By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com
Software development is an exercise is "disambiguation." The success of a given project, indeed the very meaning of success in a project, can only be derived from needs analysis, the creation of a functional specification (including an agreed upon set of features), a technical specification, and the creation of a test plan to see whether or not those features work as planned. There are various approaches to how it can be done with regard to speed and risk, but the entire exercise requires uniformity of meaning and a mutually understood set of goals and processes.
Marketing, although quantifiable in terms of "impressions," "page views," and its effects on sales, is still a largely subjective field which recognizes and plays with ambiguities in reaching different kinds of people and customers. It requires an appreciation for the subtle shades of gray as it works with the inherent contradictions of the human psyche and the customer's wants and needs. Does that shade of yellow represent warmth, and an overall feeling of well-being, or does it represent cowardice and carry negative connotations? Perhaps it is both, and this is what marketing and creative services deal with all day long.
In the days before the Internet the distinction was much simpler - the software developers created a product, and the marketers found a way to sell it. But the web muddied the waters as the medium and the message, as McLuhan famously pointed out, have become the same thing: ambiguity and non-ambiguity living together in a yin/yang of dynamic, even ironic tension.
But perhaps that's the beauty of the Internet, in its vast muddled grandeur: it is a palpable marriage of opposites that produces a wholly new synthetic experience ... one that requires-in the creation of well-made websites-an appreciation of the inherent dynamic tension. Of course, this is supported by various theories of art and beauty, and on an anecdotal level, suggests that opposites indeed attract.
