Reflection – Learning Launch (by Julia Bock)

Challenge and Selection

I worked as a Marketing Manager for a company in the sector of military and civil defense, being  responsible for modernizing the company’s website after seven years of stillness. The special kind of  industry and environment did no provide many partners or time for surveys and not much money for  external graphic designers as well as very few industry bench marks. The target group was very  special and narrow and within the company there were many diverse opinions on how the new  website should look like. Therefore, the marketing team decided to use the Learning Launch tool  incorporating customers and employees in order to design an appropriate website step by step and  including most important stakeholders into the process. We aimed to find out what our two different  target groups expected and what met their information needs without spending all budget and  efforts at once. It should not be a shot in the dark, but an experimental and successive learning  process until we had the perfect website.

Application

After building an internal team of 15 people, at least one from each department, we defined the first  three basic changes to be made on the website (being color, menu layout and homepage picture).  Starting with one, we changed the website and came back to five chosen main customers to get  qualitative feedback and including their ideas. Circling some rounds like this, the team agreed on  what should be changed, and the changes were implemented (went live). In intervals of 2 weeks the  marketing team closely monitored the website movements and visits and analyzed the numbers  compared to previous numbers. Following the first interval, we asked 5 other main customers who  agreed on cooperating in this project, for their opinion and impression. We worked this into the next  round of the internal “Counsel” and adapted some aspects. Next steps of changes (e.g. product  pictures, portfolio structure, “about us” section and many more) were defined and executed as  described above in a 2-week interval until the whole website was restructured and redesigned.

Insight

Like this, internal as well as external stakeholders had the feeling to be involved and were all happy  with the result, marketing did not struggle with different parties fighting over taste and opinion.  Seeing this being successful, I decided to use the Learning Launch tool for many other challenges,  avoiding spending money and effort in a creative process that could not be driven by just a few  marketing persons, but successively develops by many. This case made very clear that it takes much  more time (here almost half a year) than expected and many people involved when being visually  and content-wise creative and customer-oriented. Marketing is full of these challenges, so we need  to be open for opinions and learn how others can help effectively.

Approach

Building a new website could have been done by using mind maps, collecting ideas from everyone  and then internally implementing the ideas.

Visualization would have helped to give example sites and decide quickly if that was ok or not. But  then it would have been quite limited to what a few people suggested. The Learning Launch tool is  limited in terms of feasibility; you’d need customers who are willing to participate, an extended time  frame and the team needs to be very patient as results only come step by step and are often revised.

In this case the Learning Launch might have been the best choice, but for a frequent actualization of  the website the Visualization tool might be more appropriate as the frame of the website is already  set. In this way Marketing can give suggestions to stakeholders that then just react on ideas instead  of starting from zero. This is then less time- and resource-consuming and feasible for these smaller  changes.

