HALLELUJAH, GIANT SPACE WOLF

Bringing Marketing and Design to a Happy Place

You cannot innovate if you only look at what used to happen.

—Richard Grefé, AIGA Executive Director

In a publishing house, marketers and designers should want the same thing; after all, their paychecks depend on a profitable end product. However, these two entities often butt heads due to lack of communication from the design department, or ambiguous creative briefs from the marketing department. Marketers usually want accessible design—they want something that has broad market appeal. But when the marketing department takes a broad, carpet-bombing approach for a book, it can create tension for the design team if the creative brief is too vague. This “keep designing and we’ll make changes until we’re happy” approach to marketing-design team relations frequently causes friction in both departments. Having two departments that depend heavily on one another but have different metrics for success creates a difficult work atmosphere. A savvy publishing house would do well to integrate the marketing and design departments in a way that alleviates this tension.

Marketers depend on quantifiable results to determine the direction of their efforts. Click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, return on investment—this is the lexicon of today’s marketing department. When you are basing your success off of which numbers are in the green and which numbers are in the red, it is fairly simple to divert resources to trouble areas. However, one area where marketers and advertisers have struggled to understand, quantify, and then react to is fluctuations in consumer taste. Though it is impossible to preempt every consumer behavior, marketers have long sought to appeal to a broad spectrum of consumers based on focus group research and recommendations by psychologists who study consumer behavior. This microanalysis of how to sell things to everyone has left little margin for designer innovation.

Designers, on the other hand, have a different rubric for determining if a particular project is successful, and that rubric depends heavily on the creative brief. A clear and detailed creative brief is a crucial piece of the marketing-design puzzle. If the marketing team is doing their job, they should research their target demographic and convey the look and feel of the end product they want to the designer in the creative brief. If the brief is too vague, the designer is doomed to fall short in the eyes of the marketing department, and if it is too restrictive, the designer will feel like a robot. The creative brief should act as common ground where the marketing and design teams can get on the same page. It should outline all of the marketing department’s requirements while leaving room for innovation and creativity from the design team.

As it is, book designers have a number of things to consider before getting to work:

The author wants the cover to represent the content; the publisher must consider the views of both the in-house art director and the marketing manager; while the designer and illustrator take a brief from a commissioning editor. A clear brief is crucial, and the designer should attempt to present the work directly to those who are to make the decision. (Haslam)

Too often it seems like creative departments are sidelined in a business because their efforts are not immediately visible in a spreadsheet. Creativity is viewed by some as not profitable or “baggage,” an obstacle in the way of maximizing profits. Thankfully, this seems to be more of a problem in other sectors in corporate America than in publishing. Most publishing houses curate the titles they sell, whereas many manufacturers create products based on perceived demand. Large publishers use this mechanism in the form of mass-market paperbacks, but many small publishing houses sell books that they believe have some sort of artistic or literary merit. This curated approach to business can afford designers more freedom due to the intrinsic artistic value a literary work already has. 

If marketers and designers can communicate with each other effectively, they can begin to sort out appropriate design standards for titles. For example, designers may create templates for mass-market paperbacks where the point of the jacket is to look as much as possible like the covers for the bestsellers in this category. Conversely, a new book of short stories by an up-and-coming postmodernist writer may call for a more stylized or conceptual design approach.

If done right, integrating the marketing and design teams could create a powerful tool for publishers. This hybrid department could be filled with innovative, creative minds who also understand the importance of the company’s bottom line. This collaboration would theoretically ensure more communication, and could give marketers more respect for the designers’ skills and training. Designers would gain a better understanding of how their designs were to be used, and could adapt accordingly. In this scenario, another benefit for designers would be feeling more ownership of their work. This is something that is often thrown aside when an in-house design team exists only to bring the marketing team’s ideas to life. Merging the two would allow designers to originate new projects in conjunction with the marketing department and increase the chances their projects get the green light, all while keeping the budget in tact.

From Traditional to Technical

Though graphic design programs of the 21^st century still feature many traditional courses you’d find in any design curriculum (typography, printmaking, etc.), they are starting to feature more and more digital design electives. It was inevitable—we carry the web in our pockets, and design must keep up with the new ways information is disseminated. This shifting information landscape is good for marketers because it can lower the cost of a marketing campaign. A well-planned social media advertising campaign can cost much less than a traditional television or radio ad, and can have more of an impression on a targeted audience. But what does this mean for designers?

For one, it could ease the marketing budget enough to allow the designers to breathe a little. When you’re spending less money on your advertising and reaching more people, you can afford to take risks. Additionally, Facebook and Google ads do not rely heavily on graphics, so the book designers in our theoretical hybrid team can focus on what they do best, not on creating tons of collateral whose design will be second-guessed to death by aVP who doesn’t know an ascender from a descender.

Today’s designer is nimble. It is no longer enough to know how to create a screen print or eliminate widows and orphans in a book’s layout. Today’s graphic designer has working knowledge of video, HTML, CSS, .EPUB, and more. A smart marketing department would integrate these people to execute marketing and advertising campaigns in-house and save thousands of dollars on external multimedia contractors. The designer’s multimedia skills also come in handy when the printed word ceases to be the only way the publishing company sells books.

E-book design has evolved dramatically over the past five years. With the launch of revolutionary electronic reading devices such as the Kindle and iPad, there are almost no boundaries for the additional features that can be added to e-books. Our theoretical integrated marketing/design department could work closely with authors and editors to create compelling value-added content to accompany e-books. Book trailers, animations, interactive book apps, and behind-the-scenes material could soon be bundled with the e-book to create a more enticing customer value proposition.

The emergence of new media and the explosion of technological advancement in the 21^st century has taught advertisers and marketers some hard lessons. Chief among them is that the advent of memes and viral video is evidence that the taste and behavior of media consumers is not always predictable. This means that in this era, marketers should not be afraid to take creative chances if they are working with professional designers who are committed to producing quality work. Innovative design choices can drive sales and create brand awareness for a publishing company. For example, Chronicle Books, Knopf, and Melville House Publishing are all houses that are known as much for the quality of the writing they publish as they are for the top-notch design of their products. The effort these publishing companies take to keep their jacket design fresh is apparent when their designers win AIGA awards, which creates positive press for the company. Marketers and PR professionals love awards—the press releases for them practically write themselves.

Going Forward: The Designer’s MBA

Just as designers are branching out and feeling out the new electronic canvases they are offered, creative marketers can now do the same. Design-oriented MBA programs are springing up across the country. The newly minted MBA in Design Strategy at the California College of the Arts is a prime example of how business and design are merging to become powerful tools in the marketplace. In addition to design work, the curriculum for this innovative program includes coursework in finance, economics, brand strategy, operations & systems, business law, and sustainability. There is also a dual Design MFA/MBA in Design Strategy option available for people who are interested in both the subtleties of the design world, and the cut and dry mechanics of business.

This is not the only program of its kind. Similar MBA programs exist at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and Stanford. While the curriculum for these programs may still emphasize traditional business models, it’s nice to see that the design world is starting to gain recognition for its importance to businesses. After all, who is better at clearly communicating ideas and creating order out of chaos than marketers and designers?

In a 2010 webinar, AIGA’s Executive Director Rick Grefé pointed out that designers and marketers are the intermediaries between information and understanding for consumers and are increasingly responsible for creating and interpreting culture at large. Grefé advocates for designers and creative professionals to have more of a voice in larger business matters because of the two groups’ unique understanding of both business matters and the way information is received and interpreted by society. And with a recession hanging over our heads, businesses have had good reason to look to others for a fresh look.

“There are elements to the creative mind that make us well suited to address these problems,” says Grefé. The biggest problem, however, lies in trying to get the people in charge of businesses to accept input from non-traditional sources like creative departments. The trick, as Grefé shows in his webinar, is to bring a business proposal to the table that lays out the potential return on investment businesses could see if design-minded individuals were involved in business planning processes.

Another benefit to allowing creatives in on large-picture business issues is that designers and business-minded people have entirely different approaches to problem solving.

“The business mind usually looks for reliability in their answers, because if things are reliable, you can make money. The creative mind is looking for validity, a clever answer,” says Grefé. Reliable outcomes can only take businesses so far; playing it safe actually leads businesses to ignore difficult problems that could otherwise create major opportunities for industry creation or growth. Publishers are as guilty of this as anyone; the industry has relied on traditional methods of distributing media and seasonal ups and downs in the ledger for so long that it becomes excruciating when new technology and shifts in society’s media consumption threaten to pull the rug out from underneath.

Not a Quick Fix

If our integrated marketing team were to start today, the hybrid department would still face an uphill battle if implemented at a large publishing house. Decisions in large American corporations are made in order to maximize profit and reduce overhead where possible. While it seems likely that a well-oiled integrated marketing/design department would ultimately increase a company’s efficiency, it remains untested. It is unlikely that a management team would allow this change to take place without a precedent to look to.

Whether or not the integrated marketing/design department develops in the next few years, it’s apparent that the two are gravitating toward each other. Marketing departments are full of “creatives,” and successful advertising firms are already combining the talents both worlds have to offer. Publishers will get there eventually, but probably slower than some fast-growing industries. The struggles publishers have faced in recent years will have to be a lesson that the future cannot, as Grefé says, be based on past results. This is a fallacy that businesses use too often to postpone innovation in order to cut costs. In the end, publishers will have to decide what is more valuable: keeping up with this fluid new-media landscape, or deciding which dust cover will make a book sell more copies before it gets returned, and their efforts are literally pulped.

Works Cited

Haslam, Andrew. Bookdesign: [a Comprehensive Guide]. New York: Abrams, 2006. Print.

Brandon. "MBA Programs With An Emphasis On Design." Design Crack. 14 Dec. 2008. Web. http://designcrack.com/v2/2008/12/24/mba-programs-with-an-emphasis-on-design/

Dodging the Vectors. Perf. Ric Grefé. AIGA, 18 Nov. 2010. Web. https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/meetingArchive?eventId=1076uqmz9t2q

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