During the first year of my studies at Industrial Design, I did not really do anything about this expertise area. Some of my group members during Project 1 were following an elective about business, so they made the business model canvas while I focused on other things. The other courses during this year, did not involve business either. To compensate for this, I decided at the time to follow the USE Learning Line about marketing and new product development, where I learned exactly what marketing is about and how to make marketing decisions. After this, I followed the course Design Innovation Methods where I learned how to analyse a company and its customers in detail and formulate design opportunities based on this analysis. I also used this knowledge in my Final Bachelor Project to make sure my design would be feasible in a potential future business scenario. I am pretty confident that after my bachelor, I am capable of considering the business side of the design and deliver a realistic and feasible product.
A detailed overview of my developments in this expertise area:
This was my very first experience with a business-aimed course at the university. Immediately, it proved to be challenging. There were long lectures, a thick book and a difficult exam at the end. I had not anticipated that marketing would be so theoretical, luckily I quickly learned that only this course would be this theoretical, the next ones would be more practical. But, this course did provide some relevant knowledge. The main takeaway was that marketing is not just making advertisements for existing products. It is very much also about developing those products. Marketing is about looking at the market, the different customers, picking a target and making the product as valuable for this target customer as possible. “Delivering value” is a much better way to explain what marketing is, and how to deliver the value is determined using a “marketing mix”. It consists of choosing the product, price, place and promotion. All of this is a part of marketing, promotion (including making ads) is only a small part of it.
During this course, I learned all about delivering value to the customer. First of all, determining who your customer is through customer segmentation. But also how to determine the price of the product, what people perceive as valuable, what different channels for sales are and which are commonly used by certain customer segments. Some methods used for marketing would actually fit quite well in a human-centred design process, because it is both about involving the user and making the right product for the right user.
This course was indeed more practical than the previous one, and again showed me some similarities between marketing and Industrial Design. Especially the first half of the course, which was given by a teacher from the ID faculty (Jim Steenbakkers), was very close to the expertise area of User & Society and some techniques learned during the first-year course “User Centred Design”. During this part of the course, we used qualitative methods like a diary study to learn what our target user thinks about a certain app and discover ways to improve it. During the second part of the course, we used quantitative methods (statistics) to compare apps and user feedback about products to come to a conclusion about what makes a product good and how to improve it. In marketing, both methods are constantly used to evaluate current product offerings and create new ones.
This course built further upon the previous courses and taught me the next step after doing the marketing research. It was a very hands-on course, because we got to make real decisions and plan real strategies in a marketing simulation. This course showed how marketing can be like managing the brands of a firm, including deciding what kind of products to sell, to whom, for how much, where to advertise, everything while working on a budget. We got to create the marketing mix multiple times, distribute the budget between all activities that require money, monitor the current market, create new brands, decide on product features, and more.
A main learning experience from this course, was that marketing should never stand still. If you think you’re in a good spot with your company, keep working hard to keep that spot. There will always be competitors who would love to take some of your market share, so if you don’t proactively keep working to maintain or even increase your performance this will cost you income. We made this mistake during the simulation, and saw our competitors launching new brands better targeted at our customers, resulting in us loosing market share to them. If we would have used our position as market leader to launch a new brand for our target customer segments as soon as possible, we likely wouldn’t have lost as much market share. That was a valuable learning experience.
Where the USE Line I followed was more about selecting the customer segments to target and performing marketing research, this course was about designing and innovating while focusing on a target group. The goal here is to offer a better product for the customer, while strengthening your position as a business. We analysed an existing company, Netflix, and used numerous tools to get a better understanding of them as a business, their product and proposed what they could change about their product to lead to better customer satisfaction and improve their position as a business.
We learned how to perform an in-depth analysis about the company and their customers, and use the outcomes of this to formulate certain opportunities to improve customer experience. Then, we searched for technologies and patents registered to the company, while comparing this with competitors, and identifying some opportunities based on these findings as well. We learned how to create and validate a minimum viable product based on the opportunities identified earlier, and looked further into the future of the market and the company. In short, this course taught me how to analyse and design for a business with the future and the customers in mind.