Purple Cow

Seth Godin
Marketers No Longer:
Now We’re Designers
Fifteen years ago, when Jerry Hirschberg was starting up
the U.S. design studio for Nissan, he was invited to the
long-range product planning meetings as an observer – a
courtesy extended to him by the marketing people.
The meetings were all about vague pronouncements
about future cars (“all entry-level cars should be as generic
as possible”) and plenty of spreadsheets about advertising
spending and projected income. They were also the
most important meetings the company held to plan its
long-term future. The designers were mere tacticians.
Jerry proved, in short order, that he was much more
than an observer. He demonstrated that designers not
only had an important role in this process but should in
fact dominate it.
If post-design, post-manufacture marketing is dead, what
replaces it? Design. Not the pure design that they teach at
Parsons, but a market-centric design that builds the very
success of the product’s marketing into the product itself.
The semantics get funky, but the facts are clear. The
person with real influence on the success of a product
today gets to sit at the table when the original seeds for a
project are being sown.
If you are a marketer who doesn’t know how to invent,
design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products,
then you’re no longer a marketer. You’re deadwood.
Make a list of all the remarkable products in
your industry. Who made them? How did they happen?
Model the behavior (not mimic the product)
and you’re more than halfway to making your own.
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