Design to consumer: I'm not sure we've met?

Itu Chaudhuri says designers can observe how people express themselves visually

Design, properly understood, is inherently social. Designers make things for the eventual use of other people, to fit into, or sometimes transform socially determined environments. So an invitation to “share a fresh perspective on consumers” at a conference, to an audience of marketers, should hardly have caused unease.  

But inquiry is born from unease; in this case, from Deep Design’s dawning realisation that designers don’t really deal with consumers. They aren’t trained for it.

Design, to use the current argot, deals with users, or humans — a carpenter using a drill, a reader scanning a newspaper page, book or website, a mother manoeuvring her toddler into a high chair. It addresses the unchanging human system: the body and its limbs; a sensory apparatus dominated by sight; a logical tendency, subject to a fickle attention and the twitches of the lizard brain; add to this some rudimentary notions of pride. Finally, design’s problem-solving orientation focuses on the user’s behaviour in the context of interacting with the designed solution. No particular human trait is attributed to the user in a fundamental, non-contextual sense: a user is a user. 

Advertising created the consumer, or a person viewed purely by a propensity to buy, use up, and buy more of something, when industrial capitalism started to produce increasingly better but increasingly similar products. Human ingenuity responded by creating new needs, (like the ability to impress friends at a party) and fears, (like the failure to be a good mum). Not much design here; and while the human traits assumed here are fairly universal, it does introduce psychology into the mix.  

More sophisticated efforts from the time of Cheskin’s sensory marketing have co-opted design, realising that a product’s visual imprint can transcend its function. These marketers were not just after simple beauty, but saw form as whispering to a consumer psyche, per the psychological fashions of the day. So Bernays’* stunt of marching women smokers along a New York avenue convinced women to overcome their unconscious (Freudian) fear of the cigarette’s “phallic” shape. Post-war American cars were endlessly re-designed, arguably to appeal to masculinity and power.

But consumer theory is a braid with two strands. One strand is empirical, quantitative and cognitive. It aims to tease out the best approach to (for example) segmenting markets, studying things like demographics, spending power, geography, and physical constraints to buying. Rather like applied economics, it deals with the consumer’s rational side. Complexity notwithstanding, a great deal can be made out by careful statistics and reason working hand in hand, to some degree of certainty. 

The other strand hypothesises the consumer as an emotional being who is an actor in a social, cultural and economic drama, to explain or identify her deep motivations and anxieties. It uses data, but interpretively, and also pays heed to trained impressions. Its findings are qualitative and uncertain, seeks validity rather than certainty. 

Advertising created the consumer, or a person viewed purely by a propensity to buy, use up, and buy more of something, when industrial capitalism started to produce increasingly better but increasingly similar products

Of particular interest are the consumer’s values and culture. This is an attempt to extend our knowledge of the consumer including but beyond his observed behaviour in the context of our product or brand, but a deep orientation that influences his actions, at various if not all times. The idea is that a brand’s values can resonate with that of a group of consumers, and make them loyalists. (Go back to paragraph 3 and appreciate the contrast).

These groupings offer a kind of alternate market segmentation, cutting across income classes, social class lines (defined by entitlements like access and status) or communal ones (religious, ethnic or national, for example). For example: the multitudes that see in a Donald Trump or a Narendra Modi a corrective to a historical power grab by a mealy-mouthed elite, or yearn for ritualism to preserve an Indian-ness evaporating from their lives. Each grouping, united by attitude, offers multiple predictions, not for a single, narrow product or context, with multiple economic, social, cultural and political possibilities, with lasting implications.

It is in this second strand that designers can come into their own, not in their usual role as downstream providers of expression but as intelligent observers and interpreters of culture, especially visual. Designers are uniquely placed because they pour products into the stream of culture, as well as fish in it for reference and inspiration. 

Designers can observe how people express themselves visually, for example, the fashions and the codes their choices seem to gather around: how they decorate their homes, how they celebrate weddings, why not? And yes, how they buy. The anthropologist Grant McCracken, who studies culture and commerce, sees this as the source of design’s power in the boardroom. 

Or take the Italian household appliances maker Alessi, which commissions famous designers for its products, and has several iconic products among them. The business scholar Roberto Verganti, who has described their methods, points out that these icons are not merely awards-circuit darlings but broad commercial successes. They command significant price premiums and disproportionate volumes, for years together. That last criterion implies deep attachment, not an acute social contagion with a brief, steep peak. 

Alessi’s method relies on trusted interpreters, who identify large cultural swells (a fatigue with a joyless modernity, for example) and select a designer based on the likelihood that his temperament can speak to that mood. Their choices may be radical: Alessi’s best known classic, a kettle, came out of a collaboration with the American architect Michael Graves. 

The challenge for marketers with this type of thinking is to tolerate the uncertainty of the reward and recognise its magnitude and longevity. Innovative products or market strategies need more than a jaap of the Steve Jobs naam. Designers need to be able to not just observe and imagine, but to credibly interpret and act. They can start by convincing themselves.

So, I accepted the invitation. Will you?

*Edward Bernays, ‘the father of public relations’ and likely the coiner of the term; a nephew of Sigmund Freud

Itu Chaudhuri runs Itu Chaudhuri Design, a design and branding firm, in New Delhi; itu@icdindia.com