Dec
07
2007Advertising vs. Product Design
07
2007
I used to work in advertising. Now I work in product design.
Advertising is kind of like product design in reverse. You take a product that already exists - that may have gone through hundreds of incarnations and several changes of direction - and you pick it apart, asking yourself:
“What is there about this product that just happens to be different from all of its competitors? What Big Idea can we convince people was the motivating force behind this product all along?”
Dunkin’ Donuts is a huge client for Hill, Holliday. Their idea is: “America Runs on Dunkin’”. It’s a GREAT idea. Dunkin’ Donuts stores are everywhere. People go to them when they need a pick me up during their day. An ad agency took a fast food chain that was selling a lot of coffee and donuts and saw it for what it really was: a gas station for human fuel.
Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t even realize what it was until an ad agency told them. The ad agency extracted a Big Idea from an existing product. That’s quite a skill, and for that I hold talented advertising people in the highest regard.
But advertising and its “idea archaelogy” strikes me as a tactic of last resort for a company that forgot to put the Big Idea in in the first place. And I’d much rather spend my time working with companies that need help putting their Big Ideas into new stuff, than with companies that need help digging Big Ideas out of old stuff.
But that’s just me.
Ideally, advertising and product design would be the same thing. My favorite example is BoA’s Save the Change program, by IDEO. I don’t know what you’d call it. Something like “design of self-propagating products.”
ivv 12/12/07 @ 1:10 amI believe it’s not so much about digging, it’s more about offering a different view.Example: Hertz billed 100 and the next 5 competitors 10 each. Now comes Bill Bernbach and makes Avis say: we are only number two, we try harder.
Hans Suter 12/22/07 @ 4:39 am