Design , Marketing, Service ?

Russell Davies the planning messiah recently brought a interesting point to my attention that i have given some thought to. The business model that supports creative industries is fundamentally wrong, most large organisations operate in 3 silo's doing design or content, marketing and aftersales or service, dealing-with-the-consequences-of-what-the-other-two-silos-have done.

What makes this model wrong is no silo ever talks to any other, because the process almost always proceeds steadily from left to right. Design make stuff and pass it to marketing who then work out what to say about it. There will probably be some broader corporate direction that will attempt to make this stuff more seamless, integrated and coherent and to connect the end to the beginning, but it always gets swamped by the organisation. By the time a product gets to someone like the advertising agency no-one wants any more thoughts about how the product might be improved.

This isn't a revelation is has been the way organisations operate for years. However, it should be noted that people actually experience the product in a different order. People's experiences of most consumer products starts with the communications or marketing. The experience starts with the product or service second. It's not because integrating marketing and design thinking isn't a good idea, it's because it's organisationally / politically impossible.