Influential Interactive Marketing

The Perfect Handbag

For a woman, the perfect handbag is an illusion worth chasing.  Handbags are not functionality, they are an expression of style and personality.  As a result, they are almost sacred.  From my numerous voluntary (and involuntary) discussions on the subject with many women, I have uncovered that there are five brands of handbags that are truly worth owning ... Prada, Coach, Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Burberry.  Unlike other elements of a woman's wardrobe, individuality is not rewarded here.  When people recognize your purse, know the maker and perhaps even have one of their own, that's a good thing.  What is most startling about this world of handbags, though, is how uniformly ugly they are (um, that would be my opinion, not what the women said of course).  The Louis Vuitton bags are a muddy brown color covered with clip-art style icons in a checkered pattern.  They are quite possibly the ugliest piece of accessory or luggage I have ever seen ... and everyone wants one.  The Burberry bags all look like their equally popular line of scarves, with plaid checks and a tan color so well recognized on their products, Crayola should rename it "Burberry Tan."

But despite my dislike or other's like of these designs, surely design cannot account for their immense popularity.  There is something more at work here.  As Tom Ford, former designer at Gucci said, "If a bag is attractive, it makes you feel good by default.  It's all about proportion, shape, line, finish, fabric, balance.  If all of that is pleasing it will sell.  More than that, it's like you've gotta have it or you'll die."  Fake or real, handbags are a must have -- more important even, than shoes to accessorize a woman's wardrobe.  Why?  Because handbags are more closely tied to a woman's aspirational personality than another other piece of fashion.  It is an expression of what group you want to be considered part of - but you have to choose a group.  In handbags, you don't start your own group.  As a result, handbags are a testament to the old mass market view where we all fit a demographic.

Contrast this with a woman's experience online, where she can choose how her screen appears, what her username will tell others about her, what photos to post online to create herself, and how to build a virtual identity.  Many women have vibrant online personalities, each unique and distinctive.  With Yahoo's new Shoposphere, users can even share shopping pick lists in Yahoo's self proclaimed move from ecommerce to "me commerce." Online, individuality is awarded and celebrated.  But individuality is often at odds with the desire to belong to a group.  Most will agree it's tough to stand out and fit in all at once.  So perhaps there is room for both - and there is a place for the aspirational mass personality.  If only it wasn't symbolized by such ugly handbags. 

The New Gap.com Focuses Between Browsing and Buying

The unending focus on converting "browsers to buyers" has become a mantra for retail ecommerce sites driving an increasingly formulaic approach to interface design.  Select a type of product, filter by brand, price, or size, select the one you think you want, and add it to your cart.  Unfortunately, this negates the more frequent task of honing in on what you think you want, seeing a description and then going back to the original narrowed down list to see another product.  Well designed sites, like www.homedepot.com, and www.ebay.com make it easy to get back to the list that you were on previously -- recognizing the user's reliance on the back button and making the task of going back easier.

But what if you eliminated the need for the back button by focusing on the activity between browsing and buying?  The point where users need more information, but are also likely to need to return to their original list quickly.  The newly released version of Gap.com seems to have an answer that is winning the site redesign all kinds of admiration from the press.  Their "Quick Look" feature lets users hone in on a product, see photos, what sizes are in stock (very important) and order, all without leaving the main screen.  While this nifty interface does raise some question marks in terms of accessability for users with more limited systems, the arguable defense is that people with very old machines are unlikely to be shopping for clothes online anyway.  For those who are, Gap.com's interface could very well represent the leap of simplicity that others will have to duplicate in order to maintain online etailing string of recordbreaking holiday season sales.

Visual Search and the Future of Search Engine Marketing

I tried out Grokker today, the latest release from Yahoo! offering a "visual search" tool that groups search results contextually into circular clusters.  Despite a somewhat clunky visual interface with some strange mouseover behaviours, it definitely has promise for giving users a more intuitive way to use online search more powerfully to hone in on the most relevant results for what a user is seeking.  Another promising visual search tool, Newsmap has what I find to be a more intuitive view focused more on the content and less on graphics.   A quick list of some key trends in enhancing search I've noted just over the few months includes:

1. Advanced Sorting - at first only the realm of online retail sites which offered users the ability to sort search results based on price, product, brand, discount, etc ... now this tactic is extending across many retail and non-retail sites such as online travel aggregator sites (Kayak and Sidestep), and real estate sites.  Yahoo has a beta release of a service termed Mindset which offers the ability to sort by intent, from purchasing to researching.  Clearly a powerful way of helping the user get the most relevant results, and setting them up nicely to charge a premium of keyword advertising through Overture for those sites that appear highly on the purchasing side of the scale.  Smart.
2. Visual Grouping - taking search results and putting them into clusters to help users hone in on the type of information they are seeking.  Examples of sites like this include Yahoo's Grokker, The Hive Group's Newsmap and Tagcloud, a folksonomy based blog search tool that allows you to cluster by keyword mentions and get an understanding of relative buzz words within a search context at the same time.  (Now Technorati has something similar too)  My only problem with the Grokker idea is that there doesn't seem to be a relative scale to illustrate importance of clusters.  For typical searches for a single source, this may not be an issue.  But for research-style searches where you are trying to get a picture of the landscape online around a particular issue, visual grouping search has so much more promise.  Perhaps this may be something they are considering adding to future releases.
3. Self-Learning Search - I first experienced these types of searches a number of years ago when we were implementing a notes-based intranet at Didata.  It was the most promising search technology at the time -- learning search, that could refine itself based on what you clicked on or noted as relevant and not relevant.  Unfortunately, it usually forces an extra step from users in order to work, the kiss of death for innovation in an ease-of-use driven space.
4. Niche files/mediums - I love Google images.  It's saved me lots of research time over the past year in finding images that I need quickly, from client logos for proposals to resource imagery for presentations.  With Google's new video search tool, the range is complete.  I can now go online and use Google to hone in on files in PDF, PPT, DOC, images, and video.  Maybe in the future I can go and search for PSDs.  But then I guess that would make Google a facilitator of copyright infringement, wouldn't it?

So what potential do all of these innovation trends offer for search engine marketers?  My guess is that visual search and other such innovations will offer marketers a greater ability to reach users not only based on their activity, but on their intent.  And yes, we will be paying a premium for it.

Orbitz is down - CRM opportunity?

Orbitz.com is down - an extremely rare event for large ecommerce sites these days.  I'm sure there will be articles in the coming days about the real cost of this outage for Orbitz.  And at this point it's still down with only their admission that "We are aware of the problem and are working to correct it."  Chances are they will have it up very shortly.  But when the site is finally back up, they will have significant credibility issues to deal with.  Classic online crisis management. 

But this outage could also be an opportunity for the site to reconnect with dormant or past customers. What if they sent a letter to all customers with an apology and incentive to return to the site?  Apology emails have a way of travelling among customers ... which could be a good thing if an incentive were part of the message.  A built in setup for a viral message - where the good is sent with the bad.

Lessons in Online Marketing to Busy Moms

MarketingSherpa released a case study today about how Gymboree revised their website to better meet the needs of busy moms shopping for children's clothing online.  Some interesting lessons in here for any campaign targeting moms, including:

• Moms are multi-tasking at certain times of the day - "moms are so busy that they're hopping online as they're getting breakfast for the kids (the site shows a major spike in traffic at that time), during the early afternoon when kids are eating lunch/napping (another spike), or after bedtime."
• Don't ask too much, but do ask - Gymboree used a single question popup on their site asking "What one thing would you change on our Web site?" - sacrificing data collection for responses ... and they got them.
• Popups do work (gasp!) - When [the Gymboree] team realized that Google wasn't allowing ads linking to the home page due to the pop, they changed the offer to a banner-style ad on the site. "We definitely got more response when it was a popup," she said. "It didn't bother people because it was just one question."
• Make the user experience faster - Probably a no-brainer, but they did pay attention to the tasks that were taking moms the longest (entering sizes, finding pieces to match outfits, etc.) and then made these easier.  Lesson: it's not just the shopping cart that you need to make easy to use.
• Listen to moms and let them contribute - Having an easy to find feedback link on each page titled "Gymboree Listens" has had a great effect on helping them to build a dialogue and community with their users.  It's the same principle iVillage, BabyCenter, and AllRecipes have built their sites on ...

The article is available for open access at MarketingSherpa until June 10th - http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2998