Crowdsourcing Designers' Insights Into Collaboration

1. How Marketing Researchers See

Design"Designers don't just put cosmetics on the skin of a product!" During an interview with a male graduate student at Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009, he argued that designers play a key role in developing a new product. However, marketing researchers often imagine that the work done by a designer is mere a "plastic surgery." In general, the objective of much marketing research on the topic of product design is to understand whether changing a product form affects consumers' behavior including their aesthetic preference, their product evaluation and their product choices.

Many marketing researchers aim to identify a better "face" of a product in order to attract greater attention from consumers and to increase the chance that their product is included in the consumers' consideration set, or to provide greater satisfaction to the consumers after the product is chosen. The primary reason that marketing researchers often limit the role of designers with styling is that they pay far too much attention to the "outcome" of designers' activities. Therefore, many designers who perform various activities such as researching users, developing and evaluating concepts, and coordinating concepts with business strategists find it difficult to communicate with marketers. Put simply, marketing researchers shed little light on the "process" of designers' activities.

The good news is that evidence demonstrates that when designers go beyond their purview and get involved in business tasks, the commercial performance of their firms increases. For instance, a study published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management found that when many design apprentices and students from design institutions are involved in new product development projects, the profit and the growth rate of the projects increase [Gemser & Leenders 2001]. We expect that it will not take long for marketers to recognize the commercial contributions that designers make to their tasks. Until

then, designers should get familiar with business terms and practices to better communicate with marketers. In the end, design-conscious marketers work best with business-savvy designers to produce stylistic as well as profitable new products.

2. What Designers Say About Marketers

The typical briefing that designers receive from marketers at the start of a new design project is more or less useless for generating new ideas. In the spring of 2011, I spoke on Inspirational Design briefing at an Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) event in Los Angeles. Everyone broke into laughter when I asked: Who provides the best design briefs: the marketing or the engineering department? Over the laughter, I heard that marketing briefs are difficult to understand. Designers see a clear disconnect between the insights marketers provide and the concepts designers generate. The disconnect between marketing and design has been numerously found during my two decades in design consulting with more than a hundred projects under my belt.

Then, how do designers collect the insights marketers often miss but they need to build their concepts? Surprisingly, insights often come from the client's branding studies either commissioned by third parties or conducted by design consultancies. These studies provide a template of visual languages including metaphors and images that designers incorporate into their developing concepts. When no visual language is provided, designers often develop this language from scratch along with developing concepts.

In actual practice, designers often set marketers' input aside and start a project by looking at the advertisements or the websites of their clients and competitors. They collect images and stories concerning the uniqueness of each product and make fleeting trips to the products' point of purchase, taking pictures and playing with the products. If the budget allows, they purchase a sample product for the future disassembly and destruction in the studio. Ideas for new features often stem from the designer's personal experience -- including his cultural and social background -- and their personal research into art, fashion, architecture and entertainment. Designers often read the same magazines, visit the same sites and belong to the same online groups, and thus their sources of inspiration are often identical. I even heard a CEO pronounce: "If I see one more styling board with an iPod... "

What reasons do designers offer in support of their concepts? Their research findings are usually compiled into a PowerPoint, or QuickTime presentation, augmented with a booklet, posters and collected artifacts. The conclusion usually contains an activity analysis, communicated by the use of storytelling. These inspire various user segments and provide possible new user scenarios. The result is a list of unique selling points and a recommendation for design direction. To explain their proposed concepts, designers provide a map showing the client's product together with the competitors' products on a coordinated grid. The axis usually represents competitive parameters, such as features and aesthetics expression and brand attributes.

The key is selecting relevant but independent parameters to communicate relevant differentiation. For example, during the past thirty years, psychographics have been used for user profiles such as "Joe 6-Pack" and "Soccer Mom", while failing to show any correlation to actual product purchasing behavior, rendering these profiles useless as metrics.

At the end of the day, designers present three to five realistically rendered concepts from which they have to select one for detailing. Often flash competes contents since no objective metrics have been presented, so it is little wonder that design is still seen as art rather than as being business driven [Yankelovich D. & Meer D. 2006].

3. Crowdsourcing using online social network platforms

New design research methods are vital to an organizations' ability to sustain their competitive research advantage and one way to improve data collection while reducing cost is crowdsourcing. Not only established companies such as NOKIA, BMW, IBM and P&G have their own crowdsoucring platforms but also independent crowdsourcing platforms such as X-Prize, OpenIDEO and InnoCentive have been used for many years.

As for the independent crowdsourcing platforms, they have similar systems. Generally speaking, clients launch challenges to communities in order to solve problems and communities manage challenges to reward participants for their contributions. For instance, X-Prize uses a range of media to announce challenges and manage them as a traditional contest with large monetary reward. OpenIDEO leverages the IDEO network to build and manage launched challenges. Innocentive uses traditional communities and contest procedures, relying on extrinsic motivation and monetary rewards for contributors.

In order to gain experience with crowdsourcing methods before conducting our own crowsourcing projects for designers, we collaborated with Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab for two years. We experimented several approaches to briefing and formulating the challenges on a range of platforms such as OpenIDEO, Chaordix, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. More specifically, we have launched 17 design research challenges with our research partners including Peace Innovation Lab, ICEAW, Norway University, and People-People, and crowdsourced comments from various social network platforms.

Generally speaking, we found that online crowdsourcing platforms provide useful insights into each challenge. However, we additionally found that launching challenges to appropriate professional groups is critical. For example, certain professions gravitate towards humanitarian topics (e.g., animal rescue) while business issues engage others professional groups. Larger groups tend to engage in incremental challenges (e.g., What is Scandinavian Design?), whereas smaller groups gravitate towards breakthrough challenges (e.g., How can journalists assist in reducing gang violence?). Our experience leads us to conclude that we should use LinkedIn and launch short challenges with iterative procedures.

4. Empirical studies

5. Discussion

Although most problems collected from design professionals have their own solutions, two problems have no immediate solutions, which offer the opportunities for further research: (1) market segmentation is not correlated with purchasing behavior and (2) marketers and designers do not translate corporate philosophy, strategy and market data into design briefs.

Note that these two problems are interconnected because no matter what research is conducted, what designers recall and synthesize into concepts for evaluation matters. It is a common misconception that designers perform best when they are sheltered from information, so they are free to let their imagination go wild. What well-intentioned managers fail to understand is, that when designers are not using client’s design criteria to define search and ideas, they must necessarily make up their own to create concepts. Leaving out relevant criteria to introduce irrelevant constraints makes no sense and leading firms, such as Steelcase, BMW Group and Rambøll Group do not adhere to this practice.

In an attempt to translate marketing insights into useful information for designers, marketers and designers often use a scenario method and construct psychographics by using marketing data, for example Joe Six- Pack or Soccer Mom. To have a specific person in mind helps designers conduct trade-offs between various design criteria. Unfortunately the context used to construct and evaluate the proposed concepts is illusory. Since previous behavior is the best indication of future behavior, a framing applying metaphor for user behavior may offer a useful solution [Lakoff and Johnson 2003]. Our mental model of the world around us is built on metaphors. These metaphors are combined to understand and communicate new thoughts and increasingly abstract thoughts. In the same way as when creating new technical solutions, though recombine existing elements, needs and product ideas can evolve from recombination of metaphors.

Positioning matrix of brands is also popular to transfer marketing insights to designers. However, it often contains arbitrary axes which are not necessary orthogonal. Therefore, it provides an unclear direction for concept exploration. One positioning matrix, which to the best of our knowledge is untested, is the “Framework for conceiving aesthetics in design as the formulation and construction of meaning” [Folkmann 2010]. Folkman’s axis: Aesthetics – Functionality and Directly Display the Idea – Indirectly Mediate the Idea, suspend the four quadrants: Concept Design, Natural Mapping, Natural Mapping, Anonymous Design and Lifestyle Design, effectively positioning meaning and function.

We know that effective transferring marketing insights into designers’ results in improvement in designers' concept development. For example increase strategic information in a design brief result in superior outcome. In addition, tailoring design brief to innovation types, such as incremental and breakthrough innovations, increase project performance [Petersen 2011].

In general, designers require comprehensive knowledge of needs and go though alternating stages of questioning and answering of their concepts, followed by experimenting with a limited number of concepts [Eris 2002]. Therefore, it is important to provide with designer rich and vivid information, which triggers multiple associations that generate memorable inspiration for experimentation of directions and finally synthesis of novel concepts.

6. General discussion

We used a crowdsourcing method and collected the voice of designers regarding the collaboration between marketing and design. We identified two key issues that hinder effective collaboration: ongoing issues and fixed issues. Although most problems have been extensively discussed, we found one hard-to-attack problem, which is, an inherent inability to translate marketing data into design briefs. We focus on this issue, review the strengths and weakness of the tools that marketers and designers use (e.g., psychographics and positioning matrix), and call for future research.

The primary contribution that our work makes to the existing literature is that we empirically confirmed that collaborating or integrating marketing with design is difficult [Beverland 2005]. Although researchers have argued that firms need to manage the tension between design and marketing [Filson and Lewis 2000; Joziasse 2000], no empirical evidence has supported this argument. Furthermore, we review the existing tools that bridge the gap between two groups to propose a new tool that helps them. In particular, our findings suggest that integrating design and marketing needs to listen to the voice of designers. Future research is called for specific challenges that marketers and designers face when they aim to collaborate.