stealing ideas

Jinx! 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8...

I enjoyed reading what Freddie Laker had to write in today’s Digital Next. It reflected much of what I’ve been saying [to myself on this sorry excuse for a blog] over the past year here and here.

However I’m not sure I completely agree with everything he had to say about how this approach will influence the future of website strategy, information architecture, usability and design. From what I gathered he basically said this: it won’t.

“In a nutshell, I think the novelty will wear off for a lot of consumers.”

and

”[…]brands will keep in mind that consumers also like their sites to be nicely packaged. Moving forward, businesses will create sites with a far higher level of aesthetic value[…]”

In response to the “novelty wearing off” - it already has - the novelty of brand sites wore off years ago. Which is why you see brands like Modernista! and Skittles innovating and redefining what a brand site is. They took a step back and realized that a brand site doesn’t require an old-school agency controlling every aspect of the site from leading to color palette to trademarked fonts that require another agency to take it and make it web-friendly…

They realized, in contradiction to Freddie’s other assertion, that “consumers [don’t] like their sites to be nicely packaged,” and that they don’t care about, “higher level of aesthetic value.” They answered the question that every brand should start with and almost all ignore - what role does a website have in my brand’s broader marketing/communications strategy?

Most brands don’t stop to think about if they actually need a website or what it’s role should be - they assume they need a website (because you have to have a website!?!!) and then start dreaming about what it should look like or if it should have a widget. A bread widget. So people can get information on your 12 varieties of bread, on their desktop, all the time.

Awesome.

Lastly, they realized that it doesn’t and shouldn’t require millions of dollars to build a brand site for a sugar-coated sugar candy and millions more to get people to visit it… for 2 pageviews and 35 seconds of “brand engagement”. That it’s more valuable to go where people are already engaging with each other and join the conversation than to interrupt them by flailing your 30k Flash arms and begging click here, only to send them to your brand’s version of Walley World.

This site execution isn’t for every brand, that’s not what I’m suggesting. What I am suggesting is that every brand should adopt the strategic approach that Modernista! and Skittles applied to their sites. Every brand should take a good hard look at their brand, their marketing objectives/strategies, the people that use their product/service and ask themselves: What role does a website play in all of this? Why do we need a website?

The answer may surprise you and, more importantly, delight others.