• Written by Tom Lauck, Creative-Ops

Many business people look at a designer as someone interested primarily in making things look pretty. On the other side, many designers look at today's business marketer as a literalist willing to sacrifice quality to improve the bottom line. When this kind of stereotyping occurs, it's hard to imagine a successful outcome.

In fact, the whole process usually heads seriously south. The agency may be fired. The marketing manager may be put in a compromising position with management or lose his or her job. Or, the whole project may have to be started over — with half the time to complete it as before.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Who Are These Creative Professionals?

Are you working with the creative director of a top ad agency, someone in your internal creative department, or an amateur desktop publisher who moonlights from his or her regular job?

Assuming you're working with a true graphics professional, the first thing you should know is that he or she doesn't want to be thought of as a vendor. And that's not just ego talking; there is a case to be made.

No other vendor for a company creates a custom product every time, where aesthetics combine with marketing strategies to appeal to customers and communicate a specific message. It's not the same as buying coffee mugs for a trade show that are customized with your company's logo or renting a mailing list tailored to meet your company's needs. It's not even the same as working with a business consulting firm, which certainly provides unique services, but where the elusive elements of creativity and aesthetics are not required.

Creativity is the key word here. Designers, art directors, copywriters, and producers create something for their clients. They don't simply repackage it. They are hired for their sense of aesthetics in addition to their ability to communicate. They don't merely organize type on a page or pick an image from a stock book. If they're professionals, they understand human psychology — what prospects really want, need, and will use.

The Canadian graphic designer Bruce Mau suggests, "As the mass and volume of information increases, people search for a clear signal — one that gives pattern, shape, and direction to the noise."

What's Up with Marketing Communications Professionals?

I've often thought that marketing communications is one of the toughest jobs in a company, especially a technology company. When I worked in marketing at Hewlett-Packard, the engineers upstairs would build a product and then come down and tell Marketing to sell it. They hadn't done market research to create the product and, truthfully, we didn't do much research to sell it. The engineers told us that the features would sell themselves.

Well, as marketing professionals, we all know that isn't true, never has been true, and never will be true. We're always faced with the uphill job of interrogating product managers or engineers until we're blue in the face. Why do people want this feature? Why do they care? Who are they? What problem do they have that this product solves?

When we finally get to work with a creative team, we've already been through an ordeal. In fact, we come to this collaboration with some battle scars, maybe even some open wounds. Sometimes, we've been at meetings for days and our patience is wearing thin. We want the designer to understand our side of the story. When we express a limitation (either the lack of research or the lack of budget) we're not interested in arguing about it. It's often a moot point.

In this frame of mind, it's easy to characterize the creative person on the other side of the table as a prima donna. After all, they don't understand or appreciate what we've been through to get a clear set of objectives approved. And, of course, they don't like the company's logo or corporate colors. They want to redesign all the literature for consistency, and while they're at it, why not redo website? While we might sympathize with their observations, this isn't really the way we want to spend our day.

Creating a Win-Win Scenario

To change this battleground, it's important for both sides to conceive of a different alliance. Alan Webber, CEO of Fast Company, states: "What do successful entrepreneurs and business people have in common with designers? They both reconfigure reality. They reimagine the space in which a company is going to compete. They reconceive a metaphor for a business."

Right away, this strategic metaphor puts both parties on the same team.

By focusing on strategy, marketing professionals can be confident that the creative team knows what to shoot for. They can evaluate creative efforts against objectives or use research to confirm their gut instincts.

The creative team appreciates being given a hierarchy of communication objectives. Understanding key messages provides a framework for a designer that makes it easier to evaluate design alternatives.

Now, everyone can work together, with newfound appreciation for their counterparts. Marketing professionals want their role in the process to be recognized and respected. Most creative people will simply work harder and with more enthusiasm and dedication for clients who they respect and like, and from whom they feel respect and trust. Working together, they now have the opportunity to create something more powerful, more effective, more imaginative, more persuasive, more successful than either side could accomplish alone.