Ever heard somebody say “Your wife ain’t your momma?” It’s usually in response to a man expecting his wife to behave like a mother would – maybe by cutting up his meat at dinner or reminding him to take a shower.
The thing is: if you’re a husband, your wife and mother are two entirely different people, with different needs and desires. I’ve never met a woman who aspired to cut up her husband’s meat, and I’ve never met a mother who wanted to marry her son (we know what they smell like at age 10).
And if you’re designing for a brand, it’s really important to remember that your brand user is not usually the end user. Look at the image above: it’s my own interpretation of Harley Davidson’s two target users.
Harley clearly has two user groups: their aspirational brand user and their actual user. As the brand user, the impossibly handsome and rugged Marlon Brando is used to inform their brand’s personality, position and promise. In the case of web design, this sets the direction of visual and emotional design, copy and imagery.
But if you think about it, Marlon Brando types aren’t really the volume customer of Harley, are they? No – they’re too busy riding to live and being impossibly handsome (and sadly passed away). The people who actually buy Harleys are the people who can afford them: higher income people, usually men, with cash to spare.
This is the businessman on the right. He likes to think of himself as Marlon Brando when he’s on his Harley. He’s probably a 9 to 5 businessman, and he has completely different needs and desires than somebody who spends most of his time on the open road, brooding attractively and causing trouble.
Brand Users are aspirational users, based on general market research. It’s the brand saying “if you want to be like this user, interact with our brand.”
End Users are the actual people using the product or service, based on specific research like surveys and customer feedback. They’re based in reality. It’s users telling the brand “this is who we are.”
You want to make sure you’re not using a brand profile for your project’s information design, interaction design and usability testing. A few pointers:
It’s common for marketing teams to create brand profiles based on the brand user. Insist on creating a persona that represents the actual end user, and make sure everyone on the team knows the difference.
Use your brand profile to inform visual design, copy and imagery; use your persona to direct functionality, content strategy, site structure, and labeling. Interaction design should be informed by both brand and end users.
For the purposes of UX design, keep the number of your end user personas low: no more than 3. When you design for everybody, you design for nobody. (Keep your long list of user types for validating functionality at the page level.)
Also remember: your user probably isn’t Marlon Brando (sadly), and your wife ain’t your momma (thankfully).
Here is a fantastic video detailing a study about what motivates us at work. Turns out it’s not money.
“If we start treating people like people, and not assume that they’re horses; you know, slower, smaller, better-smelling horses… we can actually build organizations that make us and our work lives better off, and I think they have the promise of making our world just a little bit better.”
(This article originally appeared in Hanson Dodge Creative’s May 2010 Active Insights newsletter.)
Back in the early days of interactive, all we talked about was HTML— the simple way to breathe life into website and, by extension, user experience. Quickly we realized HTML wasn’t enough. Websites needed to be easier to get around and find things in, so we started talking about usability. But before long, even usability wasn’t enough. People began to clamor for a user experience that’s beyond beautiful, useful and thrilling. Websites packed with pertinent information — that also reflect our clients’ brands, and, of course, their marketing goals.
Flash-forward to 2009. We aren’t just designing website user experiences any more. We’re designing experiences for any number of online, mobile and offline properties. Consumers have grown to expect all of the things we’re designing to be beautiful, fun and easy to use. That stuff’s a given.
The Huffington Post reported the other day on some recent studies that show what we reasonable people have been saying for years: that the people with the most followers are not necessarily the most influential on Twitter.
In fact, there does not seem to be a correlation at all between follower count and influence.
Of course, anybody on Twitter for more than a few days already knows this: the funniest, most interesting and engaging Twitterers don’t care how many people are following them. They’re there because they’re curious, interested in other people and like to share. And they’re highly influential because of it – everybody pays attention when they speak, because it’s sure to be something good.
And on the flip side: mass followings, spam and begging for “re-tweets” are a surefire way to lose friends and alienate social media people.
You see, Twitter isn’t really anything more than a big party, taken to the internet. The funny and interesting people get all the attention, and the ones desperate to make friends are avoided like that cousin at the cookout trying recruit for his new pyramid scheme.
So why do marketers continue to obsess over friend, fan and follower count? Because it’s far easier to measure numbers than a person’s charm. Problem is, the old marketing measurements don’t apply in social media. But the old-fashioned ideas of being interesting and a good listener do.
As a the number of brands appearing in social media is growing, it seems so is the confusion about how to use it. Can social media bring return on investment? Should it replace a traditional marketing? Which sites are most effective?
The answer is nuanced. Social media can be a marketing tool, but it is also PR, customer service, focus groups and networking, among other things.
And if brands use the wrong approach at the wrong time, they can make huge missteps – and with all those millions of people watching, it can be disastrous. Router manufacturer Belkin learned this lesson the hard way when they tried to pay a blogger for good product reviews.
Posted: March 5th, 2008 | Filed under:Thinking | Tags:CMS, technology | Comments Off
In the last 15 years or so, web content management systems (CMS) have essentially become the only way to build web sites. It makes perfect sense — from large corporate sites to one-page personal web sites, nobody wants to touch code every time they need to change an image or copy.
And the question I hear all the time is simply this: which one is the best one? I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that by now, one system has risen to the top. Sort of like Microsoft Word for word processing. But the truth is, there are literally hundreds of CMS packages out there, and they all do the same thing: update web content outside the site’s source code.
The real question you should be asking is “Which CMS is best for what I need?” Of course, that takes more planning work. Here are the top six things you should consider when selecting a CMS for your site: Read the rest of this entry »
Last Sunday, I read an articledownload Wolfen movie in the NYT about the rise of “cell phone novels” in Japan. You read that right: entire novels pecked out on cell phone keypads, written in the abbreviated language of text messaging, with little plot or character development, uploaded to web communities.
The big news is not that these cell phone novels have gained popularity among young people; it’s that they’re beginning to be republished in book form and making money. In fact, of 2007′s top 10 best-selling Japanese books, five are republished cell phone novels. It’s officially a cultural movement.
Predictably, the value of this new genre of writing is hotly debated, with opposing viewpoints falling squarely along generational lines. The younger generation would like the novels to be recognized as a genre, and older folks dismiss the works as “comic books.” It’s understandable how the novels’ language, replete with emoticons and Leet, might befuddle anybody over 25 who isn’t Merlin Mann. Read the rest of this entry »
Last month, Facebook introduced a new ad program, Beacon, that tracks users’ activity on external web sites in order to serve up targeted advertising on Facebook. The program also broadcasts to the users’ friends what they’re buying.
Sounds great – especially for advertisers – except that Facebook made everybody opted in by default, requiring them to opt out if they didn’t want to participate. Hunh? Needless to say, it was a privacy hot mess. Naturally, users revolted, speaking up all over the blogosphere and even involving online lefty heavyweight MoveOn.org.
Facebook wisely reversed its op-out policy yesterday and apologized to users. Users must now opt in to the program, and no response is considered opting out. The reversal is a smart move by Facebook – after all, what is a social network without a satisfied community? Unlike ad-riddled MySpace, Facebook has now established itself as not only the fastest riser in the social networking game, but also the one that respects its community.
Ever heard somebody say “Your wife ain’t your momma?” It’s usually in response to a man expecting his wife to behave like a mother would – maybe by cutting up his meat at dinner or reminding him to take a shower.
(This article originally appeared in Hanson Dodge Creative’s May 2010 Active Insights newsletter.)
As a the number of brands appearing in social media is growing, it seems so is the confusion about how to use it. Can social media bring return on investment? Should it replace a traditional marketing? Which sites are most effective?
