we outline, the campaigns we execute, or the creative work we proudly feature. Marketing is ultimately an artifact, and an artifact in the form as a system. To create effective marketing systems, marketers can adapt design thinking methodologies to build unique systems that are true to both the inner environment and the outer environment.
Design thinking is obtaining a deep understanding of the problem, understanding the resources available to solve the problem, and understanding the constraints that may inhibit outrageous and abstract solutions.
Design thinking can be applied to marketing using the same definition. I can easily make the claim that marketers use design thinking every day on a smaller scale in their daily roles without knowing. However, to move forward and grow as marketers, we must take step back and really assess whether the small scale problems we’re solving are for ourselves and our numbers or are to solve a bigger systemic problem. Are we trying to make our campaigns more effective for reporting or are we making them more effective to make the inner environment and outer environment more in sync?
This might sound like the same thing and as we delve further in thinking of marketing as an artifact and system and address things like constraints and resources we will see the large scale impact of the shift in design thinking for marketing I’m proposing.
I’ll leave you with this quote also from Herbert Simon: “The ability to attain goals depends on building up associations, which may be simple or very complex, between particular changes in states of the world and particular actions that will (reliably or not) bring these changes about.”
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