The mum who taught me marketing.

Each week I seem to throw a new marketing term at you.

When I made the move to a sport organisation and its respective sport centres, I was pretty well versed in the language of marketing, including what a buyer persona was and why it mattered. What I had not yet done was live one.

Working client-side at a sports centre gave me that, because I could tell you everything about Penny. She was the ideal “mum” client I came to know so well.

Penny made every decision until her kid turned 13 or 14. After that, the kid became my customer, and I had a completely different job, which was convincing a teenager that sport was still cool. The person was different, the worries were different and the reasons to stay were different.

I knew all of that because I spoke with them every week, for years.

Now let’s imagine I don’t know Penny at all, and she’s a potential new client. She walks into the centre and there are three signs at reception, all pointing different ways: Junior Development Division, Facilities Management and Membership Services. All she wants to know is how to sign her kid up for Saturday.

That’s what a lot of websites do. They’re organised around how the business works, not what the person arriving needs. Adam wrote all about this in his first blog and it’s a great reality check.

So, this week’s term for you is human centred web design. Sounds fancy, but it really just means building your site for Penny.

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This is taken from the weekly email written by one of our directors, Roberto Boi. Every Thursday he shares observations, ideas and perspectives from the work we’re doing day to day at Dilate. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up here.