The Experience is the Brand

You Bought Vanilla Mint Flavored Listerine – Why?

Admittedly I’m a terrible bargain hunter – I check around a few sites for competing prices but will always buy from Amazon in the end; I go to BJ’s with the intent of stocking up on bulk toilet paper and socks, and come home with a 3 gallon jar of pepper shooters; I buy stuff off the clearance shelves at the supermarket, paying little attention to the expiration date (can Calamine Lotion really go bad?)

Last month I came home with one of those huge jugs of mouthwash that’s large enough to require an engine hoist to pour, at what I thought was a great steal. It’s something I buy all the time, and it was on sale for what seemed like 1/2 price.

Had I the presence of mind to look at the label, I might have thought twice about bringing home a barrel of vanilla-mint flavored mouthwash. It seems an odd combination – to be sure, it was taste-tested and focus-grouped – who wants to start or end their day  clean-rinsing their mouth with a sundae?

There are at least two explanations for why I made the mistake that I did: the first is that I suffer from Man’s Disease: a genetically-inherited condition which renders me incapable of distinguishing any readily identifiable object less than 18 inches from my face.

A second explanation lay in the subtle differences between the packaging of what I thought I recognized as a familiar product, and that of a newly-released variant the manufacturer was obviously (and not successfully, judging from its occupation of the Clearance Bin) testing.

The strategy is not a bad one: if what you have to offer is only slightly different or new,  copy something well established and hope no one notices. If it works and your audience stays with you, slowly differentiate the packaging to start drawing more attention to the subtle differences.

It works in a marketing context because we tend to glom onto the familiar, and if you have what already passes for a sense of familiarity with a customer, there’s little point in making the experience a jarring one – why make a customer think harder about a purchase that they already want to make, if you’re only trying to affect a slight change in behavior?

In an experiential context, familiarity is even more useful. In the craft, we call it affordance: the tendency of an object or widget to do what it looks like it should do – buttons push, switches flip, and dials turn.

In developing a digital experience, chances are you are going to have your hands full just making your concept make enough sense at a marketing level (It’s a race car, for hamsters!!!),  you might as well make everyone’s lives easier by not trying to invent a new interface for placing an order, or contacting customer service.

Go with what people already know.

Running Interference: Google Brings Enterprise Analytics to Joe’s Tire Shack

In Joel on Software, one of my favorite writers on the business of software describes Microsoft’s strategy for keeping competitors at bay: just change the API.

Microsoft would be developing an email platform, for example, that made extensive use of some low-level programming within Windows, as would a competitor. But because those APIs were poorly documented (not a mistake), the competitor would have a hard time figuring out why their email program kept crashing. Microsoft’s Outlook team, on the other hand, could just walk over and talk to the programmers down the hall, and figure out how to deal with the issue.

And by the time the competitor had figured out their own problems, Microsoft would have released a service pack that broke all of their carefully-constructed workaround.

This is not a new strategy. Sun Tzu wrote:

Defend what cannot be attacked; attack what cannot be defended.

So, too, does Google employ a strategy of running interference. Writing about their constantly improving free Analytics product, Bill Glassman observers:

They might be showing obsession because of where they want to be, but then again, they could be throwing up a smoke screen to keep the competition too busy to attack Google on advertising.

We’re big fans here of Google Analytics – it’s price-to-feature ratio can’t be beat, and for many organizations that are tentative about taking the dive into web analytics, the barrier to entry is embarrassingly small. Three minutes and some copy-pasting, and you’re gathering data.

For Google, the value in providing an enterprise-level solution for free is not to reach deeper into the Fortune 500. The value is where Google has always been aiming: the vast and deep middle.

While the top 100 advertisers on Google’s ad network (by dollar volume) are certainly using an array of commercial campaign and traffic analysis tools, they certainly don’t account for more than 25% of total ad volume. That leaves a couple of million advertisers who could make better use of their ad dollar if they had better metrics. And remember, these advertisers aren’t necessarily trying to decide which search engine to buy ad space on – they’re weighing AdWords against the yellow pages, billboards, radio spots and placements in diners.

There is a huge, pent-up demand for information about the effectiveness of advertising, and as fast as the ad world is changing at the high end, the long tail of small business is mired in advertising techniques that have been dutifully driving their businesses for the past 40 years… and are about to get upended. By arming these companies with “enterprise-class” tools for evaluating the success of their campaigns, Google is creating a huge, loyal contingent of long-term customers who will shift their advertising budgets online in direct proportion to the growing certainty of that medium’s success.

In Praise of Short Copy

Boutade. Crypt. Russet. Morisco. Rutaceous.

(from Ben Schott, via New York Times).