Consumer Context

Allow Your Customers Clarity Across Models and Styles

It's incredibly easy for manufacturers to get so caught up in the (important!) minutia of technical specs and brand message that they forget about the obvious. A few years ago, working for a cycling company, we had an epiphany at 3VERB: consumers might just gravitate to a web page that showed all available models, easily compared, side-by-side (or stacked) on a single page along with MSRP. It quickly become the most visited page on the website. That should've been obvious, but it wasn't initially.

Late last year – and I've been wanted to write about it since – I noticed that Boston Acoustics, the renowned speaker company, had fallen into a similar trap so often encouraged by the priority given to dedicated yet segmented product pages in many e-commerce cart systems. Side-tracked also, perhaps, by perfect pictures of their products, they'd lost sight of the obvious: given the 'bookshelf' designation of their A-Series product, consumers might just want to know how the product might actually fit on a bookshelf.

Instead, Exhibit A shows three very different Boston Acoustics speaker models as displayed on the B&H Photo/Audio/Video website without clear definition between each. And, though quite different in physical size and technical characteristics, each was displayed independently at almost the exact same size, pixel to pixel.

Exhibit B shows the speakers again but, this time, redesigned into a single image by 3VERB with just a hint of helpful context to help a consumer understand the differences of size, sound, and price between the models in a simple glance. This is what Boston Acoustics meant me to understand about these product and a real sense of how they might fit into the physical space I have available.

The Point? Boston Acoustics would do well to make this second image (Exhibit B) of all three models – along with the grill/no-grill images they've already supplied – available to their retailers for display on all of the model-specific pages so the consumer has a clear visual distinction and understanding of each model within the context of the others.

What is the obvious image, distinction, or simple story line missing for your products?

– Jon Roketenetz

Jon is the CEO of GimmeAnother and founder of 3VERB.

N.B. Thanks to my pal, JCK, at Anthem Marketing in Chicago for the 'Consumer Context' title; acknowledged.