Companies Must Watch Out For “Entrepreneur Design Syndrome”
May 25, 2007
Filed Under Blog
Today’s business environment puts a much higher emphasis on marketing and how it supports the organization. Marketing managers are finding more and more pressure put on them from many different levels of the company. Often, they must not only balance the overall business and marketing strategy, but they must also determine how other areas of the business are impacted by marketing efforts (e.g., operations, technology, human resources).
The result of this may influence a marketing manager’s ability to adequately balance the needs of the organization. Often the marketing manager’s expanded role also means their focus, which should be driving strategic marketing initiatives, often is muddied with opinions and commentary from colleagues who don’t have a clue (or training) in classical marketing strategy.
What does this have to do with interactive marketing? Often it can be brought into the design process where client-side contacts, not integrated with the marketing team, provide design influence.
We call this “Entrepreneur Design Syndrome” because often, design direction can be directly influenced by the last meeting that the client attended. This concept is very similar to the entrepreneur who when starting a company, is often heavily influenced by what someone told them in their last meeting.Most of the time, marketing managers do not even realize this is happening. Left unchecked, the creative process evolves into “design by committee” decisions, driving the original marketing strategy off course.
Here are a few ways marketing professionals can help reduce the effects of “Entrepreneur Design Syndrome”:
- Remember the big picture. Don’t let short term “fires” influence the long term marketing strategy.
- Give the committee input, not control. Gather feedback from the appropriate influencers in the process, but set their expectations about marketing decisions that may supersede their feedback.
- Leverage your marketing partner’s influence. Use your marketing partner to help sell design decisions. Often opinions from outside the organization carry strong weight toward influencing a committee’s opinion on design.