Richard Seymour believes that marketeers are missing out on an astonishing creative resource... because they don't understand it. For more information, go to seymourpowell.com

1. Loving
the Aliens
Richard Seymour believes that marketeers are missing out on an
astonishing creative resource…because they don’t understand it.
In the Beginning, there were who can see the whole issue at once without Actually, you’re doing all this ‘research’
factories. And the factories losing sight of the individual steps necessary because you’re expected to prove that you’re
made things for us to buy. And to achieve it. Someone who understands that doing the ‘right thing’. If you don’t have that
the people in the Factories who people buy things that they find attractive and Excel spreadsheet to tell you that Design A or
decided what we should buy compelling, and continue to use things that Communications route B is the right strategy,
(and therefore what the Factories should have relevance to their lives and provide joy then the Boss won’t let you do it.
make) were the Boss and the Boss’s wife. in the process. He then gets someone else’s
As the 19th Century rushed into the Industrial Factory to build it to Apple’s spec. Just like Is that because he doesn’t trust your instincts?
Revolution, no-one had yet heard of Brands, Nike does. Or probably your most ferocious Or is it because you don’t trust your instincts?
or Brand Managers or even designers. competitor, whose brains are here,
Many of the corporations we work with use
Product Brands were normally the Boss’s but whose production is probably in the Far
consumer research in this way: they ask
family name, or the name of the Factory. East.
people who don’t know, to tell them what to
No Brand existed without a Factory or a
And guess what? He’s never asked a single do. In many cases, spending up to ten times
Workshop. No-one knew what consumer
person what they’re going to want. Because as much in these so-called validating research
research was (unless it was the Boss asking
he knows two things you don’t. Firstly, he phases as they do on the design itself. And
his wife’s opinion). Products were engineered
knows that people haven’t the faintest ideas usually taking up much of the development
by engineers. Design was what colour the
what they’re going to want, so there’s no point network’s time-to-market at the same time.
product was.
in asking them. And secondly, he knows it’s The only people I know who really know what
And the Product was something you needed. his job to imagine the future…and then create we’re going to want in the future are people
it for us. who live there.
So who told the Boss what we all needed?
And just like Edison and Dr Marten and Mr Designers.
A small group of brilliant employees, usually, Hoover, he doesn’t wait for permission (or a
plus some of his trusted peer group at the When a product designer sits down to his
competitor getting there first) to tell him when
club (oh, and his wife….). pad, or mouse or whatever, he has to be a
to do it.
minimum of two years ahead of today. If he
Edison decided we needed electric light. Tesla Who gave Jobs permission to re-invent the isn’t, he’ll create something that’s 2 years
decided we needed alternating current to music industry with iTunes? Nobody. He just out of date when it finally arrives on shelf
make it work. Singer said we needed sewing did it because he knew he could and that we’d or in the showroom. So he ‘projects’ in a
machines. Hoover thought vacuum cleaners love it. way in which you can’t. That’s why he’s a
made sense and Mr Tate and Mr Lyle thought designer, not a marketeer. He’s an empath,
you’d enjoy refined sugar to bake with. When Apple gets close to a product launch someone who absorbs human mores and style
decision, Jobs and his few trusted colleagues and excretes relevant solutions. That’s what
Strangely enough, 150 years later, the likes of sit around a table and look at what they’ve drew him to apply for design at University, not
these visionaries are still amongst us, but they done. They then ask themselves “is it Cool?” Physics. If he’s good, he’s probably working
do something different now. If the answer is “yes” they launch. on products that may be 6 or 7 years ahead
of now, because some products, like cars
They don’t build factories….. That’s it. or telecommunication devices, are planned
Steve Jobs of Apple is one of those beings. that far ahead. Not designed that far ahead,
Good old-fashioned 19th Century Marketing.
Autocratic. Visionary. Humanistic. Brilliant. necessarily, but planned.
CEO. When you started as a marketeer, you
Long-term design strategy and short-term
probably saw yourself at the hub of the
But he’s something else as well, which you design implementation.
Communications and Product apparat,
didn’t know. Briefing and receiving the creative agencies These businesses have a ‘thousand yard
to provide the ideas for the ads and products, stare’, which lets them lead what is going to
He’s a Designer.
and then taking the ideas and presenting them happen themselves, whilst giving them the
Not a bloke with flowing locks and a pink tie to the consumer at every verse end to make time to do it properly. While you are staring
who calls everyone ‘dahhhhling’, but someone sure that ‘you’d got it right’. into the next couple of years and trying

2. Loving the Aliens (cont)
desperately to deliver the goods that fast, going through her daily cleansing routines, or in freeze-frame from within, like watching an
they’ve given themselves the luxury of time preparing a meal, or a guy getting into explosion on film, slowed down to a single
to get it right. his domestic stair-lift. That’s not where the frame a second.
magic lies. It’s in what the designer sees in
Yes, they started earlier. this material that’s so amazing. When a designer as good as Steve Jobs, or
many of the people you have at your disposal
If you look at what a competitor is doing by Because that’s what a designer does. for that matter, provides what seems to you
reacting to what they’ve just launched onto to be an answer they have just plucked out
the shelf this season, you’re looking into an Paul Smith, the brilliant British fashion of thin air (and therefore, highly subjective
archaeological dig. What you can see is what designer once explained this to a friend, when and untested), you are naturally suspicious of
they were doing, up to three or fours years asked where he got his ideas from; “You and I their conclusion, and then go about trying to
ago. If your product development cycles are could walk down the street together and look research validity into it or out of it.
any more than 3 months long, you DARE not at the same things” he explained “but I’d SEE
react to what you see launching around you, ten times more than you would”. Basically, you don’t trust him, or his damn
because you’ll be hopelessly out of date by wizardry, do you?
the time you get your retaliation in. This wasn’t an idle boast; by the way, it’s
probably the clearest depiction of the creative If you buy a really good designer into your
Which brings us back to 19th Century process at work that I’ve ever heard. What programme, you’re actually getting the most
Marketing and Steve Jobs. Paul didn’t explain, was what happened next. extraordinary thing: an object that works
backwards
Where did Edison, and where does Jobs, get The designer’s brain isn’t the same as yours.
their perspective on what we’re going to need You like ‘innovation funnels’, or Gates, or The designer’s mind can deliver the correct
from, other than constantly living in a world Steps or other, linear processes that narrow solution up-front. But he’ll then have to go
‘that is going to be in their jobs? down your options in a logical way until the through interminable post-rationalisation to
answer drops out of the bottom of the funnel prove it. It’s like getting Paganini to run a
By looking carefully at what is going to be or whatever... virtuoso arpeggio while you keep stopping him
technically possible whilst watching the saying “Well, I quite like it, but what will the
‘emergent behaviour’ of the human organism. If that worked, then you’d always be creating consumer think?”
Not ‘asking people’, by brilliant new products.
the way, but watching the Jobs and his colleages But it doesn’t. Trust me.
animal at work.
sit around a table and Get design into your marketing long before
And you’re not.
At Seymourpowell we have
a division called SPF, or
look at what they’ve done. you think you should.
Seymourpowellforesight. They then ask themselves The designer’s brain Let the designer’s brain help you jettison
works in a non-linear, the bundle of prejudices that is usually your
You could call it a research
“Is it cool?” seemingly chaotic fashion creative brief and replace it with a series of
organisation, because it If the answer is “yes” that, if you could see into clear questions about what is really needed.
it, would scare the crap
observes emerging trends
in technology, culture and
they launch. out of you.
Study emergent behaviour in your target
market through the eyes of someone who
technology and, at the same time, looks can really see.
Driving through Mumbai is almost directly
for the new, emerging coincidences that
analogous to this process. If you get in a cab Trust their instincts. And then begin your
provide the raw material for new ideas.
and belt through the city to the traffic lights, project.
You might call the ‘people watching’ part of you’ll notice a number of things: the first is
this process Ethnography. that two conflicting lanes of traffic will appear Use the Force, before that
to pile into one another relentlessly, sounding impudent, driven competitor
We call it the Conceptual Nursery. their horns and leaping from brakes to throttle with no factory eats your lunch.
in a mad, Nihilistic waggle dance. The second
This is where the future really lives. But SPF’s thing you’ll notice is how few of these vehicles
staff aren’t researchers, or anthropologists, or actually strike each other, and the third thing
technologists.They’re all designers. Designers that you’ll notice is that you generally get
who have turned to the Dark Side: the through this teeming conflagration unhurt
obscured pathway to the future. and unusually rapidly.
If they weren’t outputting their work as dossiers When this first happened to me, I looked
or reports or compelling visual evidence of quizzically at the Indian Physics major sitting
the animal at work, they’d be turning it into next to me in the cab, and he replied:
product designs (which is what the rest of us
do). “It’s a System, Jim, but not as we know it!”
If I showed you some of their video work done This system, in the designer’s brain, lets him
recently, you might throw the entire issue
see nothing unusual at all. You’d see a woman up in the air simultaneously, and then view it
The shape of things to come