“marketing”
26 posts under this tag.
The contrast’s interesting ain’t it? Joel On Software’s Joel Spolsky sees Dell’s homepage as a textbook case of heavy-handed, rapacious marketing. A List Apart’s Nick Usborne, on the other hand, sees it as one of computer industry’s best examples of self-effacing design, respectful of its users and the now-fashionable right to self-identificationWP.
Dell doesn’t think like their users think. When you go to their website, the first question they ask is what kind of buyer you are: home, small business, large business, etc. I don’t know what I am! I guess I’m a small business, but home systems are usually cheaper, and I usually like to buy top of the line PCs, so maybe I need the Big Business section. This distinction is completely lost on me.
I want a PC. What difference does it make whether I’m a home buyer or a small business buyer? I suspect that they are asking me this because they want to charge businesses more than homes, and large businesses even more. To defeat their system, I choose “home.”
Dell has what is probably the most visitor-centric site of all the computer manufacturers. For years now they have built a homepage that holds back on saying, “Look at us, we’re great.” Instead they devote a significant part of the page to an area where visitor can self-select.
The design and text on the page immediately recognizes that some people are looking for home computers, while others are looking for networks for local government offices. Both audiences and more are addressed. The Dell.com page says, in effect, “Yes, you’re
in the right place. Yes, we can help you. Yes, self-identify and please click here so we can help you find exactly what you need.”
Marketing MyopiaWP, from the recently deceased economist Theodore LevittWP is a fascinating article from 1960. Despite its now quaint and outdated examples, despite being wrong in several of its predictions, this is one of the classic articles of marketing and deservedly so. Perhaps the biggest surpise for me was to reread a sense of marvel and respect at business, a lucid and bracing criticism of capitalism, that I hadn’t seen since I read some Peter DruckerWP last year. The “intellectual” community, specially in Mexico, has so often made deriding business and its babbits its raison d’etre, that I find such cogent analysis incredibly refreshing.
Here two fragments:
The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic.
Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the
buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product
into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by
means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating,
delivering, and finally consuming it.
In a sense Ford was both the most brilliant and the most senseless marketer in American history. He was senseless
because he refused to give the customer anything but a black car. He was
brilliant because he fashioned a production system designed to fit market
needs. We habitually celebrate him for the wrong reason, his production genius.
His real genius was marketing. We think he was able to cut his selling price
and therefore sell millions of $500 cars because his invention of the assembly
line had reduced the costs. Actually he invented the assembly line because he
had concluded that at $500 he could sell millions of cars. Mass production was
the result, not the cause, of his low prices.
At the end of the article, there’s an equally engaging retrospective commentary fifteen years after. Levitt could write.
Of course, I’d do it again and in the same way, given
my purposes, even with what more I now know—the
good and the bad, the power of facts, and the limits
of rhetoric. If your mission is the moon, you don’t use
a car. Don Marquis’s cockroach, Archy, provides some
final consolation: “An idea is not responsible for who
believes in it.”
As a sidenote, this was an article originally published in the Harvard Business Review, which I’ve always dismissed on the base of its exorbitating price. I’ve been reading through online article abstracts from the current edition and I’m most impressed. I’ll be sure to buy it next time.
Local Red Cross ads1 (there are several versions of’em) are really good this year:
They make me think of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sad, true words: “Death hurt us, so we will unmake Death. Let that be the outlet for our anger, which is terrible and just.”
1 Their website’s flashy welcome is, alas, hideous.
This Thursday I went to my first Stereo Total concert and it was great.
Click to see full-size.
Isn’t the “simply have a bit of human contact” part surprising?
The other day I had a weird idea for a reputation market (that’s right, a reputation market!) and ever since, I’ve been exploring how value is created and expressed in a capitalist society. My investigations have led me, of course, to that quintessential example of wealth-creation, the scam. Nothing that I’ve read on the subject (not even the Million Dollar homepage :) has impressed me more than this long, old, but fascinating article: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
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