Brand Planning & UX are Dating

I’m no UX expert. At least not yet. I’m actually a Brand Planner taking a class on User Experience Design (UXD) at General Assembly.

Why is a Brand Planning taking a UX class? And why would my agency pay for it to happen? (Thanks again, Fitzco!)

Well, when most people think of UX, they default to wire frames and web usability and interface designs. But one of the first things we learned in class is that UX is more than just web navigation, it’s about the entire journey someone experiences with a product, be it digital or physical.

One word really sticks out for me in that description — journey. As a Brand Planner, I spend my days understanding a consumer’s journey with a brand. How they learn about the brand, what factors influence their decision, what they do when they purchase it. I try and understand every step of that process, and then work with a creative team to create the experience we want consumers to have with that process.

But recently I found myself getting frustrated about how brands talk about digital. Too often, a digital strategy becomes synonymous with social media, which is increasingly then synonymous with content. Social media is, of course, great for many things — awareness, customer service, giving people an avenue to share their opinions (for better or worse). And social is becoming more defined by content sharing — brands creating pieces of content and hoping they spread and go viral, hoping some clicks “share.” But what happens after the “share?” I think we often forget that people have entire lives online, and watching, sharing, and social media itself are just parts of that life, part of their digital experience.

When I first got into planning, I once heard a brand described as “that gut feeling” someone has about a specific product. It’s more than the attributes of the product, it’s the total experience you have with it. Social media and content certainly play a role in that experience, but we need to start understanding the entire experience and the entire digital journey. And I think learning about and applying the same process as a typical UXer is the way to understanding the digital life of a brand, where we focus on users of a product as well as consumers.

Am I right? No time to debate that now. I’m late to class…

Originally published at fitzco.com on November 14, 2014.