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The Marketing Stakeholder Interview

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This is an excerpt from from Kim Goodwin’s excellent Designing for the Digital Age. It is quite long, so we’ve broken it into several sections. Many thanks to Ms. Goodwin and Wiley for allowing us to share this with our readers.

Marketing stakeholders

Marketing stakeholders (such as marketing executives and most product managers) are usually responsible for promoting the company’s brand, identifying new market opportunities and products that could address them, or both. Most marketing people will immediately view designers as allies who will promote a customer-centric point of view. Some view designers as threatening rather than helpful, though; when you talk about doing research and driving some of the requirements, you may be treading on territory they view as theirs. If they’ve just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on market research that doesn’t provide the answers you need, you also have the potential to make them look bad. Talk about how the design team’s work is in addition to theirs, not instead of it, and describe how you can help communicate their vision to the engineering team (which is often a point of frustration).

There are a number of questions the marketing people are best equipped to answer; some examples follow. The more brand-focused questions are things a visual or industrial designer will particularly want to know, though the answers can prove useful to the whole team. These questions are in no particular order; they generally fall somewhere in the middle of the questions for all stakeholders listed above.

Who are your customers and users today, and how do you want that to be different in five years?

It’s essential to see where the marketing team wants to take the product or the brand, especially if it involves a change in direction. This will affect how you plan your user and customer interviews, since you won’t want to limit your research to existing customers if the idea is to break into a new industry vertical. (Note that if you’re a consultant planning the research before the project kickoff, the project lead should have asked this question at that time.)

Sometimes the vision is so ambitious that it sounds impossible. For example, the interviewee might paint a very broad picture about handling all types of business communication. This could turn into a monstrous product that attempts to replace phones, email, instant messaging, online conferencing, and more. Try asking what business they definitely don’t want to be in.

Ask for clear timelines. Sometimes, the engineers think the marketers are unrealistic because they talk in very grandiose terms, but don’t always clarify when they want the vision to be fully realized. Often, the marketing folks are talking about a five-year vision and don’t expect the whole thing to be accomplished in the first release a year from now. This is one of many opportunities to help improve communication between groups.

How does this product fit into the overall product strategy?

If the product is part of a bigger suite of related offerings, you need to know what role it plays in that greater plan. For example, if you’re designing the entry-level product in a set and the marketing team envisions getting people to upgrade as their needs change, you know you’ll need to focus on giving that product limited but excellent capabilities and a design that can scale up. If they’re envisioning the product as some sort of platform for future growth, you’ll need some idea what those possible directions are if you’re going to have any chance of anticipating them in the design.

Who are the biggest competitors and what worries you about them? How do you expect to differentiate this product?

While it’s seldom helpful to spend a lot of time on competitive research unless you want to build a “me too” product, you at least need to know what else is out there. Ideally, you will get to interview and observe people using these competitive systems, too. Some people see the competition as the other companies trying to sell similar products, but be sure to discuss the hidden competition, which might even be some combination of paper, telephones, and face-to-face communication.

What three or four qualities do you want people to attribute to your company and your product?

In an established company, good marketing people have a clear answer to this sort of question, and that answer guides everything they do. This answer is essential when your mandate includes developing a unique design language for hardware or software. It can be useful for interaction design, as well; when you are presenting a particular bit of functionality or behavior, describing how it supports the brand values can be a powerful argument. Mind you, this argument works best with very brand-driven organizations, such as consumer product and service companies—in a company that thinks the brand is just the logo, you won’t have much luck with this approach.

In organizations that are less sophisticated about brand, people may struggle with this question. This is where analogies can come in handy. Some people try to get at this information by asking “If your company were a car, what kind of car would it be?” It can sound less silly and be more productive to frame the question in human terms, such as “If your product were a person, how would you describe its qualities?” You might also ask for examples of other brands or products they think embody each attribute, and why.

Note that most larger companies separate product marketing and corporate marketing; the product marketing people may be focused more on understanding their particular segments, leaving the brand issues to the corporate people. If that’s the case, ask this question of the corporate team.

What is the current state of the identity, and could we have a copy of the style guide (if there is one) and examples of it applied to materials?

This question is essential for consultants, but in-house teams probably have this information already. Like the previous question, this is more geared toward corporate marketing than product marketing. In a company that’s sophisticated about marketing, you’ll see consistent visual themes across print and online collateral as well as the visual and industrial design of products; you can look at any Apple product or marketing piece from ten feet away and immediately see that it’s from Apple, for example.

In less sophisticated companies, you may see one style applied to print, another to the Web site, and still another applied to the products (or even worse, no consistent style across any of them). You might also find that the company has a style guide geared almost entirely toward print rather than pixels or hardware. If you’re lucky, the style guide will at least take into account the visual design differences between print and Web design. It’s a rare company, though, that has much of a style guide suited to digital product design, so visual and industrial designers must often interpret the spirit of those guidelines across platforms.

When the style guide doesn’t seem appropriate to what you’re designing, it’s critical to get access to a senior brand stakeholder; a less-senior marketing person dedicated to a product or group often enforces the guidelines without seeing where they should be bent. For example, when my team was designing a phone for one company, the relatively junior marketing person assigned to the product told us it absolutely had to be a certain color and had to contain certain style elements common to the company’s other phones, even though our mandate was total reinvention of the product family. When we were eventually able to get a senior marketing executive involved, he immediately understood why the parameters needed to be varied, so long as the design still conveyed the brand attributes in other ways. This is certainly a tricky situation when you’re an in-house designer; your best option might be to let it go for now, but later try a style treatment that follows the guidelines and one that captures the spirit of the brand even if it breaks the guidelines.

See also

Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services by Kim Goodwin. Copyright (c) 2009.

About Kim Goodwin

Kim Goodwin is the author of the bestselling book, Designing for the Digital Age. Kim is currently consulting for clients in varied industries including aviation, consumer electronics, and retail. She spent most of the last decade as Vice-President, Design and General Manager at Cooper, leading an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers and the development of the acclaimed Cooper U design curriculum. Kim has led projects involving a tremendous range of design problems, including web sites, complex analytical and enterprise applications, phones, medical devices, services, and even organizations. Her clients and employers have included everything from one-man startups to the world’s largest companies, as well as universities and government agencies. This range of experience and a passion for teaching have led to Kim’s popularity as an author and as a speaker at conferences and companies around the world.