Marketing and IT staff are very different — in their training, talents, personalities, and how their performance is measured.
In this first of a series of three articles, I will give some guidelines on how these very different groups can work together successfully.
Part 1 – Marketing and IT professionals have very different personalities and perspectives
As with any stereotype or generalization, there are exceptions to this rule. But it is generally true that the people who go into marketing and the people who go into IT (or programming) are simply different sorts of folk. For purposes of project management, this can boil down to a couple fairly basic conflicts.
- Projects vs. systems, and
- Felixibility vs. stability
For the marketer, things are always changing. While there are some marketing basics that seem pretty stable — since they’re based on fundamental aspects of human behavior — there are other things that change all the time. The words, colors, messages, and incentives that people respond to fluctuate with the culture. So most marketers take an attitude of, “I don’t know. Let’s test it.”
For marketers, change can be an opportunity.
While things are always changing on the IT side as well — with new technologies and devices, program updates, and new security threats — the task of the IT department is to maintain a stable system that does business-critical tasks, reliably, millions of times a day. For the IT crowd, change is generally an annoyance, and can be a threat.
This article is written for marketers, so in this first section, I will try to help marketers understand where IT is coming from.
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.
IT’s main tool is the computer. Computers are incredibly good at doing the same thing the same way a million times. But marketers often want to do a lot of different things one time.
For example, when a programmer designs a page, he’s thinking of something like Amazon.com — which displays millions of products for millions of users in the same basic page template. The product image goes here, the price goes there, the description goes in this other place. (I realize that Amazon does a lot of testing, but that doesn’t change the basic point.)
Marketers wonder if it’s better for the product image to be on the right or on the left. They wonder if it’s better to show the product, or a pretty girl using the product. They wonder if the button should say “buy now” or “add to cart” or “get yours for only $5.”
Marketers want to test things.
This level of complexity (or chaos) can make programming pretty difficult.
The IT mindset is to automate, use databases and templates, eliminate exceptions, and build a system once so that it can be used many times. IT wants processes that are dependable and repeatable.
For marketing, doing the same thing twice means that you didn’t learn anything the first time.
IT needs a way to predict and manage change.
IT needs to build a system that works consistently for millions of users, so if marketing is going to want to change things, you need to tell them up front what might change, and under what circumstances.
Marketing needs a way to try new things and implement new concepts, or things they’ve learned from other tests.
That’s a good thing for marketing to do. But marketers have to realize that IT doesn’t naturally think that way, so marketing has to communicate that they want a system that will accommodate those changes. And they have to communicate that need before IT builds a structure that won’t accommodate it.
An internal vs. an external focus.
Most IT departments, and the IT culture, developed with an internal focus. It was their job to keep the machines running, and to protect the company’s data. They weren’t focused on the customer, or at least not in the way that sales and marketing are.
“The majority of the IT power structure is in the support and infrastructure people, the network, database and help desk people. And then laying over these functions, you have a thin IT strategy layer ….” From The Empire Strikes Back: Unleashing IT as an Innovation Center.
When marketing works with IT, they need to realize that they’re dealing with a department that has a different focus, and they need to find the people in IT who are interested in doing strategic, business-development projects.
Deadlines
Another difference between marketing and IT is in how each group views deadlines. Although nobody’s perfect at meeting deadlines, marketers are more used to a relatively strict schedule based on promotions with definite drop dates, as well as new offers and new products that have to roll out at a particular time.
IT projects, on the other hand, are often way behind schedule.
There’s an expectation — whether it’s fair or not — that getting a marketing project done by Friday simply means putting your nose to the grindstone and getting it done, while the same expectation doesn’t apply to IT because mysterious technical weirdness and unforeseen gremlins are understood to occasionally derail an IT project.
That might not be fair, but it’s often the way people think. So in order to work with IT, it’s very important to communicate timelines and deliverables up front, and to have some mechanism to keep things on track. Including, possibly, consequences if the schedules are not met.
The Big Picture — IT v. Marketing
When presented with a new idea or project, marketing and IT professionals react very differently.
The programmer is thinking …
- How does this integrate with other systems?
- What server resources does it use?
- How often do I have to update it?
- Does it create any security problems?
The marketer is thinking …
- I want this now.
- How will I measure success?
- What colors, images, text and offers will work best?
- If this approach doesn’t work, I’ll just change it.
Both of these lists represent legitimate concerns, but often IT and marketing don’t see it that way.
The way to move forward is for both departments to learn about the other perspective: their interests, their personalities, their drives, and their concerns. Since this article is written for marketers, here are my recommended steps for marketers to learn about IT.
- Learn the basics of technology — in general, and the specific technologies your company uses.
- Understand IT’s motivations.
- Be diplomatic.
- Bring IT into the process as early as you can and work with them. Let them contribute ideas.
- Where possible, model the project with commercially available software or services.
- Be willing to limit your project in keeping with IT’s estimation of low-hanging fruit.
I’ll discuss all these in more detail in later installments.
Part 2: The marketing technologist
Part 3: Learn the right approach to get marketing and IT to work together
If you’d rather listen to me talk through this topic, here are some links to a fairly low-quality video I did of this presentation. The videos were limited to 10 minutes each.
Marketing and IT, part 1
Marketing and IT, part 2
Marketing and IT, part 3
Marketing and IT, part 4
