When I was at VP Marketing at Human Factors International (HFI) HFI’s good friend Javier Broch noticed the emails that HFI Connect sent to confirm membership are, well, lacking. In quoting Lester Wunderman, the father of direct marketing as we know it, Javier mentioned that every interaction counts.
I’ve written about the brand and how the Web experience IS a brand experience. So true. But it surely doesn’t stop there.
The experience as we know, is made up of many interactions. Some simple, some complex. Usability experts know this better than anyone, for they have been at the forefront of interaction design for many years prior to the Web. Us marketeers however, being skilled at offline interactions, have taken longer to fully embrace and understand just how much it means to our brand to have these usability experts on our team.
Just as writers and designers are critical to us in the offline space, those disciplines, combined with interaction designers (aka usability wonks), information architects, programmers of all shapes and sizes, (oh, and lest we forget, the customer) all make up the team that allows us to ensure that the interactions we manage so carefully in print TV, and radio, are managed even more carefully in our online domain.
When I managed a design and development team at Janus Capital, as a marketer, I resided in marketing. Frankly, this made it hard to really “fit” into the marketing team. For let’s face it, the guys who were writing JSPs (yeah, that’s just how old I am) didn’t really jive so much with the guys writing copy. I was lucky however, in that I convinced my manager – the CMO who himself spent years in direct marketing in NY – that every interaction counted to his brand.
What do you think? How is this working, or not, at your company?