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In preparation for writing this post I poked around on Google, checked out a blog or two, and read something about the disappointing results of attempts at marketing on Second Life. In fact the amount of discussion on this topic was a little overwhelming.

I'm the first to admit that customer experience is vital to the success of any business, and know for sure that frustrating interactions with a brand can ruin my impressions of what might otherwise be a great product or service. But I've got to be honest, I find the increasingly scientific methods large corporations use to create customer experience not exactly distasteful, but perhaps futile.

I suppose what I mean is that there's a huge difference between making the most of what you've got, and pretending you're something you're not. When I see a UPS commercial asking what Brown can do for me (worst theme for an ad campaign ever, by the way), and then I'm verbally abused by staff at their call centre for the heinous crime of trying to track a package, it's an understatement to say that something doesn't sit right. Saying you do something well isn't the same as actually doing it well, just as manufacturing a customer experience sitting around a boardroom table isn't the same as actually believing and doing it.

The problem, I think, is mostly because the marketing department is usually so far down the hallway, so to speak, from the bits of the company with which customers actually interact. There's been lots of talk in the past couple of years about marketing performance measurement (better aligning marketing with real results, whether that means sales targets or more subjective measures such as brand awareness), and consequently lots of marketers have jumped on the bandwagon of getting better data about their campaigns and related activities, and getting it faster.

Mostly I think striving to measure marketing to the nth degree is an utter waste of time and money, or at least when it's a substitute for getting marketers to understand their product and interact with the customers who buy it. At heart I'm a simple kind of guy and I believe that it's all about having genuine conversations: "here's my product, I'd like you to buy it because it's good in ways a, b and c; once you've bought it I'll be here to answer any of your questions directly." Honestly, I think a lot of the demand for "optimization" of marketing campaigns is a function of getting the product and the articulation of its value wrong in the first place; and polished pitches about customer experience are usually just empty promises.

Building a great customer experience really sounds like a great idea, but unless you have the influence and persistence to make it happen, please don't put it in your ads or the stuffers that come with my bill. I promise we won't put it on Gaboogie's website unless it's true.

I've spent about 20 hours over the last two days building wireframes to assist the GUI developers. Let me make something clear: I really don't heart wireframes. But it did make me realize how important it is that everyone in any organization really understand the product from back to front. It also reinforced the extent to which, agile development or not, there's no room for ambiguity or assumptions if you're truly concerned with getting the user experience right. What I mean is it's no use having us marketing types pontificate in purely general terms about how we'd like things to work; if we really want to have any influence we need to get our hands dirty.

Marketers get frustrated with engineers because they often feel as though the engineers are speaking a different language. (More often it's simply that marketers shut down instinctively when they hear words that sound remotely like techspeak.) Engineers get frustrated with marketers because they often feel as though the marketers trivialize what it takes to get the product right. The result is a yawning chasm between expectations on both sides: of what the product is, how it does work and how it should work. It also leads to misguided marketing (because marketers don't understand what they're selling) and misguided product development (because engineering isn't alinged with what's saleable).

This chasm is easier to avoid in a startup than, for example, a large software development firm, but I'm happy to immerse myself in wireframes if it means getting the product right now, not trying to fix it later, hampered by entirely avoidable disconnects and misinterpretations.