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.

Right. The Obvious Questions Answered.

What do architecture and marketing actually have in common?

More than it sounds. Both start with people, not with the thing being created. Architects design spaces for how people will actually move through and use them. Marketers design communications for how people will actually think, feel, and decide. Both disciplines fail spectacularly when they prioritise the creator's preferences over the end user's experience. Both also require rigorous diagnosis before any creative work begins. An architect who starts drawing without understanding how the building will be used produces something beautiful and dysfunctional. A marketer who starts campaigning without understanding how buyers make decisions produces something eye-catching and commercially useless.

What does understanding consumer routines have to do with effective marketing?

Everything, and most brands ignore it almost entirely. Buyers have repertoires, habitual sets of brands they consider, routes to purchase they follow, triggers they respond to. Most of the time they're not actively evaluating all available options. They're on autopilot, choosing what they already know and trust. Effective marketing either reinforces those patterns, gets your brand into the repertoire and keeps it there, or deliberately disrupts them at a specific moment when the buyer is open to change. Showing up at the moment their routine is disrupted is when marketing earns its keep.

How does thinking like an architect make you a better marketer?

It trains you to think about the experience of the thing, not just the thing itself. An architect doesn't just design a wall, they think about how light falls through the window above it, how that makes the person in the room feel, how the proportions affect the sense of calm or energy. Everything is considered in relation to the person experiencing it. Applied to marketing: don't just write a message. Think about the context in which it will be seen, the mental state of the person seeing it, what they're thinking about before they encounter it, and what you want them to think, feel, or do after. That's a much richer brief than 'write something catchy.'

Is curiosity actually important in marketing or is it just a nice personality trait?

Commercially important. Not merely decorative. The best marketing comes from genuine curiosity about buyers — what they care about, how they make decisions, what they're afraid of, what makes them feel recognised. That kind of curiosity produces insights that can't be found in a spreadsheet or a brief. It requires wanting to understand people, not just wanting to sell to them. Curiosity about craft matters too, about what makes communication land, what makes ideas memorable, what's been proven to work. The marketers who keep learning tend to produce better outcomes than the ones who found a formula and stopped there.

What's the biggest mistake marketers make that architects would never make?

Designing for themselves rather than for the person who will live with the result. An architect who builds a house around their own aesthetic preferences, ignoring how the client actually lives, has failed at the most basic level of the profession. In marketing, this is endemic: brands designed to express what leadership finds impressive, messaging written to satisfy internal stakeholders, campaigns approved because the creative team likes them. The discipline of consistently asking 'but what does the buyer think, feel, and need?', and actually finding out rather than assuming, is what separates market-oriented marketing from self-congratulatory activity.