This article is a general observation in outdoor industry. Some personal bias is involved.
Have you noticed that most product design teams are dominated by male and marketing teams are all girls? Product design is a thing; branding and marketing is another thing. Product team created a product rooted from user experience, and marketing team makes strategy based on the numbers. Even if they have meetings together periodically, they pass the specs not emotion aspect of a design.
words lose in transition
Especially when a company gets bigger, the collaboration between team also gets thinner.
Branding, website and marketing campaign should come from user product experience. But marketing team usually doesn’t have any product design experience or knowledge. Some of them are not even users. They come out with the strategy or advertisement that doesn’t speak to the products. It becomes a feature-naming game that confuses the users. Or it eventually becomes a price-slashing campaign that entices those fishing for deals.
People buy feelings
Convey the story how a product is come out. Give your product a solid test. Come out with a campaign that you’re convinced as a user. Don’t do the campaign because it’s what you like; do the ones that your audience will like.
I don’t care about international women’s day but I want more women in outdoor industry, in product design
Most of my snowboarding outfit is menswear. Why? Because I’m sick of pink or super feminine design in women’s apparel. In male-dominated product design team, they used to make women products by make it smaller, make it shorter and make it pink. (There has been improvement nowadays as big companies have added color specialists in their team.) There are some women in technical apparel design but they are mostly not users. They’re more at the fashion side. Why do we need woman product designer who’s a big time mountaineer or crushing 5.13s on rocks? Because she likely will design something that’s functional and fits women’s needs. Not saying men can’t design good stuff for women. It will require lots of empathy and tremendous amount of research. I’ve climbed with guys most of the time and they never understand how physically weak women naturally are…(They always say “oh I think it’s easy” and I really want to punch into their face.)
Switch it up
One thing we can do is switching product design and marketing team’s job for a day, periodically. (Human brain doesn’t change that fast if you only give it one try.) Learning what other’s are doing and understand the challenges. Some people might hate it. But it will help building the empathy between the teams. And your brand will be consistent inside out.