Designers are in the market for joined-up pitching

David Bernstein’s Private View (DW 27 March) once again raised the interesting issue of connectivity between design and marketing.

As time goes by and communication channels proliferate, the traditional boundaries between task-specific functions such as design and marketing are becoming ever more blurred.

Compounding this effect is the constant pressure on consultancies to better serve the interests of their clients, who are in themselves becoming ever more demanding by requiring a greater understanding from consultancies of their brand values, strategic aims and market positioning.

This demand can be seen most often among less experienced clients, such as business start-ups, which often have little regard for the traditional ivory towers inhabited by design and marketing people in the past. Instead, they simply want creative design with more thought behind it – designers who can employ some joined-up thinking and draw upon marketing principles to help them create better solutions.

That’s why we recently engaged in some joined-up thinking of our own and developed a marketing consultancy service, The Marketing Practice, to run in parallel to our established group, The Design Practice. The two can work in isolation if needs be, but in practice we have found a degree of crossover on almost every project we handle. Even if this is as simple as testing out creative thoughts against a marketing sounding board, it ensures every idea given to the client has relevance and value.

There has to be a degree of mutual respect and sensitivity on both parts to make the relationship work. And, of course, each element of our service has to be provided to the highest professional standards, because just paying lip service to integration would soon be uncovered by demanding clients.

But we’re living proof that design and marketing can not only co-exist under one roof as an integrated service, but can bring tangible benefits to a group and its clients.

Now marketing and accountancy, on the other hand and…

Josh Whiten

Director

The Design Practice

Challock TN25 4BJ