Many user experience professionals shy away from marketing.  In many ways, who can blame them?  We’ve observed customers ignore banner ads, watched pop-up ads annoy and confuse customers, and read rants by usability pioneers about the evil that ads wield on web design.  We have seen attempts at applying a traditional “broadcast” model of marketing fail in interactive mediums.

But good marketing is more than ads—a whole lot more. Several concepts in marketing jive quite well with user experience.

Integrated Marketing Communications

Relationship Marketing

Customer Relationship Management

The Good: The Communication Experience Is the Marketing
By emphasizing consistency, customization, and credibility, these concepts echo a few characteristics of what I’ve described as customer-centered communication.  

These concepts additionally

• Lead us to view a customer’s interaction with a brand holistically instead of isolated in certain channels.
• Challenge us to effectively apply customer data such as demographics and buying history to improve communications.
• Encourage us to think about building long-term relationships with customers.

The Potentially Bad: User Experience Opportunities
The potentially bad side of these concepts is, of course, their execution. (Remember those banner ads.)  Here are a few ways user experience professionals can help avoid the bad.

Don’t Interrupt Me: Placement and Content 
Because user experience professionals 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.

Example: A well-placed, relevant, and undisruptive BP banner ad on CNN.com that engaged even a skeptic like me. It shares a similar topic with the article, visually stands out on the simple page, and expands instead of taking the user away from the page.

Don’t Just Tell Me—Show Me
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 makes you aware of what happened. Showing engages you in the experience. I think showing is critical to making brand attributes clear and to developing trusting, long-term relationships with customers.  User experience professionals can help brands “show” in interactive mediums.

Example: Betty Crocker has been demonstrating brand attributes such as practical, friendly cooking expertise since the 1920s through recipes, cooking tips, cooking shows, promotions for discounted cookware, and more. (Below is a 1951 print ad with tips and a recipe.) These efforts continue successfully today on the Betty Crocker website and its RSS feeds.

Help Me Help Myself: Applying Customer Data
User experience professionals can make the most 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 customized and therefore more valuable and easier to use. 

Quiet the Noise: Optimizing for Specific Channels
Of course, we can make marketing communications highly usable and accessible in specific channels.

Okay, maybe communication never truly left … but our awareness of it has grown keen as we shape effective customer experiences in interactive media. Recently, Donovan (Director of User Experience) gave a presentation about web 2.0’s impact on the landscape of user (customer) experience.  He convincingly described how web 2.0 capabilities evolved as a response to user needs and allow the web to become, among other things, the communication medium people envisioned 10 years ago.

In this changed landscape of customer experience, what is communication exactly?  How do we ensure customers not only get our messages but also find them relevant and convincing?  How do we coordinate messages across multiple channels to deepen our relationships with customers?

As a start toward answering such questions, I just published “Rediscovering Communication“ for the online magazine UXmatters.  Please add your insights as we journey through this exciting landscape together.

Art Hall is currently a management consultant at Alvarez & Marsal, President of the Atlanta Chapter of the CRM Association and was recognized as a 2007 Customer Champion by 1tot1 Magazine where he was the VP of Sales & Customer Care at NetBank in Alpharetta, GA. He’s also someone that each fantasy football season attempts to compete against me and each season fails miserably at that I recently had the opportunity to ask Art a few questions about his thoughts on CRM.

Art, CRM seems to have many meanings depending on who you ask. How do you define it?

I define CRM as an organization’s responsibility to “proactively” manage a customer relationship on a one-to-one basis. I use the word “proactively” because the three customer value levers are for an organization to “know them”, “hear them” and to “help them.” While the basis of the relationship may start off reactive (i.e. collecting the initial understanding of the customer) over time an organization should have the customer intelligence, visibility, insight and agility to predict customer behavior over the course of a customer lifecycle. Conspicuously absent from my definition is any reference to technology though technology is an enabler for organizations to achieve such agility.

I like that you kept technology out of the definition of CRM. Obviously technology has had some impact on CRM initiatives, in your opinion what has been the biggest change that technology has made in CRM?

This is a tough question Jeff because I think there are several “big” changes that technology has made in CRM. For one, we are seeing off-premise and “hybrid” CRM models come into play as an alternative for organizations that do not want to invest in an “on-premise” model. We are also seeing the rise of on-demand CRM which Salesforce.com is recognized as a market leader. Now, we are seeing Open Source CRM models which allow the CRM software and its source code under an open source license to study, change and improve its design. SugarCRM, for example, is a CRM solution provider that is making huge waves in the CRM space and providing a flexible alternative for many organizations looking to deploy a CRM application. So, I guess the biggest change that technology has made in CRM is flexibility.

Many people say that email is the web’s killer app. Would you say it’s the killer app of CRM or is there something else in your mind that fits that moniker better?

I don’t know if I would say email is the web’s killer app. It is only the killer app if an organization is taking the results of email campaigns and feeding it back to a central data warehouse and the organization is taking the results to learn and improve regarding which email campaigns work with each customer segment or personas. Email is certainly cheaper, but with SPAM control nowadays I wonder how effective the marketing reach is on an aggregate basis.

Which companies seem to do the best job overall with customer relations?

In my experience, I love the Ritz-Carlton. I was blown away how they knew my name and I never stayed at the hotel before until this past February. Wachovia has done a nice job in customer relations over the years; it will be interesting to see how their customer satisfaction holds up on the heels of their announcement of off shoring a lot of their customer facing components to India. Wachovia seems pretty confident they can deliver.

Now I get to put you on the spot, which companies seem to do a very poor job with customer relations?

Ok Jeff, you are really pushing it. I HATE DELTA’S SPEECH ENABLED IVR!!!!! I don’t like the BP Gas station on the corner of I-77 East & Gateway Corporate Boulevard in Columbia, SC. I was going to drop kick an employee there last year for bad service. I have mixed feelings towards Apple. I used to hold them in high regard for customer relations but encountered an experience recently where I felt like they were trying to get me to move to a new version of an iPod instead of fixing the one that I had.