Monday, May 30, 2011

Giving Up Design for Marketing

Recently I applied for and got a new position as the Director of Marketing, previously I was the Direct of Graphic Services. The process was full of livelihhood challenging questions, often presented by my subconcious mind.

As a designer/writer in advertising I always thought of myself as a fairly savvy marketer, and believed the rubric: good advertising is advertising that drives people to take action.

Now, I am in the driver's seat, and my creative instincts are called upon in a different way. I am not deciding how things get done but deciding what gets done.

What gets done is not necessarily the print driven communications I concerned myself with most recently. Now I am examining all of the channels of communication—especially the power of video.

That doesn't mean I am not a fan of print, but I want to see us (at a large international nonprofit) addressing all of our audiences—where they are.

Web, is unfortunately not under my immediate oversight, but that may not be
as unfortunate as it might appear—I will be the "client". But at the same time I
know that web is the platform we must build our strengths around.

So what do I do with all of those years of design knowledge? I expect that I will still be involved with designing and communicating visually, although it might be channelled to a more educational audience.

I think that the value of good design is a marketing tool and strategy that can be leveraged to atract attention and get the word out about the good work we do everyday.

Marketing depends on so many talented contributors to be efficient, I can stop mourning over my "loss". Being champion of the talents working with me will be a pleasure—they have work hard against daunting odds and tight deadlines to produce beautiful work.

The next step is for them to become the originators of content rather than the executors—but that calls for a different paradigm.

Working on that next!

GA