Bianca Baumann

“Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro: Strategies to Ignite Learning” (2025)

At first glance, marketing and L&D may seem like an unlikely combination. But upon closer inspection, both fields share two core goals: getting people’s attention and influencing their behavior. Marketing involves captivating, persuading, and creating value—all of which are key to learning design. When done well, learning design grabs participants’ attention like a great marketing campaign and engages them emotionally and intellectually to make learning stick. In this innovative volume, marketing and L&D experts Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor ask: How can L&D pros make learning programs more effective by thinking like expert marketers? To answer that question, Baumann and Taylor explore the potential of marketing-inspired L&D, diving into essential marketing principles, strategies, and techniques and applying them to learning experience design to improve learning transfer. With a learner-centric perspective, the authors explain the science of marketing, how to use personas, and how to craft a successful learner journey. They cover effective writing, the use of powerful graphics, how to plan and execute a winning learning campaign, how to harness technology, and the all-important activities of evaluation and learning analytics. L&D pros will learn new ways to capture their target audience’s attention and influence their behavior. Each chapter includes engaging stories from Baumann and Taylor’s work in the field, case studies, and definitions of essential marketing concepts and how they apply directly in the L&D environment, plus activities and tools instructional designers can apply immediately to transform their learning programs.