Car Design News investigates how departments beyond the studio influence the final design of a vehicle. This time, it is not engineering, but marketing and product planning under the microscope
It is often said that car design begins with a sketch, but that doesn’t quite paint the full picture. Alongside the activity going on in the studio, other departments are also hard at work researching what consumers want, where trends are headed and – importantly – what is feasible to build. Whether designers choose to take that insight on board is another matter.
“After a while, you kind of get comfortable with the fact that it’s not a great situation between design and marketing when it comes to the initial idea,” admits Pontus Fontaeus, design director at GAC Advanced Los Angeles. While he is quick to note that the dynamic is pretty good at GAC, it’s his past experiences at other automakers that has shaped this sentiment towards marketing.
He recalls having to work with external agencies where the story behind the car was shaped by advertisers and branding executives who – having been parachuted in to “stir the pot” – did not have the right understanding of what the brand was about. It’s easy to see how this dynamic may not be the most congenial.
It is not like designers are blind to the trends going on around them. Much of their time is spent forecasting, and their finger is generally on the pulse of the market. Designers are also, generally speaking, quite protective of their ideas and certainly in today’s studios, expect a degree of autonomy. We have all heard how designers and engineers tend to butt heads – although this is changing – and on the surface there appears to be a similar dynamic with marketing teams. Some even describe the dynamic as a forced marriage.
“Young designers often resent marketing input and see it as irrelevant to their daily job,” says Nick Hull, long-running head of the Coventry Transportation Design course and an ex designer himself.
Indeed, speak to…
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