I have noticed a few blog postings out there where a marketing professionals talk-down the importance of user experience design and often make comments based on basic misunderstandings about our disciplines.

Marketing professionals are "users" of information architecture. Asides from their physical usage on the systems we design they are also users on the bigger picture of the marketplace.

This is what needs to happen in order to improve the understanding with marketing:

• Information architects (IA's) need to understand and explain how marketers can use information architecture for their marketing purposes
• Since marketers have a wide range of duties, the IA's need to understand the specific goals and tasks that marketers perform and how IA can help them accomplish each one of those goals
• IA's need to clarify the most often mis-understood aspects of our profession
• Companies need to invest the time to allow this alignment
  

Some of the most recent misunderstandings I've encountered recently, (I am paraphrasing):

• "User experience design is just web design"
• "User personas are the same as marketing segmentation"
• "Marketing research is the same as user research"
  
• "User experience design doesn't deal with business process"
• "Information architecture does not help to persuade the customer"
  

Why this is important
The understanding between these two departments (User experience and marketing) is not only important to success in our marketplace, but it can be a marketing advantage.

Consultation
I will make my consultation services available for any companies that have encountered this type of issue and need guidance on how to best integrate their user experience team with their marketing team.

Daniel Montano
Contact: Daniel-Montano@uxdtools.com