Is user experience and marketing one and the same?

I’m planning on speaking at a few upcoming events and I’m trying to discover something original to talk about (other than process, tools etc. that seem to engulf the conference circuit!).

I’d only really talk about something I’m passionate about, that currently being:

1. user experience
2. product design
3. cycling

I’ll save my thoughts on cycling for another time (or just check out cycling-heavy Twitter feed!), but the relationship between marketing and UX seems so close, I wondered whether others had found similarities.

Through my research, I stumbled upon the 52 Weeks of UX blog, with the title “Why UX is really just good marketing”. The author, Joshua, had this to say about it:

UX is really just good marketing. It’s about knowing who your market is, knowing what is important to them, knowing why it is important to them, and designing accordingly — Joshua Porter

Reminding ourselves what the two disciplines do (thanks Wikipedia!):

Marketing is about communicating the value of a product, service or brand to customers or consumers for the purpose of promoting or selling that product, service, or brand.

User Experience (UX) involves a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. User experience includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership.

Increasingly now, we’re calling websites and apps “products”. Product designers now include people that design websites, mobile apps and the like. The Government Digital Service quite famously said that they didn’t have any user experience designers — that user experience is the responsibility of everyone in the team.

Marketing products can include making documentaries — like the one InVision made called Design Disruptors.

Design Disruptors doesn’t really sell the InVision product. What it does do is associate itself with the likely customers of that product.

Here is a trailer:

Sometimes you can sell a product by just making it damn good. Steve Jobs knew something about that:

We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through — Steve Jobs

So are they the same?

No. Do some products and apps sell just through the fact that they are awesome? Yes. Do all products need marketing? It’s very likely. Has that space changed? Very much so!