A design you finished happy with, that drew a great reaction from the client, can still fail the business. Many designers know that experience. Picture a designer who moved from web design into ad operation and, on a first job, built a creative with every design skill at hand, only to lose on results to a creative that looked like a stock image roughly cropped.
The reason for the loss: arranging the design took all the attention, with no thought for the target's needs and wants. What was missing was a marketing perspective. With one, a designer proposes and builds work that contributes more to the business. This piece lays out three marketing perspectives a designer needs to make creative that drives results.
What design without a marketing eye costs
Design without a marketing perspective looks like this: the text went small to look stylish, the logo went large because the client asked, an overseas trend went in because it was the latest. None of these consider the business problem or the customer who sees the design. Without a marketing perspective, the rationale runs weak and invites the kind of failure above. Where the job is to solve a business problem, weak rationale makes for a hard time, since reasons like those struggle to answer the question "why do it this way?"
Start from the goal and the strategy
The same product's ad changes with the business phase and the target numbers. Aiming for 100 orders a month soon after launch differs from aiming for 10,000 a month once the business has scaled, in how to show the product and how many people to reach. Narrowing the targeting and matching the appeal to a specific persona generally lifts conversion rate. But narrowing the target and the appeal can make the content relevant to only a few, which works against you when the goal is to scale, so at times you should widen the targeting and abstract the appeal as needed.
Where a narrowing mindset sets the target as "a working mother in her thirties," a scaling mindset might set it as "anyone who wants to stay active," and the appeal abstracts to match. Narrowing is not wrong: within a limited budget, where you want the highest return, narrowing the targeting and appeal to reach people closest to a prospect first is effective. How far to narrow or widen depends on the business phase and numbers as well as the brand's position and the product's design, so it does not close inside design alone. To keep a gap from opening between the goal and the design a prospect finally sees, a designer cannot build on imagination alone. Grasp the business goal and the ad's purpose, and build backward from what communication would meet the goal.
Start from the target
With the delivery goal clear, the target follows. Starting from the target does not mean starting from design, though, as in "it is for women, so pink and rounded." That loses the marketing perspective. The question is which media, which message, and which expression will reach the target.
The flea-market app Mercari, to win customers over 40 who are not smartphone natives, chose insert flyers as the medium and a flyer-specific design far from its usual look, and drew a big response. For a non-smartphone-native generation that had heard the name but did not know what gets sold there, a flyer worked, and the oddness of "Mercari on a flyer" became a hook for conversation at home, the kind of "you do not know Mercari? I will put the app on your phone" exchange between parent and child. Starting from the target is what lets you imagine a creative that slips naturally under their guard. The same flyer pitched as "the cool flea-market app" would not have landed the same way.
Start from the product's positioning
Asked to make an ad for a beef-bowl chain, where do you start? Not from a concrete expression like "make it look tasty and cheap" or "use red and orange to trigger appetite," but from positioning. Positioning is the strategy for how you want the business perceived to gain an edge. Two beef-bowl chains sell, by function alone, the same beef bowl, but their positioning differs, and the difference shows in their ads. One runs a young man wolfing down a bowl, reading as solo, cheap, fast, tasty. The other runs a family coming in to order to each person's taste, or a woman enjoying takeout. When the positioning differs, whose problem the product solves and how you want to be perceived, the same product makes a completely different ad.
Starting from a concrete expression without recognizing that difference risks drifting from your own positioning. Confirm "who is this ad for, and what does it convey" first, then consider "what expression conveys it effectively," in that order. Marketing frameworks teach this way of thinking. A framework is not universal and fits some situations and not others, but holding one in mind lets you reach for it when it counts, so reading through a few with your own project in mind is worthwhile.
Designers are well placed to step into marketing
"A web designer should hold a marketing perspective." Anyone who has worked as a web designer for a while has heard it. Performance advertising is part of marketing, and it sits close to a web designer's work, banners and landing pages, so it is an apt place for a designer to step into marketing. Energy for the tools and the latest trends matters to a designer. But where the job is to solve a marketing problem, those alone can fall short, and the marketing perspective here is what helps.
