Adam Lerner's “Marketing Your Design Firm,” on Core 77, offers a thorough discussion of the why's, wherefore's, and how-to's of marketing and selling design services. It's an insightful piece worth printing out and keeping handy in your ideas notebook.

Whether marketing a service or a product, the same basic methodologies apply: Your firm's value proposition must articulate the underlying needs of the market, and highlight the benefits of choosing your firm over its competitors. There is a methodology to this. The cumulative marketing efforts should transition a customer through the following steps: grab attention, sway perceptions, create positive affect (emotion) and generate cognition. You then keep the firm top-of-mind with the target market through frequent touch points.

Live by this code: attention + frequency = memory.

You must resist the temptation to position your firm's brand as a collection of capabilities. Capabilities in industrial design, engineering, and research can be easily added and subtracted by competitors within a short period of time. This makes a capabilities-based brand strategy unsustainable, and potentially ineffective in differentiating any firm from its competition. Your firm's capabilities should support your brand, but not become it.

Designers should be astute about communicating with their publics. A designer's inability to link up with clients is indicative that either the design value proposition is wrong or the means of communicating it are not working. As Lerner shows, a designer has considerable leeway defining a value proposition when design trends and fancies are in flux (as they are today), but almost none in communicating that proposition to clients. As a case in point, he illustrates IDEO's very intentional branding of the word “innovative” through a series of articles and interviews the firm cultivated in the late 90s. Today there are others, many associated with the online world. Lerner warns, creatively working in the online world to a client's advantage, a value proposition, is not the same as communicating that value proposition via the Web.