Industries wants three main things from designers. Independence, self thinking and analysis ability. Employers often give us designers a reasonably open brief to generate an end product, so it is crucial we can explain our process and discoveries to illustrate how we got to this outcome. Most employers will not get the designs we create and this is where our analysis ability comes in to explain our independent journey to the finished outcome. This will help them to understand.
I learnt about the reasoning behind why businesses pay designers to work with them to promote products. Some industries do not employ designers, for example, machine tools do not need aesthetics or marketing strategies and only need to be useful. However, industries wanting to expand their product to a wider market population need marketing strategy and aesthetic products to appeal and out compete their competitors.
Expanding on this, I learnt what we do as designers to promote products in a business sense. Designers have to know product orientation and market orientation. Product orientation is knowing the product and understanding the target market. Leading to Market orientation, which is having the assets of Product orientation and knowing what the employer wants you to do with them, such as required media channels. The products are manufactured in firms, expanding to markets, national economy and then global economy. This leads us to Micro and Macro Economics, an important situation a designer needs to be aware of when communicating through design. Micro-economics is known as a bottom up approach in economics. It is the study of individuals and business decisions regarding the allocation of resources and prices of goods and services, taking into account taxes and regulations enforced by governments. Whereas, Macro-economics is known as the top down approach. Macro-economics looks at the issues from the perspective of the country as a whole, and the politics affecting the economy. New tax laws or other implications enforced by macro-economy will effect businesses in micro-economy and business may have to change their prices of products and what they pay staff depending on the situation. As, designers we learn to cleverly advertise around these factors to achieve the best marketing strategy for a product.
Next, I learnt about the four 'Ps' in marketing. Price, Product, Promotion and Place. Price is how much designs will cost to manufacture, deliver, package, plus cost to administrate and manage and how to calculate this to create a profit element. Then there is knowing the core product and secondary product. The core product is what in fact the design must do and the secondary product is knowing why the customers buy it to. This will help promote the product by understanding a psychological aspect as to why people drift towards certain products. Knowing this will help promote the product, to know the appropriate media channels to use to engage the audience. To help persuade the market through pricing, offers and packaging in the advertisements. In order to hit all of the previous points designers also need to know about place. Where is the product being made available, a shop or online and where is the product being consumed, at home, on the move, in the office and more. I have learnt developing an understanding of all of these points will help develop a successful marketing strategy.
To conclude the lecture, I was shown how designers are divergent, in relation to convergent engineers. Both significant in the world, but approach tasks in vastly different ways. Design is about solving problems through creativity, whereas engineers solve a problem by converging one answer or outcome. Diverging basically means exploring all different approaches and areas to move towards an outcome and that is how us as designers work. It was pointed out to us, that it is because we designers are divergants industries hire us to work around a problem convergents would struggle to accomplish. This skill is important in marketing as it helps to discover problems and work around them to advertise to the appropriate audience. This was a nice ending to a very insightful lecture and gave me an extra sense of self worth, to leave and know why designers are so significant within industry.
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