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Re: Marketing knowledge should be part of a technical writers tool kit
Subject:Re: Marketing knowledge should be part of a technical writers tool kit From:Michael Lewis <lewism -at- BRANDLE -dot- COM -dot- AU> Date:Mon, 12 Jan 1998 10:55:57 +1100
David Fredericks wrote:
> ... Marketing, after all, is what gives us our =
> jobs and what America, entrepreneurialism and free markets are all =
> about. Not for a second can you talk intelligently about creating any =
> business without discussing target markets, demographics, psychographics =
> and arriving at the right media mix. Only at the very low end can you =
> generate user manuals today (especially of bookstore quality) without =
> factoring in marketing elements.
There's an even closer connection between marketing (as an activity) and
tech communication: if you are documentating a product that's being
sold, you can get a head start on your audience analysis by tapping in
to the market analysis that should have been done before any money was
put into development. Even if you're not writing directly to the defined
market (eg, writing to users rather than decision-makers), your audience
is still very closely related to the market. IMO, that means that any
document that ships to a customer is in part a merketing document.
You can extrapolate from there to the idea that even in-house
documentation relates to an in-house "market", and again you're both
writing for the market and producing market-related docs.
--
Michael Lewis
Brandle Pty Limited, Sydney, Australia
PO Box 1249, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012
Tel +61-2-9310-2224 ... Fax +61-2-9310-5056
