Good Learning is Great Marketing

You saw this paradigm shift coming – now it’s here! 6 steps to catching up.

In my hands is a tube of Crest and a tube of Colgate toothpaste. Chances are better than 50/50 (Colgate 32 share; Crest 27 share) that you’re using one or the other, but do you know why?

Toothpaste is a relatively low-involvement decision and you probably made your choice years ago based on criteria like brand recognition, price, taste, efficacy, the fact that your significant other likes the smell of your breath in the morning… it’s a growing reality of the marketplace however, that as products become increasingly similar to one another in features, quality and price (commoditization), the more important it becomes for marketers to differentiate through education. The speed, impact and efficiency with which product knowledge can be delivered to a target audience will increasingly identify leaders and followers.

Here are six suggestions that should help move the process in the right direction:

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Games-That-Teach – Simple Works!

We’re well beyond the debate as to whether games-that-teach enhance the delivery of learning content (they do), so why aren’t we seeing more of them? The two biggest challenges we encounter are:

1. The perception that they take a long time to design and build and are, subsequently, very expensive.
2. A perceived need to be the next incarnation of World of Warcraft in order to capture the learner’s attention.

We were at an educational gaming conference a couple years back, where a grant was awarded for the design and production of a game prototype in support of a specific curriculum. Twenty-seven months and tens of thousands of dollars later the project is still in development. The developers are the only beneficiaries of learning in that scenario.

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Make a Meal, Not a Shopping List

When starting a project, it is easy for us to gather up a shopping list of goals, wants, needs, and ideas. We may say “I want a chat room, a product configurator, a calendar, a blog, a forum,…”  - you get the idea. In fact this list is a great component when within the discovery and defining process. The more information and ideas we can put on paper, the better. But this is shopping list. It is a list of ingredients that don’t necessarily relate to each other. We buy ingredients to create a meal. There are a lot of ingredients we like but we must understand the that not all good ingredients can be put together to create a great meal. We choose ingredients that have their own unique flavors, textures, and colors, that intermingle to form the perfect tasting meal. This same idea can be applied within training, educational, and marketing applications. It is important that we not only define and develop the individual components, but how these components work together to form a comprehensive, cohesive experience.

When we make a meal we pay attention to how it tastes. We make adjustments to the ingredients to make the next meal even better. Metrics, or measurements do the same for your applications. We don’t make a meal and not wonder what people think of it. We don’t give it to someone and not ask how it tasted. The process continues past the development of your application. Use it yourself, find out what others think, and review the analytics.

If we focus both bottom-up and top-down, explore ideas that are detailed while stepping back to review the big picture, there will be no stopping our pursuit in creating more engaging, better measurable, and more delicious applications.