What Architecture Taught Me About Marketing

July 25, 2024

My marketing career spans more than 20 years, but what you might not know is that it's not my first career.

I've kind of given it away with the title, but before I was a marketer I was an architect.

I studied, practised and for a brief period even taught architecture.

But before I get to what it taught me about marketing, let me take a moment to talk about architecture as a subject and as a profession.

Architecture taught me to be curious. To want to understand how things work, how things create emotions. It taught me to admire art, it taught me to admire science. It taught me to admire music, engineering, graphic design, advertising, DJing, graffiti, cinema, dance.

Of course the down side of this is that architects want to get involved with everything. Much like marketers, they have shiny new thing syndrome. I've had architect clients in the past. Nightmare. They, might I even say we, are not built to leave things alone.

But that curiosity, that inquisitiveness, directly led me on a path to where I am today. A marketer.

Architecture is the only one of the classic professions which is also a fine art. It's a subject with a lot of depth. It's both creative and practical. It is the perfect fuse of art and science.

It is also primarily focussed on people. You will rarely hear architects talking about elevations, structures and walls. More often they will talk of spaces. Architects create spaces that people do things in.

As a young architect I learned that our job was to create spaces for people's everyday routines and rituals. Whether that is how you move around a building, how you get ready in the morning, how you do your best days work. We all have a series of routines and one or two rituals that enable us to do what we need with as little thought as possible.

As an architect I was fascinated by how we might reinforce positive routines, and equally how we might adjust away from, and replace, bad routines.

As with marketing. Consumers have their routines and rituals too. Their routine brand or category set, their routine for negotiating a retail store. Again, this enables them to do what they need with as instinctively and with as little thought as possible.

Our job as marketers is to reinforce or disrupt consumer routines. If we're not somebody's choice of brand, we want to disrupt their routine purchase. If we are their choice of brand, we want to reinforce that routine.

Whilst at University in the mid-nineties I was introduced to the world wide web. It was barely a year old at the time, but obviously I wanted and needed to know how it worked, how to create pages, how to build websites.

The web then was very different to now, created as it was by academics and the military to share information, it was never intended to be the commercial giant it is now. And at the same time as the engineers didn't see a need for aesthetics, the designers didn't understand that you couldn't simply turn a billboard into a website.

That's when this then architect, having developed a sideline into nightclub visuals, realised that my training, my mindset and the rudimentary web design and development skills could navigate the science meets art conundrum. And with a fellow architect friend built a web design agency.

That lead me into digital marketing, which led me into marketing. Because the curiosity keeps me learning, developing, improving my knowledge and my practical skills.

That's the architect in me.

It's made me a better creative problem solver.

And I believe it's made me a better marketer.