Communication: The Interface of Your Company

Ever since Starbucks was hailed for selling a “customer experience,” not merely a product, the marketing glossary has been reinvented. In boardrooms across the country, marketing executives pontificate about their brand experience, customer interaction strategies, and corporate culture. I try to keep my eye-rolling to a minimum, but I could not help noticing the remarkably simple approach that a colleague of mine recently presented.

I have had the recent luxury of working with J.S. Design Concepts, which has recently been rolled into a division of Carter & Co. As an Industrial Design firm, J.S. has a wealth of experience in designing user interfaces for consumer products. As I learned about this unique design process and I considered our current projects, we soon realized that the methodology for creating a user interface is one in the same with the daily challenges of marketing communications.

Consider each message you send as another button on a panel, or options on the LED screen. With each function you want to present, the interface designer must predict and cater to the ways a user would interact. The marketer’s challenge is no different. Will people hear us if we abandon print and go entirely online? How do I direct prospects to our website? How are leads received and dealt with? Moreover, the interface that a marketer creates must first make the “user”—the prospective customer—desire to interact in the first place.

It’s vital in marketing to consider the complete interface that we create for our audience. We must predict our customers’ interaction with our message and create an interface that’s user friendly and effective—from first impression to the closed sale.