I’m watching the field of impactful learning begin to look like a great marketing campaign. Blended learning is exactly what good marketers do – they assess the audience and the need then throw all kinds of different but aligned messages at the prospects to engage them in buying. I am not saying that the marketing technology is the secret sauce, instead, I’m suggesting that the marketing process is. Good marketing fights very hard to grad your emotions and keep your attention. They work back from the specific audiences’ need to define the best ways to influence.
In learning and development (or whatever we call it now), we love to think up a new, cool class. We choose the content and delivery that we think is amazing and drop it on the learner. This is the opposite of marketing. More learning would occur and performance improved if we spent more time on grabbing emotions and attention and less on cool software with badges dumped on our unsuspecting learners.
Stealing from marketing, we can imitate:
- The Drip Campaigns – small bits of emotional, attention getting stuff that builds into solidly changed perception.
- Persuasion – focus on selling the benefit
- Influence – leveraging interesting developers like you to drive engagement through community
- Parallel – do lots of fun things at once with urgency, color and all the elements that Howard Gardner told us about when he thought of Multiple Intelligence.