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Let’s talk about relationship. What is a relationship for you? Something you work on everyday? Something that you use only when you need it? But what about team work? What’s a relationship in a team?
Simon Sinek said that:
“A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.”
Considering this quote, I look at the relationship between marketers and designers. How can they work together? How can they perform the best by learning and helping from each other?
Marketers should be marketers and do their marketing stuff and designers should be designers and do their design stuff.
I don’t believe that a marketer should do the work of a designer and neither the way around.
[Tweet “Marketers should marketing and Designers should design”]Maybe this is the problem why sometimes this is just isn’t working. Because we are not doing our own job, but other’s.
I had the opportunity to work in a very small agency where I was the designer, the marketer, the advertiser, the creative director, the art director, the client service and sometimes the video producer. I was almost everything in that agency and guess what? My job wasn’t at the best at it. Why? Because I wasn’t doing the job I had to.
But marketers and designers should work together. Moreover, they should drink their coffee together and ask each other a lot of questions.
In this article I will show you why marketers and designers should work together and what they can learn from each other.
1. The MARKET
The marketer – Working in the marketing industry it’s vital for the marketer to understand the market of the product. He must know everything on behalf of the market: what the customer wants, what the customer needs, what the competition is doing, where is the product at one moment, what the product can be and list can go on and on.
The marketer should be the bridge between the product and the market, because marketing is not anymore just selling a product and that’s it. The best marketing a marketer can do today is to create a great experience for the customer with the product. But how he can create such an experience? Here’s come the designer.
The designer – Today, design is more than just drawing some simple lines on the paper or to put some colors in a box (if you know what I mean). The today great designer is responsible on designing the bridge between the product and the customer. But not alone. This work requires a great understand of the market that only the marketer can do. By designing that bridge is helping the product to outline the power of words we all want to achieve – the brand.
[Tweet “The marketer and designer should create together a reliable customer experience.”]
2. The BRAND
The marketer – Let me tell you something, dear marketer. You can’t create a brand by yourself. Even if you have a market, some customers, a price and a production line. You just can’t create (design) a product by yourself with your barehanded.
Why? Because you are not the one who decides if you have a brand or not. Not even the marketing department, not even the CEO, nor the designers.
You can’t decide if you have a brand or not. Because there are two important points that will decide if you have a real brand or not are: the time and the customer experience. You can only work to build a product that one day will be a big brand. And by building it, I mean you should do a marketer’s job, and let the designer do his job.
The designer – What just I said to the marketer it is true for you too, dear designer. You can’t design a brand by yourself. Even if you create the logo, design the brand manual and deliver the right line they should use for this product. You need to have patience and let the time and the customer experience to tell you when will you have the brand. You can only design a product, but you can’t build a product. This is the marketer’s job.
[Tweet “Marketers should build the product and designer should design the product.”]
3. The STORY
The marketer – Every time when I hear the next quote I start laughing very loud “every marketer should be the storyteller of its brand”. Why? Because my friend, we are living in 2016 and you must do marketing for this year, not for the 1998 nor for the 2004. But this story must be told in a specific way, to a specific market with a specific language. Your job as a marketer is to tell the story in a right way. And how you will tell this story and how you will package it. Well my friend, you guess it. Here is the designer job.
The designer – The marketer needs your professional skills on how to tell the story to your product. And here comes your job to package it, help him to deliver the right story to the right market. You are the one that designs the words in the story, that creates the right picture and finishes the goodnight book. Exactly. You create the goodnight book and the marketer will read from it. If you don’t work together, you won’t have a voice who will tell your story and the marketer won’t have a book from where he can read.
[Tweet “Marketers will tell the story and designers will create the book.”]
Conclusion
I strongly believe that everybody should do their own work but not alone. Working together will help your product be a brand, communicate the right message to the right market in the right way and to become a strong brand.
This is why marketers shouldn’t design and designers shouldn’t do marketing.
They have their job and they must do it in the best way they can.
[Tweet “Marketers and designers should work together.”]Now back to you, let me know in the comment section what’s your opinion: if you are a marketer how hard is to work with a designer and if you are a designer how hard is to work with a marketer?
