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Design Week Marketing

BSMS Article Team Member

The Milan Design Week is the world’s largest annual design event: it takes place in the city of Milan and its main parts are the “Salone del Mobile” program and a series of exhibitions and events spread across different areas of the city. It’s a thrilling event for the city, and as spring blooms and the days get longer the city is invested in a new light, and the atmosphere perceived walking around is one of inspiration, sophistication, elegance and innovation.

The Design Week’s goal is primarily that of showcasing avant-garde and groundbreaking pieces of modern and contemporary design by the most important designers from all over the world.

But, among the many aesthetically-pleasing venues all around the city, there to pay homage to the city an the design industry as a whole, it was not hard to spot the many initiatives that were born solely to exploit the wave of collective enthusiasm in order to fulfill a marketing purpose.

Needless to say, marketing has a lot to do with all of this: many niche initiatives are aimed at driving the attention of a specific group of invested people to one’s creations and line of design, as (especially for products whose main component is visual) an installation is an extremely powerful tool to make one’s ideas and concepts known and appreciated, which will hopefully secure some new clients.

Nevertheless, another great example of a well planned marketing strategy was that of everything that had nothing to do with design and gravitated around it, purposely entering the picture to benefit from the outstanding flow of people and the atmosphere of this charismatic week to ultimately drive up sales.

That’s why in between the exhibitions it was definitely not uncommon to be delighted with free beverages, to spot partnerships with food brands, receive sample products from cosmetic companies etc…

Even better, it could be argued that these little extra activities, while definitely not being the main course of the whole experience, succeeded in attracting to the events many people that otherwise wouldn’t have probably taken part to it: these ecosystem really brought the rather niche and design-focused event to a whole new level, making it accessible to all kinds of people and giving everybody the chance to feel part of an exclusive and sophisticated reality.

To make one example, the plant-based product company Alpro gifted free plant-based cappuccinos in bars located strategically across Brera, the most influential neighborhood of Milan when it comes to design, so that people in between exhibitions could get their hands on their new range of plant-based milks, also promoted in light of their limited environmental impact in comparison to animal milk: the inherent incompatibility with design was not an obstacle at all, as the Design Week is becoming less about the design exclusively and more about the whole experience of a visitor that wants to be delighted in all forms possibles.

Something similar was made by Lavazza, which promoted its new line of environmentally-friendly coffee by gifting a cocktail made with such coffee in well planned locations across the city.

Part of this is also undoubtedly due to the high involvement of social medias with respect to this significant event: indeed, among the countless initiatives and installations, many exhibitors harnessed the high-powered tool of social media marketing to effectively drive the stream of people to certain events more than others.

That’s why, all throughout this week, social medias were flooded with design week related content, and many people rightly saw in this shift a very lucrative opportunity.

It goes without saying that the general public at which content on social media is targeted to is much more broader and varied than a restrict group of people keen on design; therefore what was highlighted the most in the creation of such content was whatever motive could reach as many people as possible and get stuck in people’s minds, coming across as simple, accessible, less high-end and, why not, free: definitely not a cryptic and complex design exhibition, but rather an oddly funny and lighthearted installation where a well-done game of lights was bound to leave you speechless.

These laid-back experiences, pressingly labelled as “must see” to generate some sort of “fear of missing out” on people, ultimately caused people to take part in design events despite knowing little to nothing about what they were about, just for the sake of not being left out from what they were constantly seeing on their phones.

However, not all communication strategies were about simplicity, fun and games: the huge impact of the Design Week truly paved the way to new marketing strategies, as the most distinctive feature of all the events is the elements of surprise, that generates uplift, positive emotions and memories bound to stay.

For that reason, many brands and companies saw in this week a stimulus to challenge their traditional marketing tools in order to offer to the public something that could feel fresh and experimental, maybe even overlapping with design concepts to be perceived as more coherent.

For instance, the company Campari soda decided to partner with the Italian design brand Qeeboo to promote their brand by bringing to life four design creations aimed at conjugating apparently odd objects to catch people’s attention: the Campari logo and products were evoked all throughout this collaboration, from the shapes to the colors to the decorations, leaving no doubt as what they were about.


Another remarkable example is that of Eataly, joining forces with the designer Paola Navone to fabricate “100% pasta”, a breath-taking, multi-sensorial installation all dedicated to the traditional “pasta al pomodoro”: with the ambitious goal of stressing and promoting the importance of the quality of the raw materials (in design just like in the kitchen), this installation is, as a matter of fact, a journey that goes through all the necessary steps to prepare the recipe, with the main characters being indeed all the ingredients from the garlic to the spaghetti.


At the end, this whole process turns out to be certainly a win for every party involved: apparently extremely distant worlds of products coming together succeed in bringing both target audiences to the same event, not only ensuring a pleasant and immersive experience for the consumer but also allowing each single brand or designer to fulfill its primary goal, whether it is attracting certain people to an exhibition or increasing brand recognition; in fact, what happened was that many people went to the events in the first place because they had heard or seen on social medias that they would have been gifted this or because they sympathized with the brand, but ultimately stayed to really enjoy what the mesmerizing design exhibitions had to offer, leaving with not only what they came for but also possibly some new knowledge, new perspectives and food for thought.

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