Industry Icons

Planted 02020-08-09

Icons for design, development, and marketing.

Design: Paintbrush, pencil, (pen/pen tool, art)
Development: <\> (HTML tag)
Marketing: ?

Google shows the most familiar icon for marketing to be a megaphone? I don’t know about you, but I abhor megaphones.

Which is probably how a lot of people feel about marketing. Tools become associated with the ones who hold them—who use them to interrupt, spam, and pretend they’re welcome.

But the same tool—the megaphone—helped promote women’s participation in society.

Marketing seems less understood and less adored than design and development. At least less concrete.

Let’s dig into each of their definitions.

Design
Websters 1913: A preliminary sketch; an outline or pattern of the main features of something to be executed, as of a picture, a building, or a decoration; a delineation; a plan.

Synonyms — Intention; purpose; scheme; project; plan; idea.

Development
Websters 1913: The act of developing or disclosing that which is unknown; a gradual unfolding process by which anything is developed, as a plan or method, or an image upon a photographic plate; gradual advancement or growth through a series of progressive changes; also, the result of developing, or a developed state.

Synonyms — Unfolding; disclosure; unraveling; evolution; elaboration; growth.

Marketing
Websters 1913: The act of selling or of purchasing in, or as in, a market.

Design, Development, and Marketing as defined by Websters 1913 dictionary.

Start with intention, a plan. Gradually grow the idea through elaboration. Then bring it to the market.

The market is defined as an opportunity for selling anything; demand, as shown by the price offered or obtainable; a town, region, or country, where the demand exists.

That feels old and out of date. It is Websters 1913.

Etymonline writes marketing is the process of moving goods from producer to consumer with emphasis on advertising and sales.

Marketing is about understanding what drives us as humans and bringing a better way forward for those we position ourselves to serve.

Marketing is the act of offering opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward.

But that’s not the established idea. The established idea is the megaphone—the idea that if you interrupt just the right people, you can move forward.

So we get the megaphone as the icon of marketing.