Listening to: Fast Cars - U2

A few months ago I came across a great
article that that looked at UX in context of advertising spend and considered
how advertising without UX investment negatively impacted brand loyalty.

“Well,” she responded, “we already spend $30 million a year just on advertising,
so there’s not much left over.”

Needless to say, the project never happened. The CEO decided to continue to “run
a few surveys” with his $20,000-or-so budget; his $30 million in ads continued to
drive customers to a website that frustrated them.

Let’s review the numbers.

Amount           Annual budget for…
$30,000,000…Advertising (driving people to the website)
$20,000…….Customer experience (what happens when they get there)

So… a good chunk of every dollar the company earned went to sending potential
customers to have a bad experience. A tiny percentage of those frustrated people would
muddle through and become paying customers; the vast majority would click away, never
to return.

Is this any way to run a business?

Mark Hurst has followed up with an great
article that builds on his first.

The spread of Internet connectivity worldwide makes it much easier for people
to communicate with each other about experiences they’ve had - commercial or not -
specifically, whether they’re good or not. A good experience will spread via the ether
of the Internet, powered by millions of thumbs and fingers, typing and e-mailing and
texting and IMing the referrals to friends all across the world. (I don’t need to
tell you that a bad experience will spread the same way - maybe even faster.)

Oh, and advertising might help a little bit on the side, too.

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 25th, 2004 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Business, Design/Art, Software, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.