Interestingly, the Australian Design Institute is listing in career profiles “Design Management” amongst graphic, industrial, interior, etc.

It states: “With the integration of design into the business planning process of many large national and international companies and the identification of design as a major factor in competitive advantage the management of design has become a specialisation in its own right.”(DIA)

With this in mind, I researched who offered jobs with the title of “Design Manager”, or “Manager, Design” in Australia or who included ‘design management’ as skills/experience/qualification. You may have guessed it, the “Design Manager” demand, I found, is for a property and construction industry profile. Alternatively, it is also a production manager’s job. So who and where are these professionals in Australia that work in ‘design management’ as defined by DIA? Would be good to hear from the companies who employ them or the recruiters who place them.

It may sound like a recruiter’s job only, but the matter of fact is, your marketing success will be determined by the skill set and experience of the person in charge of your marketing. As such, you should take a keen interested in finding the person with the right profile for your SME. As discussed earlier, in SMEs marketers have a generalist profile, but even the most broad knowledge does not cover all aspects that are necessary to connect to the target audience on an initial shoestring budget.

Hiring for the start-up phase

You want a person who can market plan and understands the value of organising not only your planning, but comes well connected to local vendors when it is time to implement activities. It is important to start off with a strong brand development. The marketer in the start-up phase can either develop brands (has a creative background, e.g., comes with a job title like ‘art director’) or is a marketing manager who can direct an outsourced team to develop the brand in accordance with your market strategy. This includes knowledge or access to market research so that the brand development is grounded in real world needs and wants of your customers. Don’t fall in the trap of thinking that all you need is a logo for your business cards, unless you are not serious of building a company brand that gives you return on investment.

A person with strong creative background may give your visual market presence the edge if you are in life style industries, however, if you are manufacturing widgets or other commodity products, you may want to consider a B2B (business-to-business) marketer with a commerce degree who understands the ins and outs of B2B marketing and out sources the creative parts on your behalf.

SME brands are now in a fortunate position to have low-cost, far-reach digital tools at their communication disposal but it requires some dedication and expertise to leverage them. Most of all, after the start-up phase, marketing is about widening the appeal and building on existing equity internally and externally of your business. You might find, that your start-up brand builder or manager does not want to continue in a monitoring role, or that stewardship and control is not their cup of tea. Find a supplement or replacement for the next phase in your company life cycle.

Hiring For Growth

This is the phase when initial ground work has been done, the company should have a brand identity and marketing direction. And a pretty good understanding who their customers and competitors are and will be. The creative part now involves planning and steering the brand. Stewardship is replacing development for the most part of the marketer’s SME role. Budget presentation, market research and campaign planning are the forte of SME marketers in a business growth phase.

The role is working closely with your sales department (where applicable) and influences service delivery and internal brand building (internal brand building: connecting your brand with your employees). How much of the stewardship can and should reside in one person depends on your growth plans and business strategy. As mentioned in part 1 of this post, its about skill distribution and industry fit.

PROFILE: Senior Marketer, Corporate

In a larger organisation, the marketing department consists of a team of marketers who have complimentary administrative and strategic skills. Senior marketers are often strategic planners who are guiding the company.

Under their leadership, junior staff are collecting market research, research competitors and execute and administer the marketing plan. Brand development and advertising in most cases is outsourced. Corporate Marketing’s overarching objective is stewardship of the brand.

PROFILE: Senior Marketer, SME

In SME’s this is usually a combined skill set resting within one person. This person should have both, administrative and strategic skills. This is very difficult to find, as the marketing field requires a large set of skills and people tend to specialise in one of the areas of marketing expertise as typically required by larger organisations. Often SME senior marketers have a stake in the company and spearhead their investment.

Senior marketers are on board either from the early start-up phase or when the company hits the financial glass ceiling where further growth is only possible with customer relation management, positioning strategy and regular budgeting. SME owners have to identify whether the marketer has the right skill set to transit from strategic to administrative task set and back.

We commonly see  job ads asking one marketer ‘to design ads’, ‘create brochures’ write marketing plans’, ‘liaise with sales teams’,  ‘conduct research’ and ‘manage events’. The ‘on a shoestring, one size fits all, versatile and exciting busy role’ approach is asking for the amalgamation of ‘Graphic Designer’, ‘Marketing Manager’, ‘Marketing Analyst’ and ‘Events Coordinator’ in one person.

Would you trust the effective and timely delivery of your service order from one single person attempting to explore, survey, mine, quote and sell gold from the mine you own? In the next part we discuss more on the profile of SME marketers.

Consensio: We both agree that creativity does not need innovation but innovation does not happen without creativity. You are challenging people in organisations to think outside the box, (thus to become more creative). How do you teach them to go beyond creativity?

Kevin Carroll: I define innovation as something that is new and different AND THAT ADDS VALUE. If it doesn’t add value, then I classify it as simply creativity. If the idea can increase someone’s pleasure (make you more productive, gain you more respect, create more revenue, build your awareness in the marketplace) or decrease their pain (lower your stress, help you lose weight, save you time) then it’s adding value which means it’s innovation.

Consensio: What made you realise this is an organisation issue and what are you doing as a consultant to address that?

Kevin Carroll: Everybody is constantly talking innovation, innovation, innovation..or they use the cliché: “Think Outside the Box.” But I realized that no one teaches people how to do it. It’s nice talking about it, but you have to know how to execute the process.  Also, Breakthrough Thinking needs to be fostered throughout the organization and rewarded…I show them how to do that, too.

Consensio: Are you confronted by some organisational members (eg accountants and CFO’s) who don’t think workshops and courses are money effectively spent? How do you counterbalance these barriers?

Kevin Carroll: I show them my case studies to prove the ROI.

Consensio: Do you use your own problem solving techniques? when do you catch yourself not using them effectively?

Kevin Carroll: Yes, I use my own problem solving techniques and I use some that have been around for centuries. The key is that we all need to build the habit so that we use them automatically. I catch myself getting stuck frequently and I have to consciously apply the techniques.

Consensio: If you could wave a wand and creativity would become the natural tool for organisational problem solving, would we automatically build better products and services?

Kevin Carroll: Yes we would, because we would have a clearer understanding of what the underlying problem really is and we’d be able to fix it. The biggest challenge with being more innovative is that people do not define the problem clearly!!! They state it in vague terms and they then they go about trying to solve it. You’ll get nowhere doing it this way.

Consensio: Would more or just different types of consumers and clients buy them?

Kevin Carroll: Both.

Much has been written about the influence of national culture and cross-cultural influence on globalized companies (see for example key culture writers like Hofstede, Tropenaars and Friedman). The link of one’s heritage and underlying assumptions to organsiational performance per se has held bread and butter money for generations of business consultants, HR professionals and psychologists.

It strikes me as interesting, that a quantitative measurement is often engaged to ‘measure’ the organisational culture, e.g. “…33% of our people are effective in their performance; 43% engage in after-hours social activities…”, as if behavioural observation was all that culture is; e.g. we hear culture defined as ‘the way we do things around here‘.

This may be a catchy way of remembering this ‘culture thing’, but it is not an organisational culture definition. Culture is deeper ingrained in people than behaviour that we observe everyday. We behave based on our beliefs and values which are fundamentally based on our deeper assumptions.

That’s why culture can be shared, even when the key people, who left the place, are not there anymore to demonstrate the behaviour. I call this the living heritage of organisations. To measure this, we need different instruments, don’t you think?

Business goodwill is a key intangible asset that represents the portion of the business value that cannot be attributed to other business assets.

(Btw: For a quick definition on institutional, professional, practice and practitioner goodwill, see for example here or Wikipedia.)

IA’s are according to this:

• Intangible assets can be identified and described. They must be a specific property, not an idea.
• Intangible assets are legal property. Just as tangible assets, the owners can assert their legal rights to and defend their possession of intangible assets.
• Ownership of intangible assets can be transferred. For example, the owners can sell them or give them away.
• Evidence of intangible existence. Documentation is a typical way to establish that. Examples are customer lists, blueprints, contract documents, software source code printouts.
• Intangible assets have a life span.

Why is it locked out of the definition of an intangible asset when all you have to do is follow through with this logic and place ‘idea’ in the above bullet points? So tell me, what did my last idea not do to increase business value?

I carried it around, I gave it to somebody, I wrote it down, it got me a good reputation, I was paid for it and in the end it might be a good one to keep for solving a specific problem in the organisation later on. A bit of goodwill, anyone?