Maverick idea: Shift some marketing dollars to product design

(Sir) Jony Ive recently left Apple to start his own design studio. On his heels, Marcus Engman with a similar role at Ikea is doing the same, and he has an interesting value proposition “I want to show there’s an alternative to marketing, which is actually design ..And if you work with design and communications in the right way, that would be the best kind of marketing, without buying media.”

He is definitely on to something. Look at all the money we have poured into modern marketing and the poor results

1. email marketing has led to all kinds of spam and phishing scandals
2. telemarketing has turned into nuisance calls, robocalls and scams
3. TV advertising has been abused to the point where the FCC does not even try to limit number of commercial minutes per hour anymore - other than for kid's programming
4. digital marketing is turning into a privacy nightmare

BTW, there is a naive view that GDPR and EU regulators will somehow make 4) more viable. To which I point to how poorly regulators have done trying to regulate 1, 2 and 3.

Nineteenth century retailer John Wanamaker is credited with saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” We spend a lot more on advertising these days, and have much better tools, but the results are only marginally better.

The sad thing is enterprise vendors have for over a decade now missed the move to smart products, a trillion+ dollar market I covered in my 2012 book The New Technology Elite. Contract manufacturers like Flex and Foxconn and design firms like IDEO and frog were the big beneficiaries of a focus on smarter, better designed products and services.

Enterprise vendors brag about CRM, but the reality is most also missed out on the digital advertising market. Google, Facebook, now Amazon have mostly benefited.

Will they change their tune and encourage customers to try the balancing act Engman is preaching?