Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mary V. Knackstedt, FASID, FIIDA, is president and founder of Knackstedt, Inc., of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and New York. She is an interior designer, furnituredesigner, consultant, and lecturer, and has taught interior design business practices at Harvard's Graduate School of Design for more than ten years. Knackstedt heads the Designers' Business Forum, a program dedicated to raising the level of interior design firms.

ALSO BY Mary V. Knackstedt, Published by Wiley:

The Interior Design Business Handbook: A Complete Guide to Profitability, Fourth Edition

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Discover the latest insights in marketing and client relations

for interior designers

To be a successful interior designer, it's essential to market yourself and your firm effectively. A must-read for interior designers establishing a client base, as well as for seasoned interior designers aiming to grow their businesses, Marketing and Client Relations for Interior Designers offers valuable tips on enhancing client relations and building lasting relationships for a growing practice.

This step-by-step manual helps you design the marketing program that best fits your unique practice and provides helpful business forms to help keep you on target, including staff questionnaires, planning guides, and design services outlines.

With insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense, industry expert and authorMary Knackstedt guides design professionals through all aspects of promoting a design business, including how to:

• Design specialized promotional resources, market research, and personal interactions

• Establish a company profile that attracts clients

• Find clients who are most likely to want your services

• Budget marketing efforts accurately to avoid unnecessary expenses

• Handle complaints diplomatically and with minimum problems

• Build a better relationship with clients

• Create proper contracts and letters of agreement

• Set prices that are appropriate for your services

Brimming with examples and proven strategies from successful, highly profitable firms that make it easy to apply the book's marketing techniques to your own business, Marketing and Client Relations for Interior Designers is your design firm's guide for business development, successfully marketing its services and maintaining long-term customer relationships.

Aus dem Klappentext

Discover the latest insights in marketing and client relations

for interior designers

To be a successful interior designer, it's essential to market yourself and your firm effectively. A must-read for interior designers establishing a client base, as well as for seasoned interior designers aiming to grow their businesses, Marketing and Client Relations for Interior Designers offers valuable tips on enhancing client relations and building lasting relationships for a growing practice.

This step-by-step manual helps you design the marketing program that best fits your unique practice and provides helpful business forms to help keep you on target, including staff questionnaires, planning guides, and design services outlines.

With insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense, industry expert and authorMary Knackstedt guides design professionals through all aspects of promoting a design business, including how to:

• Design specialized promotional resources, market research, and personal interactions

• Establish a company profile that attracts clients

• Find clients who are most likely to want your services

• Budget marketing efforts accurately to avoid unnecessary expenses

• Handle complaints diplomatically and with minimum problems

• Build a better relationship with clients

• Create proper contracts and letters of agreement

• Set prices that are appropriate for your services

Brimming with examples and proven strategies from successful, highly profitable firms that make it easy to apply the book's marketing techniques to your own business, Marketing and Client Relations for Interior Designers is your design firm's guide for business development, successfully marketing its services and maintaining long-term customer relationships.

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Marketing and Client Relations for Interior Designers

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Design firms constantly need to think about how they present themselves. Presentation is the basis for business development. We talk about this in the form of marketing and selling design services. Marketing comprises all the activities that build the relationship between the designer and client, including product development, research, and promotion. Selling is a process of educating and communicating directly with potential buyers. It begins when you attract their attention and continues through developing their interest and giving them the information that helps them evaluate the decision. It ends with the commitment.

Just as McDonald's learned to sell hamburgers and hospitals learned to sell medicine, interior designers need to learn to market and present design services. Many designers have a built-in aversion to selling. The word has so many negative connotations. I don't want to sell or to persuade. I want to educate and communicate with clients to help them make informed choices.

Designers need to develop techniques of communicating effectively with the particular client group they seek. The firm that knows both how to market and how to communicate is most likely to get the business. Clients sometimes call us about a project for purely emotional reasons. They may want a more inspiring environment, or they may have specific design problems to solve. Either way, they consider their issues critical.

A designer's business is to solve problems that the client cannot or does not want to solve alone. It is the designer's job to identify the problem, and through technical skill and expertise, demonstrate an ability to solve problems. To sell their services, interior designers must show that they are businesspeople who understand construction, scheduling, and budgets.

It is up to the designer to educate the consumer through marketing. Only an informed consumer can differentiate between partial service and full service, unqualified and qualified designers. Designers like to believe that they can rely on referrals as their major marketing tool. But any informed firm knows that this is no longer enough. Established firms can lose jobs to inexperienced newcomers to the field who have sophisticated techniques to market their design skills.

In order to be effective, market development must be a highly systematized, structured process, with exact schedules, measurements, and reviews of each part of the process-from defining your market and making the first contact, through writing proposals into production and follow-up.

The purpose of the marketing plan is to help your firm focus directly on the type of work that is most appropriate and profitable for it. The marketing plan is also designed to help you understand who you are, what you really want, and how to attain your goals. After all, as a designer, you want to create your own destiny. You don't want to sit there and wait for something to happen; chances are that what happens won't be right. You want to design your firm to enhance your chances for success. Obtaining the wrong business doesn't really develop a design studio; it can only destroy it.

What does it really take to devise a program that is profitable and directly related to securing the appropriate business for your firm?

First, what projects are appropriate? A big part of marketing is defining what type of work is best for your firm and refining that definition as your market changes. You need to think about who you are. You need to analyze your values, systems, mission, and exactly where you want to be.

You must look at who your clients are. Any good program is a partnership or marriage between a client and a firm with capabilities that complement the client's needs. It is a mistake to place your entire emphasis on existing or prospective clients and overlook in-house capabilities.

Building Your Definition

In the design field, each of us comes from a different background, a different school, a different part of the country. We have aptitudes in many varied areas. Some of us are involved with very technical work and very detailed contract specifications. Others are doing highly inventive work. Each of these different design disciplines has its own management requirements. Each specialty has its own vocabulary, so the process must be designed to meet its requirements.

Your marketing plan helps you set a direction. It is essential to approaching the right kind of client. It also helps you to minimize day-to-day problems. If you are going in 74 directions, you cannot be effective or achieve professional results. You-and everyone who works with you-need to understand your goals and where you are going, in order to work in the same direction. Mutual understanding will eliminate a good deal of confusion. Directed firms don't waste as much time with crisis management.

With a proactive, progressive approach, you spend time directing and staying on track, and therefore you achieve greater results. You are also able to maximize your own potential. In some instances, this progressive approach may require a firm to alter its qualifications and, to some extent, retrain the staff or team with other specialists. You know what the needs are. You've explored them with your clients and reviewed the current market. You've looked at what other design firms and specialists are doing. You really have an understanding of the demands of today's market.

The most effective way to achieve your goals is to create a MAP (Multiple Action Plan). Figure out where you want to be and decide on the best ways to get there. As you work on your marketing plan, it is important to focus on your abilities and resources, to consider how you can relate to your clients, and to offer the best possible product. Today our clients want exceptional design. Having the ability to do exceptional work efficiently with appropriate prices is the key to building a client base.

For a marketing plan to be valuable, dedication and a regular schedule are required. You must act consistently, not just when business is poor, to obtain the results you want. This is the benefit of a good marketing plan: It provides your firm with opportunities-opportunities that would not exist otherwise. It gives you the chance to create your future.

A marketing plan takes both management and leadership. Every person in the firm, starting with the CEO, must be dedicated to this plan. In addition, someone must manage the plan's direction to make sure that every phone call, networking system, meeting, and whatever bridging systems you use are accomplished. Each person in the firm must be involved, but someone must be responsible for managing the process.

You need a specific structure to ensure that your firm operates productively. Building a client base requires consistency. Be sure you are able to fulfill any commitments you make; otherwise, you will neither be able to build your clients' trust nor make these marketing systems work. Select your actors, and direct their roles with flair.

Successful Design Firms

Today's successful firms are very heavily market driven. They are based on what the clients need and want to purchase. Those firms understand exactly how their clients perceive them and how the firms, in turn, perceive their needs. Design firms that...