Fast and Easy….Bad.

1171
0

I asked a cohort with an aspiring web business what s/he wanted consumers to take away from the web experience – the brand experience – and the answer was it’s “fast and easy” for the user and “a traffic source and stress free” for the vendors who pay to be on the site.   

Consumers and vendors want these things, I know.  I worked at a web start up that wasn’t easy to use. And when something is not easy it’s not apt to be fast.  But today, my friends, fast and easy are the price of entry in a web site or app. (The only time you want to push fast and easy is when the functionality of the product or service is expected to be plodding and complicated — read: trips to the DMV or reading a financial disclosure statement.) Most of the time brand strategy should not be about price of entry values.

The values you need to position around should be human and endemic to the category. The more emotional, the better. Emotions are flypaper to consumers.

I watch Hallmark movies with my wife to balance the bang, bang, bang stuff I favor.  The movies are all the same story-wise but never fail to get me to tear up at the end. It’s a formula. When planners are mining the brand claim, they need to think emotional and endemic. Not just in a passage in the brief but in the claim itself.

Heavy lifting admittedly. But your creative team will appreciate it.

Peace.