Costco.com Good Example of Design
Costco offers thousands of wholesale items to its members through their physical warehouse locations and a booming e-commerce website. Their website layout lists all the major categories of products with a clean design as their main priority. Below, the company is featuring approximately 20 select deals on various products with impressive, large, and colorful product pictures accompanied by prices. It is very easy to navigate this site to purchase any product, and if a customer is unsure of a selection, the marketing strategy designs with the 20 offers will immediately attract the attention of the customer. They will likely purchase a product that they did not intend to buy before entering the site! Thus, customers are lured into impulsive buying habits.Bestbuy.com Poor Example of Design
Best Buy is a large retailer of consumer electronics with a domestic and international presence. Their business is worth about 50% the value of Cosco based on market capitalization. Their website is an eCommerce site that is not effective. To find a category, the customer must click on a drop-down menu requiring the visitor to think an additional step. They only promote approximately six items on their front page and are not hitting as many potential visitors as they could be. If they displayed more pictures, prices, and categories, like Costco.com, the website would further enhance the value of their business. Good Example #2
The Poor Example #2 Sprint Magazine Ad
This Sprint ad in People Magazine features the text, “How much unlimited do you get for $69.99?” and a dull bar graph that compares Sprint to Verizon and AT&T. It is a boring advertisement from a company that barely competes with Verizon’s Droid and AT&T’s iPhone partially due to the lack of an apps market. I personally prefer the Verizon Droid ads that claim that the Droid does it all. This Sprint ad does not capture my attention in any way and it never reveals the pricing of its other two competitors. There is too much plain black text and most people won’t even understand the confusing chart which is their emphasis.
I love the Campbell's ad. It provokes a warm feeling for me- which I suppose is what the ad set out to do! And I agree, the sprint ad is also a debbie downer. A graph? Who wants to look at that? The average customer probably doesn't really care about graphs.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you 100% about the Sprint ad. It shows a complete lack of imagination. In addition, I actually had to think about what it was trying to say because the y-axis of the graph isn't even a quantity measurement. I found it confusing. And there is way too much text.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the Campbell's Soup ad. It really gets the point across while invoking feelings of warmth and comfort. It works!
ReplyDeleteI might disagree with you about the Best Buy site being an example of poor design. I kind of like the more bare (compared to Costco) site layout. Also, Best Buy is a more specific retailer. One would think that someone who goes to that site is looking for some specific type of technology or gadget and would prefer to browse specifically rather than being bombarded with dozens of products on the main page. I think it works for Costco because of the audience- generally people looking for bargains.
ReplyDeletePS "Me!" is Vienna. I tried to fix it, but don't know why it came up that way. Sorry!
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