Marketing and UX share many similarities. Both disciplines have the user in focus, but they do so through different lenses. Marketing is about increasing the perceived value of a product through brand perception or special offerings that the company might have. UX is about decreasing the interaction cost, which is the sum of mental and physical efforts it takes a user to complete a task or accomplish a goal. Both of these lenses together increase the expected utility of the product for the users; in other words, they aim to make a product or service desirable for buyers and users.
Definining Marketing and UX
How can UX teams work with marketing teams effectively to not only maximize their relationship but also support one another? It starts with understanding the purpose of each discipline.
In general, marketing is involved with promoting and selling products. It includes understanding the market itself, attracting potential customers, and further engaging users who already interact and use the product.
User experience involves understanding and designing for the totality of all the touchpoints that a user has with a company, its services, and its products.
A touchpoint is any point of interaction between the user and organization and could happen on any channel (e.g., mobile app, website, physical store, TV ad, mailing). This is a people-centric approach to design, where the focus is on helping users complete tasks and reach their goals when they interact with a product.
Marketing vs. UX: Similarities
Marketing and UX are two sides of the same coin. Marketing professionals are often driven by business goals around customer acquisition. UX professionals are driven by and think a lot about user experience and satisfaction. Sometimes each team makes tradeoffs on other focus areas to hone in on their own main drivers. Depending on the team’s maturity and how the two teams work together, that’s usually okay. It’s what makes these two teams complementary and balance each other out.
Methods
Marketing and UX teams are driven by understanding human-behavior patterns. As a result, there are a lot of similarities in the methodologies that each discipline employs to understand and represent these behaviors.
Both marketing and UX teams often conduct user interviews, surveys, ethnographic research, and focus groups. But the research questions are different because they aim to research different kinds of behaviors and attitudes.
Both marketing and UX use artifacts such as journey maps and personas to help teams understand their target audiences and their (potential or actual) interactions with the product.
Note that, for the same product, the target audience for marketing can be different than the target audience for UX. For example, let’s say your product is an ed-tech application for elementary school students. The audience for UX will be those who interact with the app; thus, UX will likely create a user persona representing young students. On the other hand, for marketing professionals, the target audience will be app buyers, so they will likely create a buyer persona representing school professionals or parents. This is because marketing professionals focus on how to best promote and sell a product to buyers.
Multiple Stakeholders
UX and marketing teams need to get input from many different stakeholders. UX professionals typically work with product and engineering teams. In the product-development process, UX teams are responsible for representing the user and work to ensure that products meet user needs.
On the other hand, marketing works closely with sales teams. Sales representatives are typically the first people with whom potential customers interact with. By working with sales teams, marketing teams engage potential buyers more effectively because they are getting real-time feedback on marketing material and other engagement efforts.
Building Brand Loyalty
Both marketing and UX value increased customer retention. However, the approach to generating brand loyalty looks different for both teams. For example, marketing teams will look to retain customers through incentive structures, discounts, or special access. UX teams might focus on ease of use and on seamless, painless interactions across all channels, as these qualities often foster brand trust and loyalty.
Tensions Between Marketing and UX
While sharing many similarities, these two disciplines face certain tensions largely because of their differing priorities and approaches to users or customers.
Marketing Elements May Deteriorate the UX
Marketing often aims to get information from users to ultimately tailor marketing campaigns closely to each individual user. In doing so, it sometimes uses design tactics that go against a smooth user experience. For example, marketing may opt to include a popup on the landing page. The popup may ask for contact information or customer feedback or may offer promotions in exchange for mailing-list subscriptions. These are important for lead generation, which is the act of building a potential customer base. However, such popups often interrupt users and restrict their ability to see or interact with background content behind the modal. Even worse, these elements often appear multiple times during a flow.
Marketing Goals May Infiltrate User-Research Goals
In an effort to save money, many organizations include marketing goals in their usability-testing studies. It might seem ideal to kill two birds with one stone, but marketing tactics may end up biasing users and corrupting the study results.
For example, a UX team for an ecommerce website may have learned through analytics data that users abandon their carts at a certain point during the checkout process. Therefore, the team is planning a usability-testing study to understand the reasons for that behavior. But the marketing team for the same organization wants to use the opportunity to understand the impact of including a promotion for related items, so it argues for interrupting the user’s flow and asking them pointed questions about the promotion. Needless to say, these questions can easily bias the user and corrupt the overall external validity of the study and the quality of the UX-related findings.
That being said, it is possible to address marketing goals within a user-research study, but the methodology needs to be sound. One possible format may include starting with the user-testing part and then ending the study with an interview that addresses the marketing goals.
Marketing Often Precedes UX in Organization Priorities
Market research is typically conducted before product development or product updates. UX-research methods can be used throughout the product-development life cycle. As a result, market research generally precedes UX in organization priorities. When this happens, marketing-research methods are sometimes used inappropriately to test interface elements.
Marketing teams strongly rely on self-reporting from users, through focus groups and surveys . UX-research teams largely rely on observing user behaviors. Sometimes, traditional marketing-research methods, like focus groups, are used inappropriately to evaluate user interfaces.
For example, marketing professionals may ask target users in a focus group how they would interact with an interface element or if they would buy a certain product. In UX research, we have learned that what people say isn’t always an indicator of what they will do. Users’ responses aren’t necessarily reliable when they are removed from their context; people may also feel pressured to answer in a certain way because of groupthink. Instead of asking users what they would do, UX researchers should spend time observing their behaviors through usability testing.
Collaboration Among UX and Marketing
UX is a relatively young discipline. And when UX maturity is low, it is not surprising that staff are confused by the distinction between the two fields. An unclear understanding of roles can result in teams feeling isolated, territorial, or working in silos.
Here are 4 ways in which UX and marketing teams can collaborate effectively:
1. Increase communication to prevent silos and educate one another.
Marketing and UX teams need to consistently communicate with each another — for example, by scheduling monthly meetings to share updates. Marketing can seek ways to develop transparency around in-progress marketing campaigns. UX can invite marketing individuals to relevant product meetings. In this way, both teams are staying informed, acknowledging overlaps, and addressing them proactively.
Both teams can also use these interactions as an opportunity to educate each other on their respective priorities, which often conflict. Teams can discuss ways to work through disagreements that may come up and further build an understanding in what the other team is focused on and how it conducts research. For example, if a marketing-team member learns about an upcoming study you are working on and wants you to also test marketing-driven design elements, you can use these meetings as an opportunity to explain how this approach may interfere with your current research goals and discuss an alternative. Or, if a marketing team plans sharing a UI element in a focus group, you can educate the team members on why usability testing would be a better alternative.
2. Share research insights
Marketing collects information on the current market. This information can help UX understand broader patterns that it can expect from a potential user base. On the other hand, UX teams often collect information around initial impressions; this information can be valuable for designing or evaluating various marketing campaigns. For example, in usability testing you may learn users’ initial reactions to a product-launch campaign presented on the website. This is an opportunity for marketing to gain qualitative insights around the campaign. Both teams should consider displaying their findings on the company’s intranet or share those findings during a standing meeting.
3. Design a shared persona(s).
We’ve discussed before how marketing and UX teams have some overlaps in their approach to supporting existing users or attracting new customers. To make sure they are aligned, consider designing a persona for current users who are also potential customers for new products. This shared persona could be used by both teams but shouldn’t replace separate marketing and UX personas. Rather, it should be an additional persona that will encourage teams to think about users holistically.
4. Align key performance indicators (KPI)
A lot of teams fall into the mindset of “this is what our team needs to prioritize to hit our goals.” And, often, different teams have different goals and metrics that they are trying to optimize. Marketing and UX management should consider aligning some KPIs to encourage collaboration. Good UX can improve sales or conversions. Similarly, attracting new customers helps the business grow and informs the design of new interactions with your product or service.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you need both strong marketing and strong UX to drive business growth and satisfy customer needs. Whether it is to persuade potential users or support users in completing a task, understanding people is at the core of what both these disciplines do. When marketing and UX teams are intentional about collaborating effectively, these two teams not only exist in harmony, but support users and help a business thrive.
References
Kathleen W. Guan, Joni Salminen, Lene Nielsen, Soon-Gyo Jung, and Bernard J. Jansen. 2021. Information design for personas in four professional domains of user experience design, healthcare, market research, and Social Media Strategy. Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2021), 4446–4453. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24251/hicss.2021.540
