Shall all marketing teams be called user development teams?

Quick punch into what marketing and communication leaders are doing and how they understand their role and the mission of their team. As I recently worked on the market introduction of a Chinese car brand in Europe and we had been focussing on regular stuff like Brand governance, PR strategy, and supporting communications of the dealers… I was wondering why we were not called “marketing team”!

In fact we were the UD Team, the user development team.

So, yes! Startups that are searching for their business models are doing Customer Development, ok. But here we had an innovative product sure, but functionally well-known… nothing fundamentally new. Even the strategic communication approach was not different from what I have seen from other car brands. So why?

I have not asked the management why, they may not even really know. But maybe the question is rather what this is changing than why this change was done. Because it is changing a lot:

  1. The team is organized in a product-centric way
  2. The core is not the brand but the customer satisfaction
  3. Kind of an inbound approach

Not sure what you think about it, but if I had to create a company today, I would consider calling my marketing department (if any) user development and branding team.

Thanks for reading, speak soon!