UXPA Boston Conference 2022

A year ago, the author made an interesting career choice — moving from a world renowned strategic design agency to a fast growing integrated marketing agency. They had noticed a trend brewing and felt there was huge potential to apply their decade of human-centered design (HCD) experience to this space.

As they had a crash course in what it really means to be a contemporary marketeer, their suspicions were confirmed — HCD and Experience strategy has a huge role to play. Contemporary marketing plays an important role in shaping people’s perception and society itself, and the tools available to marketers to influence human behavior wield a lot of power. This is much too important to not interject thinking that is centered around what is good for people, retaining their agency and choice, and meeting marketing goals without user manipulation.

Additionally, Marketing stakeholders have huge stakes in projects run by their UX/CX peers and in some less design-mature organizations, are entirely responsible for digital experiences themselves. These scenarios should lead to better cohesive thinking across these domains.

So, all the experience they had with design research, UX, behavior change, transformation design, co-creation, service design and experience strategy — seemed relevant and ready to be applied in a new context.

Soon, they had developed a new vocabulary and started thinking about: authentic brands that deliver on their promise by way of great post purchase CX; service blueprinting in collaboration with CRM strategists as a means of orchestrating customer communication; personalization on public sites that helps move users forward on the sales funnel and is “not creepy”; the demise of third party cookies and providing users with meaningful value in exchange for zero and first party data. All of these require expertise in behavioral research and translating findings to actionable directives for marketing and UX functions.