I've been reading a lot of articles for school about how user experience fits in a company hierarchy. All of them make a clear distinction between marketing and user experience. They say that the marketing objectives (selling) are different than the user experience/design objectives (making things usable*).
As someone who worked in marketing, I don't fully understand why these entities have to be so separate. Why can't marketing people use UX concepts to gather their information, too?
I always think of my experience at the startup. We were frantically planning for an event (as usual in reactionary startup-ville), and the marketing people threw together this new campaign called The Republic. It was geared towards teenage skateboarders, in an attempt to create a street team or affiliate program. It had that whole revolutionary, we-take-the-world-by-storm-via-helmet-cameras vibe. It also required people to wear bandannas. I remember thinking "hmm, this is a weird idea." Right before launch, someone realized that this was actually not the product demographic at all. In fact, the users were 25-40 year old action sports enthusiasts. Perhaps if we had incorporated some user requirements gathering techniques (such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc), we would have been able to produce a more fitting marketing campaign. This isn't to say that companies don't use user requirements techniques in marketing, but it's definitely not common practice in smaller organizations.
The articles always talk about how the design team gets requirements from marketing but not vice versa. To create a truly successful product, I think this information flow should go both ways.
Look at the new Windows 7 campaign - Windows 7 was my idea. They are leveraging their UX practices to sell things. I don't know why this isn't done more frequently. After all, people like technology that works. Plus, if user experience practices didn't help companies sell more things, companies wouldn't use them. So why such a strong distinction?
Maybe it's just a case of academics over-analyzing these concepts and trying to create clear distinctions between similar fields. I don't think it's so clear-cut in reality.
*Not to be confused with user-friendly.
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1 comment:
I think you're spot on here, kwoz. Marketing and UX both involve a great deal of empathic research - essentially figuring out what your users want (and what they don't yet know they want), and giving it to them. The helmet camera example you gave really demonstrates this idea.
Keep up the good writing.
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