The reason designers don’t specify your product may all be in your head

There is an interesting dynamic in the contract furnishings business that greatly inhibits communication between the designers driving most of the major projects and the manufacturers that produce the materials that ultimately make the designer’s vision a reality. While the two groups depend on one another for survival, they live on the opposite side of the corpus callosum. And though Robert Frost’s neighbor believed good fences make good neighbors, people who live on opposite sides of this neural fence have a real hard time communicating.

The corpus callosum is the hundreds of millions of networked neural fibers that join the analytical left side of the brain with the creative right. Dr. Roger Sperry was the first to articulate our understanding of the brain’s duality in 1981, an insight for which he won the Nobel Prize for medicine. He almost certainly never considered the implications of his work on the contract furnishings business.

Manufacturers tend to be left-brain oriented. Their minds work logically, in sequence. They like processes and order and they love to predict results. Having worked as the marketing director for United Chair, I’ve seen the left-brain orientation of furniture manufacturers up close. When considering a new product, they constantly ask, “What’s the most efficient way to manufacture it? How low can we drive the pricing on the various component parts?” I’ve never heard anyone in a new-product meeting ask, “How will this chair make our prospects feel?”

Designers meanwhile inhabit the right side of the brain. They use the portion of the brain devoted to abstract thought. They see patterns in seemingly random events. They feel color and taste sound. And they get frustrated with left-brain thinking. Too often abstract thoughts melt away when we try to rationalize them in language. Likewise, left-brain thinkers have little patience with right brainers. They see an absence of sense in all that fuzzy, formless thinking.

But if you want designers to specify your chair or your system or your carpet, it is imperative you understand how your prospects think and craft your messages to their way of thought. I’ve seen brilliant marketing ideas shot down because analytical upper management didn’t see the logic in them. Which was precisely the point of the idea in the first place, not to make a logical argument, but to capture prospects’ attention with visual, emotional messages.

The mistake was not in analysis or logic; it was in failing to understand who we were talking to. The designer who perceives the world from the right hemisphere will never connect with an ad that makes a logical, left-sided argument.

A second common mistake manufacturers make is to look at marketing as an event; in reality, marketing is an on-going conversation with designers. No one tool should be forced to carry all of the water of the marketing plan. In the early phases of the conversation, the message needs to be highly visual, relying on colors and sounds (even in print the right words trigger sounds in the mind) to create a strong mental image. You want that image to associate with both some previously held thought in the person’s mind and your product or company. You want to reinforce that mental image as much as possible, but your communication doesn’t stop there.

Because sooner or later, your new favorite designer who wants to spec your chair, your carpet or your system will have to sell the idea to her client who is probably back on the left side of the brain. And as a right brainer, she’ll undoubtedly have trouble telling her client why your product is the best choice. “It just looks better” is a weak argument, but you can help.

While early stage sales tools connect with your client emotionally, later stage tools can help designers build walls of logic strong enough to withstand the analytical storm that is sure to follow the specification. Details, specifics and testimonials are the mortar.

So having said all that, here are a few insights to help you improve your communications with the architects and designers your business depends on:

1. Build awareness tools that appeal to the creative right side of the brain. Strong visuals will sell more powerfully than lists of statistics and specs.
2. Use the Web and any product literature to reinforce the visual message, while building support arguments on the back-end that form a more logical, left brain argument. Standardized test results, specs and testimonials all work well here.
3. Train your sales reps to sell both sides of the brain and how to understand when each appeal is appropriate.