Users VS. Consumers — having been in Marketing for years, why I think UX and Marketing are two sides of the same coin.
I started my career in marketing with Nestle, one of the largest fast-moving consumer good companies (FMCG). It was the first place where I learnt to understand “consumers”. Moving to Johnson & Johnson, I then realised the difference between “consumers” and “customers” as I was focusing more on customer marketing. I became a customer/shopper expert when I took the role Shopper Development Manager at Colgate-Palmolive. This was how I have developed my knowledge about consumer and customer research.
When I decided to change my career to UX, I did a lot of research about the industry before enrolling myself in General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive course. The more I studied, the more it reassured me that UX was similar to marketing. The Double Diamond process was pretty much the same as the process that I have practiced in those FMCG companies.
Let me give you an example here. When Nestle marketing team wanted to launch a new coffee product, we started from consumer research to discover what our consumers needed about coffee — their behaviours, goals, and pain points.
Sounds familiar?
Using qualitative and quantitative research methods, I would then have massive data from various sources such as consumer focus groups, consumption and purchase history, home visit, in-store observation, and retail sales.
One of the most memorable experiences at Nestle was that the company went extra miles for us to understand the real consumers by offering consumer home stay. Yes, I meant a few nights stay at our consumers’ places. This way we were able to observe their daily lives, what they did, how they felt — and how their experience with coffee was like.
You would be surprised that Nescafe 3in1 consumers in the South of Thailand didn’t have an instant coffee the same way we experienced. Instead of putting the coffee mixes in hot water, they tore a sachet, poured the coffee mixes in the mouth and followed by warm water. For this group of consumers, coffee was not to enjoy but to keep them awake so that they could work hard the whole day in the sea. They were fishermen, a popular occupation in the south coast of the country. This also allowed me to learn that demographics affected how people used a product to solve their problems.
The massive data collected from different methods used to wear me out in the beginning of my career.
However, the more years I worked, the more I practiced a skillset for market researcher, including an ability to quickly see patterns across data and translate them into insights.
Here came a critical part. We might have found hundreds of insights, but what insights would be meaningful for the business? While I found the interesting way that the fisherman consumers used our product, it may have had a little impact on new product strategy. Instead, I put more focus on another group of consumers whose needs haven’t been met.
This process is pretty much like UX — focus and focus, we solve one problem at a time.
We discovered that some women consumers were taking supplement while going on diet as they wanted a quick fix to help with digestion and metabolism. These insights were the outcomes of several workshops, and involved multiple stakeholders brainstorming and discussing the opportunities. The insights have been turned into a plan to develop a new beauty coffee, Nescafe Proslim. It tried to solve the problem for those female consumers by adding an extra weight loss benefit to coffee.
After this point, it was all about new product development, involving cross-functional teams from research, design, production, supply chain, marketing and sales. Each team would take part in different phases of product development, while a Marketing Manager was the centre, making sure everyone was on the same page. As target female consumers looked for extra benefits, it was important to design packaging that could engage the consumers as well as communicate the weight loss.
Learning UX’s Double Diamond theory later, I have found it easy to apply my marketing knowledge to understand and practice the process.
The first part of the diamond, where user research sits, includes research, analysis and synthesis — these are basically what I have done to conduct market research with consumers or customers. Both user and consumer research has the same goal — to discover insights and turn them into strategic actions.
The other diamond part could be considered as product development in order to deliver solutions for consumers or customers. Now we can see that the process used in marketing were similar to user/customer experience design in the tech industry. We have designed the coffee based on the consumer insights, developed mock-ups, tested and refined until launch.
From a marketing perspective, a consumer product launch meant a big scale and high investment, and therefore it was nearly impossible to make a quick change or improvement after launch. UX, on the other hand, would have more flexibility to iterate and improve the product based on the users’ feedback.
For example, once the Nescafe Proslim had been launched with its TV commercials, the consumer feedback showed low scores in benefit communication. They didn’t know how the coffee could control their weight. It would cost a fortune to reedit the TV commercials, so we tried to fix this by explaining the weight loss function in other media.
Having been in both sides of the coin, either marketing or UX has given me fascinating moments when I discovered the insights through different methodologies.
What I love about UX is that the research is likely to be in a smaller scale, but deeper in quality. UX research allows me to empathise with users and feel the real humans.
Moreover, creating a realistic persona has given me different feelings from identifying a target consumer. While a target consumer in marketing is about demographics and behaviours, a persona is more humanised with feelings. I have learnt that developing personas not only help stake holders identify their target group, but also create empathy and understand where users are coming from. This is probably why I feel like I am researching and designing to make people’s lives better.
ABOUT ME
Hi, I’m a Marketing Manager who has recently started a new journey in UX Design. I love translating data to insights, and that leads me to my passion in user research. I’m based in Canberra, Australia. Check out my work at www.suelueng.com
