Resourceful Sensemaking: Overcoming Barriers between
Marketing and Design in NPD
Summary
Marketers and designer have different perspectives in new product development (NPD).
Moral of the blind men and the elephant.
Hard for managers to find shared agreement about right way forward.
Relation between marketers and designers are important for NPD success as well as to brand
value, long term competitive advantage and firm performance. However, marketers and
designers usually misunderstand each other, and there is tension between the relationship.
Tensions can be reconciled by using three mechanisms: exposing, co-opting, and
repurposing.
Resourceful sensemaking; how marketers and designers can effectively improve working
relations and broaden each other’s mental horizons.
Sensemaking is largely achieved through informal means and often involves paying attention
to rituals, artefacts, language, stereotypes, and stories, while sensegiving is concerned with
actors’ attempts to influence an outcome (Rouleau,2005). The term resourceful sensemaking
is used to capture these related constructs. Resourceful sensemaking involves actors
attempting to take the perspective of others to shape desired outcomes through the enactment
of “horizon-expanding discourse”
Sensegiving is how one actor can influence the outcome.
Roots of interfunctional conflicts
Shape vs. Fit
Designers try to shape the environment meanwhile marketers seek to fit/adjust to the
environment.
Three aspects of interfunctional conflicts
It was discovered that marketing and designers differ in their way of framing NPD problems
in three aspects: i) relationship to the environment, ii) relationship to time, and finally iii) the
nature of truth and knowledge.
Relationship to the environment
Designers sees existing marketing or product catalogue structures as social constructions that
can be created, shaped, or reshaped. In contrast, marketers see these structures as largely
fixed, something that you must adjust to.
Relationship to time
By believing of the ability to shape the environment, designers time-orientation is to work
from the future and back. Furthermore, designers tend draw inspirations from future
scenarios, looking for upcoming trends that may change social mores. Therefore, designers
want to create products more focused on future trends to influence markets. On the other
hand, marketers look at the knowable present, and wants to stick to what the customer is
demanding in the present, also past demands. Thereby, marketers prefer to create products
that meet existing needs and incrementally improve current products.
Nature of truth
Three resourceful sensemaking sensemaking practices: exposing, co-opting, and repurposing
Exposing
Questions
Beverland, Micheli, & Farelly (2016) should revolve around the topic: Resolving the tension
of conflicting two departments
1. What three mechanisms help to resolve tension between two conflicting departments?
Exposing, co-opting, and repurposing
2. Which of the following three mechanisms (exposing, co-opting, and repurposing) is
the most important solution for resolving tension between two departments?
Rådman et al. should revolve around the topic: Collecting customer needs
1. What methods are utilized to collect customer needs in the article?
Observation, interviews and through secondary data such as customer satisfaction surverys,
email communication, booking apps and space usage statistics
2. When do you know that you had enough interviews for collecting data of
customer needs?
“The interview process stopped when we thought our sample was
representative enough and additional interviews no longer provided new insights.”