A great product will always be a company’s best marketing weapon. Sure, you can throw money at a product or service, however ultimately a poor product is destined for failure, especially amongst today’s savvy consumers. Word of mouth is the original and best way for a brand to get exposure, and the advent of social networks has merely served to heighten this.
These days tech driven start-ups focus their resources on product and service, rather than advertising driven marketing. At the same time, established brands are waking up to find that their most disruptive competitors no longer have a marketing cost line in their business plan – saving them millions.
This isn’t to say that marketing is dead – far from it. However, where digital services are concerned, the reality is that the product itself should now do most, if not all of the marketing.
Spotify is a great example of a product that has achieved mass appeal with little marketing budget – its popularity has grown wildly amongst users in the past year, but have you ever seen it advertised? Digital services are becoming much more pervasive; a rise in m-health, entertainment and social apps means that we are engaging with a digital product many times daily. Our digital engagement takes many forms; for example, it could be checking in on Foursquare, using Shazam to identify a song on the radio, using a Nike app to track your run – even updating Facebook and Twitter. Engaging with these products has become popular and almost like second nature to many of us. Interestingly, none of these digital products or services heavily rely on advertising or marketing. Instead, we engage with simply good products.
This begs the question, what lies ahead for digital services: essentially whether advertising and marketing will become defunct altogether, or whether they will take on a completely new, product and service design focused model.
The disruptive nature of mobile, coupled with the accelerating media fragmentation we are seeing in the mobile space, means that it is exponentially harder for brands to achieve mass media impact. The mash-up culture within which we live in means that everything is a shop front for something else. Multi-screen appearance means that an app can be accessed on a PC, tablet, mobile and shortly TV. Each new channel becomes a new marketing tool, as users share a service with their social group in a different context.
Hence, we predict that 2012 will witness a major shift in the role of the service designer. A service designer is pivotal in the development of a service: their role is to assess the needs of the customer, ensuring that the end product is user-friendly, relevant and consistently delivers customer delight across multiple interfaces. One decade ago, this role sat within the marketing department, but as design became its own strand of product development, service designers became separate entities. Today, the role of a service designer is more important than ever – these are the people whose visions shape and design tomorrow’s world. Many entrepreneurs understand that the better a service, the less marketing a product needs. Therefore, many start-ups have emerged in the past year, relying on word-of-mouth, viral hooks and a great design that taps into consumer needs, rather than expensive advertising campaigns.
Consequently, in 2012, we could see product and marketing merging into one discipline, with service design blessing their union. The job of service designers will get harder –no longer is their focus simply on journeys, flows, beautiful graphics and animations. Rather, social hooks, upsell, churn, location, frequency and length of engagement will all become central design drivers. Traditional marketing will never die – but the digital landscape means that the role of the marketing department is evolving. Digital media marketers who have skills in service design, marketing and advertising could become the most-sought after employees companies going forward. The service design of a product now has more of an impact on a brand perception than marketing – a trend we will see continuing into 2012 and beyond.
