INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS: marketing isn't what happens after you design

Marketing shapes how a product is positioned, what it promises, and how it reaches customers. But too many teams treat it like a phase that happens after design is done, which isn’t how it should work.

When designers aren't part of those conversations, you're working from secondhand strategy. The brief tells you who the customer is, but you've never talked to them. It tells you the price tier, but you don't know why. You're designing to someone else's assumptions about what matters, and those assumptions might be wrong.

You need both sides at the table early. Otherwise you're shaping a product around guesses, or marketing a product nobody asked for.

Your design decisions are marketing decisions. Form language signals category. Materials communicate quality. UX delivers on the brand promise.

Good marketing doesn't make a bad product sell. But no one will find a good product without it.

If you think marketing is someone else's job, you're making yourself less valuable. Stop waiting for the brief. Start shaping it.

Marketing for Industrial Designers: Part 2 of 7 Follow along for more in the series - https://www.linkedin.com/in/blairhasty/