Lady on the Bus » marketing

Online creatures and their mean ecosystems

Adriana — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:09:35 +0000

As I read the article – Gmail users tweet twice as much – I remember that a couple of months ago someone said during a nice girlie lunch: If a guy gives me a Hotmail email address I’ll probably lose interest, – which was followed by supportive nods of agreement. I learned that Gmail is to be expected. Yahoo might be tolerated.
Wow, talk about strict standards. I agree that Hotmail as a brand doesn’t add points to anyone’s cool factor, but then I wouldn’t go as far as shipping them to social Siberia.

But wait, I forgot to mention that my friends and I are a generation apart – and it shows. Whilst most of my social ecosystem grew under zero influence of the internet and is therefore agnostic to online social codes, to my friends there is no such clear line. Their online and offline personas are bundled together, and increasingly their cultural codes, references, brand preferences (and prejudices) are generated online.

Fair enough, my girlie lunch friends and I all work in the internet industry and thus are fickle early adopters. But from the research we do I get the impression that this is getting more widespread. What do you think?

Are we doing product or service design?

Adriana — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:36:23 +0000

Sometimes when you try to decide if the output of an interactive project is a product or a service, things get blurry. Traditionally products are defined as tangible goods as opposed to services which are defined as intangible goods. Not so helpful… What is that tangible on the web? Perhaps the interface, but not much else.

I prefer the definition which says a product is something we own whilst a service is something we can use temporarily. The difference between buying and hiring a dinner jacket.
This definition seems useful, so I’ll try to apply it to a few real life projects (the output of which I would have called generically Product in the past):

An e-learning platform – Definitely providing an education service
An online newspaper – An information service
A software-as-a-service online shop – Can provide a similar service to a sales assistant offering expert advice and guiding the customer towards a suitable service package.
A mobile mapping application – A tricky one. I have downloaded the software (so I own it), but for it to be useful at all I need data provided by the mapping company (a service) facilitated by my network operator (also a service).
A multinational corporate website – Essentially a marketing and communication tool between company, customers, investors, press, etc. At the same time you can consider it as a provider of self-customer-services.

Why is this differentiation relevant to interactive projects?

It is pretty clear that many online projects will generate hybrid product-service offerings, just as in the physical world. But I think we (practitioners) are developing more services than we imagined, yet treating them mostly as products.

Services usually involve longer or repeated engagements with the user and perhaps we can contemplate that more efficiently. It would be really interesting to start using rich design tools such as service blueprinting in addition to content maps and prototypes.

Let’s see how it works in practice.

——–

Some interesting reading: Better than owning

Taaz.com: A fine example of customer centric online marketing

Adriana — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:52:04 +0000

Taaz.com is a virtual makeover website which allows you to upload a photo of your fine self and test what you would look like risking a new make up direction, a new hairdo or a collagen enhanced pout.

Once done with the transformation you can go social: use the result as your new facebook avatar or let the Taaz community comment on your hard work (going public is optional).

But the real beauty here for me is the natural and unobtrusive way they managed to fit brands at the core of the service.

Brands like Stila, Clinique and Revlon do much better than just sponsoring or bothering us with banners – they are a seamless part of service.

Instead of browsing through individual brand “counters” searching for the ideal lippie as you would in a department store, you browse through colour pallets slapping them onto your photo. Found the dream shade? Voila, it happens to belong to a certain brand. Product = 100% relevant info.

Besides, it is quite a laugh.