Ian Peterman, CEO of Peterman Design Firm, shows how customer acquisition channels shape design choices. Retail demands eye-catching packaging, direct-to-consumer needs interactive features, word-of-mouth requires clear documentation, and B2B sales might need demo units. But for most products, how you sell matters less than what the product actually does.
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Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I'm going to answer the question, how does my business model for acquiring new customers impact my design? So basically, what, what impact does the approach or how you market or sell to your customers impact the design of your product. Uh, and a lot of products, that is not a huge factor of how you sell. However, it is— it can be a big impact. So you definitely want to think about this and figure out, you know, does my product care or is it impacted by how I get customers? And One way that that could be the case is if you get your products or your customers purely through stores. So you don't do online, you're not a retail, you want to be one of those companies that makes the product but sits in the background and you sell through distributors only, then your product needs and the way that it's designed, and especially the packaging around that product, is likely going to be different than if you are selling online. While you do care about packaging for selling direct-to-consumer, it— and it is an experience, and you can definitely make that an amazing experience— if you're selling on a store shelf, your product could— is going to need to be able to catch the consumer's eye. A lot of people do that with packaging, but you should also be aware of, you know, the product itself, especially if you want to show off the product. So if your new customers really come through a storefront, then be aware of that. And as you're designing the product, think about the fact that someone's going to be able to physically interact with it, so they may want to be able to interact with it. So you see like products that have, especially kids' toys, they have like a test me button or they have a little pull tab. Like you're able to interact with the product and it's designed in a way that you can interact in a limited way with it in order to, you know, see if you like it basically. So that's one way that can really impact product design as well as your packaging design, which I consider as part of it. Your packaging is, is very key to your product. Um, if you are, you know, there's one example. So there's, if you are acquiring your, if you're getting new customers, uh, and it's purely online where people are able to research and they're able to get a ton of information, your wired, like the amount of information you need to give someone on a product is less than what it used to. So things of things that people used to do, like putting all the instructions on the product and things like that, are less necessary because people absolutely, they have the internet in order to purchase your products in the first place, which means they have the ability to look up instructions or access digital instructions. That you can provide. So, you know, looking at that and how you— how people are able to acquire your product and how you get new customers that way can be part of the product design. There's also products out there that are specifically designed to help facilitate people wanting to promote the product themselves or creating diehard fans of a product. And if your primary way of getting new customers is actually based around word of mouth, or, you know, let's say it's something that is sold by independent reps, say Mary Kay or something like that, then your product is going to need to be designed in a way that works for how it's going to be presented to customers. So if, if the product is actually a sales tool that whoever is selling the product uses, then being aware of how it's going to be used as a sales tool will sometimes affect how the product might be designed. May have additional features. You may have a special version of the product that is a demo model. You know, it's made in order to be able to last all 10,000 hours of demo modeling. Or it may be designed to show off and accentuate features. Or I've even seen products where, you know, they really want to show off the interior workings of something for a demonstration model, which is what they use to sell. And they do shows and conventions. And so they will make a special version of their product that has, say, clear— instead of using a normal, normal whatever casing and enclosure, they'll use clear material so you can see inside of it, things like that. And some of that eventually may become part of production, but it's also part of the process is understanding, well, your sales— what does the sales process look like? And how to— if you're going way back in the beginning and you're being really strategic about this, is looking at what is your sales process going to be and how can you make it so that someone can sell that product more? And this is especially the case or products that require a salesperson to sell, business level, where they're not just gonna go online and buy a little product. You know, businesses buy pens and stuff online, that's totally fine. But when you're talking about large industrial equipment, they're not just gonna look online and go, oh, I like that tractor. Oh, I like that piece of machinery that's gonna cost $1 million. They're not gonna buy it online. They're not gonna do that. With— if your process for getting a new customer requires demonstrations and it requires taking your product to places, so there's products that literally get driven around, they get modified, put, put into a mobile vehicle that then is able to demonstrate the product. That product may not be exactly the same as production, or it's going to be close, but but it may require some modifications. So knowing that, you may even design instead of trying to make 2 things. And this is where understanding your process, maybe you don't make 2 separate products. Maybe you figure out what you need to use for your sales process. And that is a production because that'll even be even better if your sales and demo models are exact to production, minus any customizations you might do for a customer. That will be even better. And so making sure that, yeah, the customer can see into the machine and see the inner workings, if that's part of what you are selling, is what's on the inside. If you can't see it, it's harder. It's a lot easier to just show them, hey, look at this window right here and you'll see into the machine. So things like that will and may impact your design. However, those are very limited cases. General design work, general products that are developed, how you actually get your customers typically is not a driving factor for the actual product. More of customer experience, feature-driven— what does it do, what problem does it solve— those kinds of things that are related to your customer are much more important for the product than how the customer finds you or how the customer purchases the product from you and becomes a new customer are not typically the defining factors in how you develop a product. So hopefully this answers the question, how does my business model for acquiring new customers impact my design? Short answer, probably doesn't.
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