Why Marketing Research
Makes Us Cringe
(Does it bother anyone that design continues
to be driven by awful marketing techniques?)
Dan Formosa
Smart Design | [e-mail]
January + February 2010

interactions

The role of marketing research is
to work with product or service
consumers to understand their
needs and desires, while design-
ers are often asked to use the
marketing research results. So
why have I never seen a market-
ing study targeting designers to
find out how marketing research
can benefit them? The answer
may be because it can’t.
Design research and mar-
keting research are far from
interchangeable. While both are
intended to help us understand
people, their raisons d’être are
very different. Accordingly, so
are the ground rules that govern
the two. Yet more than three
decades after the inception of
design research as a discipline,
far too much design work is sub-
ject to methods implemented by,
or borrowed from, marketing.
It’s no surprise that this often
makes marketing-generated
studies frustrating for designers,
and generally underwhelming in
terms of usefulness.
Meanwhile, designers’ contin-
ued willingness to put up with
these methods is curtailing the
evolution of design research—
and perhaps design itself.
Market research evolved from
a need to understand consum-
ers’ reactions to products, mea-
suring responses to products
already on the market—after
they’ve been designed, not
before. Enter the toothpaste aisle
of a supermarket and you are
faced with many choices. Buy
one and leave, and you are play-
ing out an action that formed the
genesis of marketing research.
Given choices on a shelf, which
one would you choose? A bit
oversimplified, but that’s the
basis. In contrast, the goal of
design research is to make us
smart about our creative direc-
tions and opportunities.

An Emphasis on the Artifact
Historically, designers have
concerned themselves with the
“thing”—the product they have
been hired to design. The initial
description of this product, the
design brief—as well as funding
for the project—typically came
from elsewhere. Marketing’s job
was to interface with consum-
ers. Designers rarely ventured
outward. And, certainly, design
education never suggested that
consumer interactions were
part of the program. Few, if any,
courses in social sciences, bio-
mechanics, or psychology were
a typical part of design curricu-
lum. At the inception of 1930s
industrial design, designers
appeared happy to draw sketch-
es or shape clay models in an
ultimate effort to cull aestheti-
cally pleasing forms from the
manufacturer’s factory machin-
ery. Verification of these design
efforts came afterward.

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