Marketing Isn’t a Dirty Word

The Potentially Bad: User Experience Opportunities

The potentially bad side of these marketing concepts is, of course, their execution. (Remember those banner ads.) A focus on user experience offers tremendous opportunity for informing the strategy and execution of these marketing concepts. This section describes some ways in which we, as UX professionals, can ensure successful execution.

Don’t Interrupt Me: Placement and Content

UX professionals can help determine the most appropriate and effective place for marketing communication in a specific channel. Because we understand how and why customers actually use the channels, we know when and where marketing communication is most appropriate. We also can inform its content.

Take a retail Web site, for example. Promoting special offers and related products that encourage continued shopping are good ideas, but usually not during the checkout process, when a customer has already committed to purchasing. At that point, promotions would interrupt the checkout process. Promotions are more relevant earlier in a customer’s buying process—for example, when a customer adds an item to the shopping cart or reviews the contents of the cart and might want to keep shopping. However, a promotion that might be relevant during checkout is a credit card promotion—especially if the customer can apply for the card without disrupting the checkout process. For example, the Dell.com example shown in Figure 3 includes subtle promotion of the Dell credit account, but no other product promotions appear during the checkout process.

Figures 5 and 6 show another example: On CircuitCity.com, when a customer adds an item to the cart, a confirmation appears along with several types of promotions that encourage continued shopping, as shown in Figure 5. However, once the customer enters the actual checkout process, no promotions appear.

The infamous phone menu provides another example. I once did usability testing on an interactive customer service phone menu with a lengthy marketing message at both the beginning and the end. Not surprisingly, customers found the marketing messages annoying, because they kept the customers from satisfying their immediate needs. Marketing products to customers before solving their problems never works.

Still another case was getting the marketing focus right when my project team at Cingular Wireless redesigned the customized Cingular Service Summary (CSS) document, shown in Figure 7, and related welcome communications. When welcoming a new customer, we eliminated irrelevant marketing elements. Thus, CSS focused on information relevant to new customers, not selling more products. For example, we removed a coverage map, because customers consider coverage during the process of choosing their wireless carrier, not after they’ve already decided to become a customer. We focused the communications on moving the customers forward in completing their rather complex purchase—reminding customers of their plan details, explaining how to set up features, and educating them about their billing and customer service options. By explaining self-service options for paying bills and checking minutes, CSS helped customers make their service more convenient to them and reduced customer service costs for Cingular.

Finally, the right kind of banner ad can be effective in the right context. A couple of months ago, I clicked a banner ad for the first time ever. The ad appeared on the newly redesigned CNN.com Web site with an article about the environment. Shown in Figure 8, the ad was not promoting a specific product, but awareness of BP’s environmental efforts. Thus, the ad was relevant to the article’s topic. And the ad stood out visually, because the page had little visual clutter. When I clicked the ad—rather than taking me to a different site or even a different page—the ad expanded to reveal more information. Because the ad was well-placed, relevant, and not disruptive, it engaged even a skeptic like me.

Don’t Just Tell Me—Show Me

A long time ago, a writing professor taught me a critical lesson I haven’t forgotten: Know when to tell and when to show.  In writing, telling means reporting what happened or explaining what to do. Showing means describing the experience—in a sense, creating the experience through words. For example, telling is reporting that you hiked 25 miles on the Appalachian Trail last weekend. Showing is describing the weather, the scenery, the sounds, the animals you encountered, the soreness in your muscles. Telling informs people about what happened. Showing engages them in the experience. I think communicating by showing is critical to developing trusting, long-term relationships with customers.

In marketing, an example of mostly telling is a traditional TV or print advertisement. It conveys a key message through brief text and imagery or video. One example is Nike’s “Just Do It” advertising campaign. Some examples that incorporate more showing are Nike’s sponsorships of athletic events and placement of its logo on clothing athletes wear while competing. An example of mostly showing is Nike’s microsite that provides information and tools for managing the running experience and is centered around its Nike+ product line. (Nike+ is a system that includes shoes with a sensor and a kit that lets the iPod Nano track running metrics.) Shown in Figure 9, the Nike+ microsite integrates running programs, tracking tools, shopping for gear, and more to help customers create the optimal running experience.

Betty Crocker, the General Mills icon that represents a line of baking products, provides a unique, long-term example of showing. This brand has been showing customers how to bake since its inception in 1921, when they created the iconic food expert as a way of personalizing responses to customers’ questions. The Betty Crocker persona evolved to share baking advice, recipes, and more through a radio show and eventually a TV show. As shown in Figure 10, even their print ads focused less on telling customers about Betty Crocker products and more on helping them use the products, including tips and recipes. Today, Betty Crocker engages customers with baking ideas, tips, coupons, recipes, and more through its Web site, shown in Figure 11, and RSS feeds, shown in Figure 12. Similarly, with our emphasis on the experience, or showing, UX professionals can leverage online technologies to deepen customers’ relationships with a brand.

Help Me Help Myself: Applying Customer Data

In this age of privacy concerns, we have to treat customer data responsibly and manage users’ perception of its use. Through user research, we can help evaluate when and how applying customer data enhances the customer experience and how customers perceive it—helpful, annoying, alarming, and so on. In my professional experience, once customers have chosen to enter an ongoing relationship with a company by subscribing to a service or signing up for an account, they are more comfortable with obvious applications of their data.

UX professionals can also make the most effective use of customer data across customer self-service channels and applications such as store kiosks, Web applications, automated phone systems, and more. We know how to leverage that data to make self-service more valuable and easier to use. For instance, when a customer calls customer service or signs in to a kiosk or Web site, we can customize menus based on the customer’s account. So, the customer hears or sees only relevant options. Similarly, we can make the most of customer data in applications and systems that support customer service representatives, whether in a store or a call center. For instance, we can design better visualizations of customer data and make storing, finding, and reading notes taken during customer interactions easier.

Quiet the Noise: Optimizing for Specific Channels

Of course, we can make marketing communications highly usable and accessible within specific channels. I discussed many examples of such optimization, or quieting of technical noise, in my previous column.

The Ugly? Shaking Up Organizational Roles and Structures

When the user experience is the marketing, the line between marketing and user experience blurs. So, within a specific company, where does the marketing role end and the user experience role begin? I don’t know the complete answer yet. Marketing tends to represent company goals such as winning a certain number of new customers or creating a certain brand perception, while user experience tends to represent customer goals such as ordering a product that offers the best value. I’m not sure exactly where the strategic work of synchronizing company and customer goals lies, but I do know user experience needs to be involved in that work. Further complicating matters in larger companies is the channel silo. When marketing and user experience roles focus on specific channels with little coordination across them, creating a holistic customer experience is tough. In the short term, UX professionals can work with marketing teams—similar to the way in which they work on product development teams. I see value, too, in bringing the UX professionals who designed a product into the product’s marketing, because they know the targeted users so well.

Over the long term, as the ways in which companies interact with customers evolve, will the user experience and marketing roles evolve? If so, how? I think these roles should evolve, but they can’t unless organizational structures change. Channel silos must integrate or collaborate efficiently. To some extent the future of these roles depends on a company’s domain, focus, and target customers. A company focusing on product development for businesses might need to approach these roles differently from a company focusing on services for consumers. I can see these roles becoming very intertwined at a services company, perhaps resulting in a Customer Experience division that houses sales, marketing, customer service, and user experience.

These thoughts provide only the beginnings of an answer. I invite you to share your insights and experiences regarding these important questions.