I've seen dozens of these efforts over the years and many of them fail for the same two reasons: 1) a failure to understand who you're marketing to 2) lack of clarity on what you want the campaign to achieve.
On #1: Organizations are big places with lots of roles. Which job functions do you most want to raise awareness with? Focus on them. Get people from those communities involved in planning the marketing campaign, or even being the spokesperson. Treat the entire campaign as a design process - it's absurd how few UX teams do this. Posters in the break rooms, speeches at all hands meetings, etc. all seem nice and good but are aimed at no one in particular. They are easy to ignore. When was the last time you were inspired to do something different at work because of a *poster* ? Probably never. There is never a single person in an organization looking for *more* work to do - certainly not while on break - and many UX teams unknowingly pitch themselves as more hurdles for programmers and managers (UI Standards almost always feel like a tax). So make sure the campaign focuses on how the UI team helps programmers be more efficient or produce higher quality software, etc. Show a photo of an ipod or a porsche with the tagline "want your project to look and feel like this? Call us." will go much further than yet another UCD diagram, which mostly makes people's eyes glaze over. On #2: how you do you imagine the result of a perfect marketing campaign? Will there be more requests for work from your team? More budget for you? What? Handle this like a design problem - refine and refine what your victory condition is. Awareness on its own doesn't buy much. Lets say there is 100% percent awareness - what does that give you? Maybe you get that magic X with 10% awareness, of the 10% is the right people. The most successful way to market a UI team inside a company is to get the lead programmer or manager of a successful release to talk to as many of his peers and say "a big part of our success was working closely with the UI Team from day #1". If you have no success stories, don't bother marketing until you have one. Nothing has more influence than an endorsement from someone with respect and power. And nothing has less influence that the leader of a UI Team talking about how important the UI Team is. -Scott Scott Berkun www.scottberkun.com > Our UI team is getting ready to start a marketing program. The purpose > is to raise awareness of the existence of the team, educate people as > to what we do, what UI is and some basic information about it. This > will lead up to a training class on UI standards. The plan right now > is a series of posters for the break room shared by the US R&D > department. We are planning on changing them every week or every other > week depending on the topics we have to cover. > > Has anyone tried something like this before? Any advice, thoughts etc > would be welcome. > > Thanks, > Jamie McAtee > UI Designer > Manhattan Associates > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
