All companies organize themselves into separate buckets to best focus expertise on business needs. The bigger the companies, the more these buckets are usually distinct from one another. Marketing is often a function of sales. Engineering and product development are often separate. This is a reasonable distinction. Historically, marketing and sales relied upon designers, but in different ways. Today, this is rapidly changing, and the evolution of digital products requires a different approach.
Since the 19th century, designers did not design products. Rather their job was only to make things visually appealing. They did this by adding ornamentation or through marketing. Marketing was important to differentiate products between companies that were otherwise the same. If we look at Nicholas Felton's graph below, we can see that for over 100 years, it was sufficient for a company to make a raw product - such as a radio, or a clothes washer - before having to compete. The job of a designer was to make the package appealing, to draw up posters, and assemble advertisements.
Today the competition between products is very steep. Everyone has a clothes dryer. It is not enough for a company to produce the object. They must design special variations of the product to appeal to specific groups of people. They must import new features. Some features are engineering problems - like drying the clothes faster. Other features are industrial design problems, like the ambiguous question, "if your dryer connected to your phone, what would be different, and what would that do?" For physical products, the separation of marketing and product design might continue to make sense. But what about digital products?
If we examine the digital marketing funnel, we see a seamless journey across multiple digital experiences to engage and pull consumers into the business. Visual images, videos, white papers, and previews are used to get people's attention and pull them toward trying the product. Ideally, the product is good enough that they want to use it and tell others about it. Nested within this flow is the work of the product team, wherein the team is seeking to understand and satisfy customer needs. During and after product use, the team seeks input on how to improve the product for repeat use.
Perhaps it is time to change this.
Digital marketing should not be a completely distinct domain from the product design. If we consider the funnel, at large, the funnel is a viable part of the user experience. Digital ads pull the user to a website, and through the website one directly utilizes a web application. The outputs of the web application are typically reports and dashboards that other people will see and use. The outputs should also be considered as part of the marketing funnel, as these artifacts directly inform the successful adoption of the product into a business. The feedback forms, customer support tools, are obviously important to product reuse but this information can drive new marketing tactics and campaigns.
By creating a deeper blend between digital marketing and digital product teams, one can more quickly accelerate audience discovery, engagement, customer satisfaction, and growth. This does not require people to give up their responsibilities. Rather, the implication is a change in team configuration. Product teams may not want to merely consist of engineers and designers. Marketing is no longer merely the domain of business. The supply of market expertise and product expertise is fundamental in driving success within marketing teams and product teams.
This also implies that designers need to learn and think through the broader marketing funnel as much as marketing people need to better understand the workings of product design. If all stakeholders do the work, they will discover great opportunities to accelerate their missions and achieve the outcomes they want.
