DESIGN IS NOT A FRACTION OF ADVERTISING AND MARKETING

Recently, I was in a group conversation where I made a point about how advertising and marketing alone might not be solving real business issues, but Design could. One of the responses I got was “Design is a fraction of advertising and marketing”.

That statement inspired me to write this article.

In 2014, I just got into one of the small agencies as an Associate Creative Director. It was a leadership role and I was to lead the overall art and design output of the agency. My previous experiences in other agencies had led me to the discovery of Human-Centered Design and Design Thinking so I was passionate and willing to use the principles I learned to deliver the vision of the agency.

We had a chance to pitch for the defunct Skye Bank account that same year and we won the account together with another big agency. One of the ideas we proposed was called Skye Life Design which was supposed to be a mobile banking platform that offered advisory services and many other benefits. It was an idea I was excited about, so was @Ife Olatunji (an amazing strategist/serial entrepreneur) and Tunde Makinwa (the then Creative Director). We worked extensively on bringing the idea to life as shown below.

I had sleepless nights working on how the UI/UX would look, going back and forth with Ife to understand the audience that we were really designing for. We tried to convince the bank to implement it, but all attempts fell on deaf ears. The mistake we made was not knowing the agile way of building the platform by ourselves or at least collaborating with the right set of people who do, maybe by now we would have cashed out like Shola and Ezra.

I learned how insights from product design and development could help a lot with advertising and marketing communications. If I had known what I know today about entrepreneurship, start-ups, product design, etc., it would have been better designed with the sophistication of technology, UI/UX tools that are readily available today.

In 2013, as a senior art director in one of Nigeria’s most creative agency, I was the major art director working on a popular mobile money platform which was designed to target the unbanked. One of the many ideas, we proposed was the use of a USSD code since most of the unbanked had a feature phone at least and they could send and receive text messages. The quest to convince the team fell on deaf ears too and in 2016, GTBank launched *737# and the rest is history. This particular mobile money platform eventually launched their USSD code in 2017 and maybe the time was right or not but *737# would always have the first-mover advantage. In fact, I was disappointed to hear in one of the training sessions I was privileged to facilitate at one of the biggest banks in the country that they were truly the first to have a USSD code, but nobody heard about it and nobody used it.

 With the two experiences shared above, I observed that most businesses do not really pay attention to the “needs of the people”. They believe that the typical Nigerian audience is not smart enough to be communicated to in a certain way or not smart enough to adopt technology. They often go along with their ideas some of which are in total disconnect with the needs of the people and how they behave but still force their products and services on them with advertising and marketing. The sad part is that creative individuals in advertising agencies come up with enormous ideas like these that are never approved, end up in waste bins that I often question why agencies couldn’t convert these ideas to assets or innovative start-ups that can grow to be unicorns if built properly after all the marketing budgets of brands are the first hit when a situation like 2020 happens.

 As a designer, with the level of experience I have gathered around design, entrepreneurship, start-ups, branding, advertising, and marketing, one might seem like possessing visual powers to predict the future by simply studying trends and patterns, observing and paying close attention to human behaviour. I can opine that design helps to connect a vision, an expected outcome with people’s needs (that is if the vision is to genuinely solve problems). Design uses or follows a well-detailed blueprint to deliver an intent, starting with the people, understanding their needs, trying out several ideas with open-mindedness to get feedback in order to arrive at a functional solution that delivers the intended outcome beautifully. It is the process between ideation and proper implementation and this principle can be applied to personal life, products, services, business, systems, governance, and so on.

Imagine an individual who was involved in the design and development of a product or service like the Skye Life Design example. She would have first-hand knowledge, information about the audience, understand how they behave, their pain points and needs, their reactions, responses, and feedback to prototypes, and then the eventual product or service. She would have gathered enough insights that would also help and guide her to market the products to the existing and new audiences, and manage innovations around the product.

"Innovation happens by building, testing, getting feedback, learning, and iterating fast."

So, I cringed when I read that design is a fraction of advertising and marketing. I’d rather say advertising and marketing is a tool for selling what is designed, after all, everything made was designed.

"Design is a subset of the creative industry just like advertising is. It is not embedded in advertising."

The part of design that is a fraction of advertising and marketing is graphics and it is a skill set every professional must have as long as you present your ideas on PowerPoint slides. Graphics design is like knowing how to read and write in today’s world and platforms like Canva have democratized it to an extent and made it simple for anyone who is really interested in the simple basic stuff.

In conclusion, design is changing how organizations operate, innovate, build culture, achieve sustainability and good designers are going to take the lead in the future because design-driven organizations outperform their counterparts…ask Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, IBM, Nike, Starbucks etc.

Young designers on the other hand must not be too comfortable designing logos, social media posts, posters, and banners alone but learn data analytics, UI/UX, entrepreneurship, copywriting, storytelling, finance, law, history, culture across the world, machine learning, AI and many more if they want to be relevant in the future. Hence, you would not be seen beyond a common individual that puts layouts together when you introduce yourself as a designer.