Month: January 2008

Wow, I just found this. I just Googled my main competitor to see who was running AdWords against their brand name. I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and voila, there it was:

Google obviously knows that BrandX and my company are the top players in the same business. (Brand-Y is in a different market and is just one letter off from my competitor’s brand.)

Wow, free advertising on searches for their brand without pissing them off. Thanks Google!

We used to use Agilent (and before that, HP) as a guide for marketing. If they were in a publication or show, that means they had judged it as a quality investment, and we could join in confidently.

Kinda like how Burger King doesn’t have to spend as much finding a location when McDonald’s has already done all the hard work. (Agilent’s products are complementary to ours, so maybe selecting a site for a gas station or convenience store is a better analogy.)

And over the years, Agilent’s website has been top notch, even publishing (gasp) prices for all to see.

One of the things they do is publish an annual general catalog. It might be a little antiquated in its approach, but certainly worth doing for them. Someone there must have been a little self-conscious about the ‘antiquated’ part, which is the only reason I can explain this:

Don’t get me wrong. NxtBook isn’t that bad. Redoing a paper catalog this way is okay, up to a point. But were talking about a 600 page catalog. Engineers are either going to go Agilent’s regular website, or to the real paper catalog, but who in-the-heck is going to use this?

The only thing dummer, is the five trade publications willing to post Agilent’s press release announcing this doozie. You can email a colleague a specific page from the catalog? Really.

I suppose that Agilent already has a contract with NxtBook and this didn’t cost them much to do. And they are at least trying out new things. But this just ends up looking silly to me.

Hi Sir/Madam,

I’m a costumer from overseas (Singapore),
I’m interested with your product and plan to purchase them.
Before we are carrying out business transaction i want to know the transaction method.
Do you accept credit card for payment methode?
If you do, could you shipp the goods to Singapore?
Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Best Regards,

Jason Smith.

Holey Crapola:
The American Marketing Association Releases New Definition for Marketing:

‘Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.’

Hat tip to cynical (and prolific) J-Walk Blog. Now why didn’t I learn about this from any Marketing Blog? Perhaps because it is meaningless crapola? Even gurus who say marketing is everyone’s job must be stunned at uselessness of this definition.

The funniest part is that they used the standard toolset for generating crappy marketing-committees and surveys:

“The committee used qualitative insight generated through an evaluation of the 1985 and 2004 definitions of marketing to craft a new definition… As part of this process, Association members were asked to provide input on what they liked best about the previous definition, and … were later asked to offer feedback on a draft of the revised definition. At the end … more than 70 percent of their membership viewed the new definition as an improvement.”

The definition doesn’t even seem to solve the biggest confusion (as I see it) between marketing as a support function and marketing as a process of developing and selling products.

One size does not fit all. Committees kill meaning. Surveys are useless. And definitions are not useful unless shown in context. Crapola is crapola.

There are two kinds of GPSs out there:

1. Navigation GPSRs that help drivers find where they are going and create helpful routes.
2. Sport GPSRs that simply point an arrow to the final destination. You choose the route.

I’ve got a couple sport GPSRs that my family uses to go Geocaching. (And a brand new one just arrived today!!) Part of the fun of geocaching is finding your way and discovering the cache at the end of the hunt. But most people navigating a car would find this type of GPS frustrating, as they’ve got a task to do, not a ‘discovery’ to make.

I bring up GPSs to make you think about navigation and how important it is. Navigation on your website is the same way. Yet, it seems, most industrial websites seem to leave navigation as an afterthought.

While I am modest about my new website, calling it just brochureware, one of our sales reps pointed out how clear it is to navigate compared to the competition. A quick look at the competition, and here are some of the mistakes I saw on home pages or main product pages:

Navigation-to-products mistakes:

1. No obvious starting point.
2. It isn’t obvious which category to choose.
3. Multiple similar-sounding categories (the most common mistake, I think.)
4. What is clickable? Only the product thumbnail??
5. Too much text.
6. Small text links in two columns crammed all together.
7. Categories buried in text.
8. Two systems of categories.
9. Extraneous categories, such as ‘used’, ‘brochures’, ‘demos’
10. Categories that dump into a laundry-list of products. (like 27 text-only links)
11. Just plain bad categories that show no thought about the visitor.

The truth is that people do enjoy hunting for info, to a point. But with each additional click, they are increasingly ready to give up. Getting them to the right category right away is like a Navigation GPS telling you what exit to get off the highway…it gets you going in the right direction.

How to fix?
Limit yourself to six categories. Or eight. I call these ‘buckets’. Then make sure you can fit all your product lines into one of these buckets. Some product-lines may go in two different buckets–figure out if you should cross-list those or adjust your buckets so it only fits in one. Cut, cut, and shuffle until this works. Then come up with short understandable names for each bucket.

Here’s what I’ve got on my website:

• Product categories/buckets: 6, including one catch-all for products that don’t fit the other 5.
• Product families: No more than 6 families per category.
• Products: 1 to 28 products per family.

If your website has this problem, you already know it. Time to go and “cut, cut, and shuffle until it works.” (That is, unless you are my competitor–your site is fine, really.)