If You Please– Draw Me A New Hybrid Product!” The Struggle between Designers and Marketers
Résumé
Designers play a key role in the success of marketing strategies when creating new products. To this end, fostering collaboration between marketers and designers would create well differentiated and attractive products (Radford & Bloch, 2001). However, many researchers attest that designers and marketers experience rivalry and frustration when working together and often achieve poor results.
The question raised here is related to the role of designers in the conception of these NHPs. These newly created objects often incorporate the functionalities and usages of two (or more) original concepts or suggests new ways to use an existing product. Are designers willing to conceive them or are they under marketers’ control mechanisms?
To understand the struggles between designers and marketers while designing NHPs, we have opted for a qualitative approach based on sixteen semi-structured interviews with French Hi- Tech design experts on new communicating hybrid concepts. In this article we apply Ouchi (1979)’s framework to the analysis of relationships between individuals within a corporation. We studied how control mechanisms can help understand marketers’ control on designers in companies. The findings show on
the one hand that designers are reluctant to conceive NHPs and on the other hand that they struggle with marketers as they try to control their work. Many marketers intervene to change their design.
Designers find this intolerable interference in their work without any expertise in design as a lack of trust and understanding of their work. Companies and researchers in the topic should take into account the reluctance of designers to conceive these hybrid products as this reluctance may impact their design. They gain in understanding the various brakes presented in this study explaining this reluctance. Furthermore, this study help understanding the relationship between designers and marketers under the spotlight of Ouchi’s control mechanisms. Marketers use their legitimate authority and norms of reciprocity in their relationship with designers. Due to the NHPs’ ambiguity, designers deserve to be listened to in order to assess their willingness to create NHPs and move from a system where control mechanism create frustrations to a system taking into account designers’well-being.