Design Management

Organisation and Marketing Perspectives

Sotiris Lalaounis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317235705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Placed at the nexus between marketing and organisational studies, this book breaks a new ground on the intersection of these two disciplines with design management. With the latest marketing thinking assigning greater emphasis on organisations co-creating value with consumers and other stakeholders by placing them at the heart of the product/service development process, it has never been more important to integrate marketing and organisational perspectives into design management.

This text explores the importance of managing design strategies, design processes, and design implementation in a way that it puts the human and the society at the centre, contributing to organisational success, customer gratification, and social welfare. Drawing from a variety of scholarly research and personal commercial insights, this book integrates key concepts of marketing, innovation, and design, to provide an in-depth discussion of the subject of design management.

With end-of-chapter exercises, case studies, and reflective insights along with online teaching materials, Design Management: Organisation and Marketing Perspectives is an essential text for students in design management, marketing, and innovation, or for anyone interested in gaining an in-depth understanding of how design can be successfully managed in order to generate the best answers to contemporary global challenges.

1 Introduction

Design management and the creative economy

Chapter aims and learning outcomes

This chapter aims to:

1 Discuss the development of marketing and commerce from ancient civilisations to the contemporary post-modern society.

2 Explore the development of design management practice and the three overarching paradigms in design management.

3 Understand the creative industries, the creative economy, and their role in the wider economy and society.

4 Discuss design sustainability and ecological intentional design.

5 Determine the overarching synergy between design management and marketing paradigms in post-modern society.

This chapter essentially aims to extend our understanding of the development of design management over the years and its role in contemporary society. Perhaps some would question the purpose and use of such a critical review of the subject. In response to such doubts, we can turn out attention to the work of Tadajewski (2009), a marketing scholar specialising in disciplinal history who argues that a very good starting point for understanding a discipline is by reviewing the history of the field, from its first inception as an academic discipline, exploring the influences that have impacted the subject areas over the years as they stand in the present day. In addition, George Santayana, the famous Spanish-born philosopher, argued that “those who do not know their history are likely to make similar mistakes to those of their intellectual predecessors” (cited in Tadajewski, 2009, p. 13). Therefore, understanding the history of design management thought and practice will allow us to avoid making the same intellectual mistakes and helps us shape a better understanding of design management from organisational and marketing perspectives, which is the fundamental aim of this book.

Development of design management: A critical review

Marketing and commerce: Ancient traditions

Before we attempt to understand the development of the design management discipline, it is important to explore the advances of commerce and marketing from ancient civilisations to our contemporary post-modern world. The reason for such endeavour is the fact that the connections between design, commerce, and marketing have been very profoundly strong across different eras of human development. Especially over the last few centuries, there has been closer integration between the development of design and marketing.

Product design has always been of keen interest to marketers. Medieval craftsmen sought to curry favour with the quality of their ecclesiastical ornamentation, and railroads of the 1930s attracted passengers with the visual impact of their streamlined locomotives and comfort of their Pullman cars. Today companies like Apple achieve record profits during a major recession because of leadership in design.

(Bloch, 2011, p. 378)

In 1984, Kotler and Alexander-Rath recognised the importance of design as part of the organisation’s marketing strategy, but argued that it had been neglected by organisations despite its imperative value. Undoubtedly, there has been significant progress since then as organisations have deepened their understanding of the role of design in innovation, which consequently leads to product differentiation (Lalaounis, Wood, & Evans, 2011). Nowadays, numerous organisations recognise that “marketing interacts with research and development, industrial design, engineering, and manufacturing” (Zhang, Hu, & Kotabe, 2011, p. 360) during the new product development (NPD) process. But the connections between design and marketing go beyond product design and the NPD process. In our contemporary society, there is an ever-growing need to manage design to achieve organisational objectives and contribute to social welfare. As a result, this has elevated the importance of design in the corporate world and in the wider society. But let us take things from the beginning.

Some would be surprised to read that the start of the history of marketing, a discipline so contemporary in comparison to other social sciences, is not placed during the Industrial Revolution but traced in the ancient world. Indeed, there are various forms of trade shown in 6,000 years of recorded history. In fact, one can find evidence of commerce, in the form of branding, advertising, and packaging, in ancient sites scattered across the Mediterranean Sea, such as those attributed to ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome, and Etruria. According to Shaw (1995), ancient Greek Socratic philosophers Plato and Aristotle discussed macro-marketing issues, such as how marketing can be integrated into society. Wengrow (2008) indicates that brands in the form of labels or seals can be traced back to prehistory and the Bronze Age society. The use of these kinds of brand was very administrative – to signify ownership, place of origin, or jurisdiction. The earliest manufactured goods in ‘mass’ production were clay pots. These were ‘marked’ by their makers with their thumbprints or symbols, such as a star or a cross, rather than their initials. These symbols are the earliest form of brand logotypes. In ancient Rome, commercial law was developed to protect the origin and title of potters’ marks, with evidence, even then, of imitations and counterfeit products (Blackett, 2003).

Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the mutually interdependent system of trade between the Mediterranean and the West European peoples collapsed, and the use of brands was mainly on local scale with the exception of distinguishing marks used by noble groups, royal families, and governments (e.g. the Hapsburg family’s coat of arms, or Japan’s imperial chrysanthemum symbol) (Blackett, 2003). The use of brands evolved to indicate content and quality of the product as trade became more specialised. Volume manufacture of fine porcelain, furniture, and tapestries by royal patronage increased, and laws for watermarking of paper and hallmarking of gold and silver objects were enforced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Blackett, 2003); such laws are still used to this day. In addition, at that stage, besides quality, brands were also used to signify authority, ownership, and status because factories manufactured not only perishable but also durable goods (Moor, 2007). This led to branding becoming a means of separating production from consumption (as explored in Chapter 8), a separation that contemporary branding still depends on to an extent. In the Middle Ages, Medieval schoolmen such as St Augustus of Hippo and St Thomas of Aquinas wrote about macro-marketing issues such as how marketing can be practiced in an ethical manner and without sin (Jones & Shaw, 2002).

Thumbprints or symbols on clay pots as first forms of brand logotypes.

However, it was the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century which was the springboard for the development of the first set of principles of marketing. During the industrial boom, we saw the development of mass production, higher levels of trade among different regions, improved distribution and transportation, and enormous social changes such as the increase of urbanisation, the birth of working and middle classes, luxury consumption, and more interactions among consumer cultures. According to Bartels (1988), the term ‘marketing’ was first used as a noun, hence a label of a particular practice, sometime between 1906 and 1911 in the UK. However, Tadajewski (2009) points out that the first use of the term is a subject of intellectual contestation with some scholars placing its first use as far back as 1561 (Shaw, 1995). The 1900s’ meaning of the term ‘marketing’ was strongly associated with the work of sales departments which were becoming extremely common. The first meaning of the term was related to the combination of factors that had to be taken into consideration prior to the undertaking of selling activities. The combination of these efforts was the essence of marketing at that stage. Marketing was a characteristic of the period in the development of the ‘market economy’, the system where the market regulates and runs society, and has evolved to a refined system of thought and practice.

Blackett (2003) argues that the Industrial Revolution phenomenon led to the brand revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Manufacturing and communications advances opened up the western world and led to the mass-marketing of consumer goods. Many of today’s best known brands, such as Coca-Cola, Heinz Baked Beans, and Quaker Oats, date from this era. “Hand in hand with the introduction of these brands came early trade mark legislation. This allowed the owners of these brands to protect them in law” (Blackett, 2003, p. 15). In the same period, we also saw the founding of many well-known advertising agencies, some of which still dominate the sector, e.g., J Walter Thompson, which provided further push to the development of brands. The first ever registered trademark in the UK was Bass Beer’s Red Triangle, first registered in 1876, and still used by the organisation today. Innovation in packaging and printing meant that manufacturers had the ability to place their mark on their products; thus, instead of selling in bulk to retailers who then placed the product into their own unmarked packaging, they had a way to differentiate their own product from others and communicate a message through the images used in promotional materials. This highlighted the significant role of branding in fiercely competitive environments (Moor, 2007). The development of the marketing profession is also strongly associated with the history of professional associations such as the American Marketing Association – established as the American Marketing Society in 1931 – and the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing established in 1911 as the Sales Managers’ Association and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1989.

Bass beer triangle – first registered trademark in the UK.

The period since World War II is described by Blackett (2003) as the ‘brand explosion’ period. Brands are now symbols of worldwide economies on a demand-led rather than a command-led system. This was a result of developments such as the collapse of communism, the birth of mass communication systems and the Internet, and improved transportation. However, brands, along with the capitalist market system, have been criticised over the years. We can see such criticism mounting; attacks by anti-globalisation activists on Starbucks or McDonald’s stores are simple manifestations of such anger. This also demonstrates the fact that brands have also become political symbols beyond their economic jurisdiction. On a positive note, this has made organisations realise that they have to understand the political, social, and economic impact of their activities – brands are central to these activities (Hales, 2011).

Design management practice

The first person to be attributed the ability to marry the activities of designing and managing is Josiah Wedgewood, an English master of pottery who established a very successful, world-renowned ceramic pottery business by combining the beauty and art of designing with a set of management skills (Cooper & Junginger, 2011a). Letters written by Wedgwood to his friend, Thomas Bentley, provide us with “a unique picture of the mind of an entrepreneur during the early stages of industrialisation, revealing the problems he faced and the solutions he developed. In particular, they show the unprecedented importance that design was to have in the production of his wares” (Forty, 1986, pp. 17–18). The industrial society, and its early manifestations such as the opening of the National Gallery in 1832 and the Great Exhibition in 1851, created the context in which the subject would be born (Best, 2006, 2015). World’s Fairs like the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace provided the platform for discussions about the influence of machines on the role of design in society. Many, like Henry Cole, the principal organiser of the exhibition, believed that the effect of machines involved the separation of the responsibility for the appearance of a product from the tasks of fabricating it, leading to, in their opinion, the quality of design deteriorating (Forty, 1986). On the other hand, such exhibitions were supported by the UK government with the aim of improving public taste and educating artisans. The underlying reason for such endeavour was the fact that the development of machine production had made design more valuable to manufacturers. In retrospect, the use of machine at that stage was still limited, and any arguments against machines were fuelled by Victorian writers’ misunderstanding and prejudices. Generally speaking, the Great Exhibition ignited the debate on the effect of machines on the quality of design, a discussion which is still contemporary (Forty, 1986). Nowadays, we agree on the interdependence of design and machines, and most of us welcome machines as a way of improving design process and design artefacts.

The Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851.

Peter Behrens, the designer appointed by the German electronics manufacturer AEG, is the archetypical design manager of the early twentieth century, whose role was to shape the corporate identity, buildings, posters, and actual products of the organisation, enjoying senior-level influence within AEG. In 1915, the Design and Industries Association was established in the UK to facilitate the collaboration of manufacturers, designers, distributors, economists, and critics, as well...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of images
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Design management and the creative economy
• 2 Design research: Framing the design problem and identifying design opportunities
• 3 Incorporating design thinking into the organisational DNA
• 4 Strategic design management: Developing the design strategy
• 5 Understanding individual and organisational creativity
• 6 Organising for design innovation: Organisational paradoxes and ambidexterity
• 7 Human experiences and design management
• 8 Human-centred design: Co-creation and design management
• 9 Design consultancies as professional service firms
• 10 Conclusion: Leading through design
• Index