Regardless of your line of work, you're likely to hear yourself or someone in your department talking about how indispensible your field is. Just the other day, my accounting professor said something like:

Accounting is the most important part of business. If you can't make and manage profit, then you can't do business.

Similarly, engineers can claim:

"If you don't have a product, you've got nothing to market or sell. You can't stay in business."

Marketers will say:

"Even if you have a fantastic product, if you have no one to market it for you, you'll go nowhere."

I once worked with a software engineer who said something like:

Marketing is the biggest waste of money. They never do anything for the company.

The fact of the matter is, just about every part of the corporate tree is important. It all operates like a bunch of happy cogs in a clock.

I often marvel at how apparently unimportant a good company brand is for some and for others, brand is everything. Obviously it has a lot to do with budget, but it seems to always be the last thing on the priority list as a business develops.

Make it work, then make it pretty.
–The World

Why not make it work and make it pretty at the same time? You hire scores of product managers, engineers, and even people to manage the managers. All it takes is one talented employee to make a massive aesthetic difference to your brand as well as the design of your products.

As hard as it is to look beyond the functional, pay more attention to how your image greets, treats, entices, and preserves your onlookers.