Looking outside of your immediate industry provides both insight and inspiration....

I recently attended IIT's Strategy '06 conference. Big deal right? We all go to conferences. What's different is that it's not really a conference about marketing. The audience of Strategy '06 is mainly composed of product designers, creative problem solvers, design strategists, research experts, experience architects, interaction designers and business people of all walks. (This year even attracted a representative from the city of Chicago Mayor's office).

So what does this have to do with marketing?

It doesn't if you think about marketing in the traditional sense of the word. But Marketing 2.0? That's another story. The IIT cranks out scores of talented creative problem solvers every year.These are the people who dream of working for companies like Google, Yahoo, and Apple. I had a brief conversation with the Dean, Patrick Whitney about why his students don't typically consider marketing as a profession and his answer was simple, "They don't trust marketers."

So back to my original point. Why would I go to a conference year after year only to be surrounded by people who perceive marketing as "purveyors of snake oil"? For this reason: Marketing and design thinking are merging. There. I've said it.

What many of the IIT type individuals may not realize is that they are marketers in a sense. The digital products/experiences they help design are enabling people to connect with both brands as well as each other. You Tube, Flickr, Technorati, Typepad, Facebook—these are the open source platforms that help us market directly to each other. And the design thinkers at IIT have the right skills to develop these platforms and make them work.

So why do I consider this environment "out of my sandbox"? Because the focus of the conference is still primarily between the balance of design thinking and business.

But this year was a little different. In his presentation, Clement
Mok—hero to thousands of graphic designers dared to use the "A-word" .
Advertising. In fact, his whole deck revolved around this. But his message was clear—he was talking about how advertising is evolving, vs. the traditional TV driven model.

I found this to be greatly encouraging. Finally, someone with tons of equity in the hearts and minds of designers was getting them to think about marketing. Good news for all of us.

So the morale of this story is that playing outside of you sandbox is good for everyone. I'm inspired by how design thinkers approach their work. The research, insights and user-centered practice that drives it. And this year, I think our design friends are looking at marketing a little differently. So maybe our sandboxes aren't so far apart?

At the conference, I facilitated a break out session where we discussed how advertising agencies are doing things like designing retail experiences and product design firms are beginning to execute marketing campaigns. Some call this phenomenon cross-pollination. It was a good discussion and I think folks are coming to the realization that we need collaborative interdisciplinary teams to fuel innovation and cultural changes within our organizations if we want to evolve our offerings.

Who knows? Maybe next year I'll mix it up and attend an entirely different conference. But one thing is for sure, it probably won't be about marketing—I play in that sandbox on a daily basis.