We’ve been told the wrong story about marketing. A story of rigid funnels and siloed departments, where “strategy” is a slide deck of graphs and bullet points while “design” is the final task of making things look good.
In practice, this model is flawed.
Management implies control, but in marketing, the factors out of your control far outnumber the ones you can manage. This narrative of control traps us in a product-oriented mindset that Theodore Levitt called Marketing Myopia. You’re so focused on current products, you don’t see the market changing.
You forget Philip Kotler’s sage advice: “Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.”
The wrong story is marketing just sells things. The better story is great marketing designs solutions. It’s not a sales pitch to a faceless target demographic. It’s a well-crafted narrative to a persona that solves real human needs, what Clayton Christensen calls Jobs to Be Done (JTBD).
As copywriter Howard Gossage said, “People don’t read ads. They read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.”
Design thinking is the best approach to keep this perspective. The most successful marketing follows more of a design process.
IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown explains, “Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.”
My Accidental Journey to a Design-Led Approach.
I didn’t learn this in a textbook. I learned it through experience.
My dream was to design cars, but two semesters into an engineering degree, I realized it was all math and no magic. I didn’t know “industrial designer” was a job, so I searched. I tried business, but didn’t find much creativity there. I even snuck into an advanced poetry class, looking for a home.
I finally found it in an advertising copywriting class—the intersection of art and commerce. But when I graduated, I hit a wall. My program was siloed. The art department didn’t integrate with the ad department. I was a writer trained without design collaborators. My portfolio wasn’t good enough for Madison Avenue.
The solution was portfolio school. At Portfolio Center (Now Miami Ad School) the magic was built on an iterative process and integration. As a writer, I was paired with art directors, designers, and strategists.
We solved marketing problems through consumer empathy, defining problems, creating ideas, sketching out concepts and testing them. By designing solutions and crafting engaging stories I landed my dream job at BBDO.
For 17 years as a copywriter and creative director I worked with top marketing managers at startups to Fortune 500s. What I learned is the best marketing is born from a deep human insight. Something we obtained best through a design process.
Now, I’m excited to join the Markets, Innovation, and Design (MiDE) program at Bucknell University’s Freeman College of Management. It’s the culmination of my career—a true integration of business, marketing, and creative design thinking.
With the increase in AI, human-centered design is more important than ever. There’s an increase in jobs requiring design thinking and salaries for marketing managers with design thinking skills are higher.
A New Map for Marketing.
To stop managing marketing programs and start designing consumer solutions we need a new map. I created the visual framework below to teach my marketing principles students this unique perspective.
This map isn’t a rigid set of steps. It’s a logical flow that ensures every part of your strategy is grounded in a deep human insight by:
- Inserting Empathy. Understand the human as you analyze the market. Use tools like observation, empathy interviews, journey maps, bug lists, and POV framing.
- Pivoting on Key Insight. Synthesize research into an “Aha!” moment that defines the problem in a human-centered way. The “job” they’re hiring the product to do (JTBD), or a cultural shift the brand can tap into.
- Making a Creative Leap. Find inspiration. Ideate to undercover a Big Idea—the magnetic theme that makes your brand matter. Prototype, test for feedback, and iterate quickly. Share in an engaging Story.
- Treating your Integrated Marketing Mix (4 Ps) as a System. Your product, price, store, and ads are not tactics. They’re all opportunities to live out the big idea and are chapters in your Brand Storytelling.
A Real-Life Example: The Airport Challenge.
What does this look like in action? We were once tasked to fill seats on a new flight at a regional airport. The brief was simple: “Sell tickets.”
The problem? Consumers always looked for the lowest price and ended up driving hours to bigger, cheaper airports. A traditional, product-first approach would have been a losing battle.
Instead, we started with empathy. A cross-disciplinary team went to the airport and just observed. We noticed how easy it was. We parked across the street. Security took ten minutes. People were calm, not stressed.
Our key insight was that people weren’t hiring an airport just to get on a plane. They were hiring it to begin their journey. The value of that “job” was more than just the ticket price.
This led to our Big Idea, which came from our agency operations manager! The local airport code was MDT. She said, “It stands for the Money, Distance, and Time you save.”
That Big Idea became the core of our Story. Our digital team put a calculator on the website that showed the true cost of driving to the other airport. Our ad, PR and social teams created an engaging “MDT Challenge.”
Two local DJs raced to Chicago for a scavenger hunt—one from our airport, one from the big city competitor. Every live social media update was a mini-story of hassle vs. convenience.
The result? Ticket sales on the new flight increased and overall ridership at the airport soared to its highest levels ever. We didn’t just sell tickets. We redesigned the way people thought about the value of their local airport.
Now It’s Your Turn.
The next time you’re tasked with a marketing challenge, open a spreadsheet, but don’t forget to also grab a whiteboard. Marketing’s greatest power isn’t in the managing, but in the making.
Your work becomes infinitely more interesting when you stop asking “How do we sell this?” and start asking “What are we solving?”
Your strategy will be better for it. Your career will be better for it. And the humans you’re designing for? They’ll thank you for it. For insights on how AI can help you in this process see my post “AI for Professionals: Deepen Your Expertise With AI, Don’t Outsource It.”
This Was 90% Human Generated Content!
The initial ideas were my own, and so were all the life experiences and stories! I used regular Grammarly for proofing, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking and Anthrophic Claude Sonnet 4.5 for feedback – kind of like an idea partner and an editor. I created the graphic myself.
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