In Japan, "design" is often thought as drawings of products. But "design" includes the stage of making concepts of products. Design and Marketing has strong relationship. And they has same area.
In this site, something related to design is below.
Persona is a model of users.
If we design for a person or a few people, we can design with deep thoughts for our users. We thinks users minds and spirits.
Design for persona uses such our thoughts.
Each of us has different image of "user". So the member of a design needs a same image.
And the image should be resonable.
Collect many customers's information.
Then make persona by the information with Affinity Diagram , Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis .
Next Value Engineering