Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies of this article for non-commercial purposes provided this permission notice is preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to: seltzer@samizdat.com
Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
On Halloween, I had the good fortune to see part of an excellent teleseminar "Competing in the Marketspace: Profits on the Internet and Beyond", produced by Kathleen Gilroy Associates (http://www.kga.com/).
The part I saw included a video case study of Virtual Vineyards (http://www.virtualvin.com/). Harvard Business School professors John Sviokla and Jeffrey Rayport (http://marketspace.hbs.harvard.edu/) put the case into historical perspective and shed light on the extraordinary success of that Web site.
They spoke in terms of product, context, and infrastructure.
Consumers could buy these same premium wines at nearby stores. And the infrastructure (the Internet) was available to competitors as well. So the company's value to the customer comes primarily from the context -- the carefully constructed experience that they lead users through at their Web site, to help them understand, appreciate, select and purchase the wines they want. (Keep in mind that the presentation at the teleseminar was far richer and more compelling than my gleanings which I am summarizing here.)
While the presentation was compelling, I was left with an uneasy feeling that while what Virtual Vineyards is doing seems very right for now, and obviously works, it might not be a good business model for others to follow. At first, I couldn't articulate that uneasiness. Then, on the next day, I chanced on some interesting statistics about visits to my own little Web site and got some anecdotal feedback from a couple of readers on how they had navigated to my site.
Several months ago, I had posted an old article I had written about Halloween (http://www.samizdat.com/hallow.html ). And much to my surprise, over the couple weeks before Halloween that article got more visits than my home page. In fact, over the last few days before Halloween, it got three times as many visits as my home page. And some -- if not most -- of the unexpected visitors were surfing using search engines (like excite and opentext) and looking for references to Halloween.
What does that mean?
Efficient search engines which dive into the full text of Web sites are making "home pages" less relevant. People are finding what they want deep in the bowels of Web sites, without having to navigate the way the designer of the site intended.
In other words, once again, the Internet puts people in touch with what they want, the way they want it. Users create their own context, and blow right past the carefully constructed contexts that companies try to create for them. And this is barely the beginning...
The Internet went through a similar transition about a year ago, when the advent of Yahoo blew apart the concept of the virtual mall or on-ramp site. People no long needed an orderly, well-constructed context to find the site they wanted when they wanted it. With searches they could bounce from one site to the next, unaided by a mall designer.
The mall had been an attempt to construct a large controlled environment/context on the Internet that in some ways mimicked the environment of the old on-line services. For a few months, it looked like a brilliant idea; then overnight it was obsolete. Of course, it took a while before large companies realized it was obsolete. MCI and others started moving boldly in that deadend direction in the spring. That was when I wrote an article about the "associative power" of the Internet for Internet-on-a-Disk ("The Associative Power -- This Ain't Kansas, Mr. Broadcaster." You can find it at http://www.samizdat.com/kansas.html )
I believe that we are about to see that same phenomenon carried to a deeper level. Not only can users move smoothly from one site to another without aids and context; in the near future they will be able to go from pages deep inside one site to pages deep inside another, without the help of hardcoded hyperlinks.
Search engines, agents, and other tools that enable users to drill straight to what they want when they want it -- bypassing the carefully constructed contexts of sites like Virtual Vineyards -- will soon make that business model obsolete.
A year ago it was reasonable to assume that people navigating to and through a Web would start with the homepage. The number of hits on deeper pages was simply a subset of the hits on the home page (unless you went out of your way to publicize deeper layers as separate entities and encourage people to go there directly).
While we realized that users can come and go as they please, on a whim, we presumed that the structure/context of a Web site is important to hold the user there and to lead users through a controlled sequence of experiences and choices. (From what they said in the video, the people at Virtual Vineyards folks put a lot of effort into that level of page design).
But sophisticated search tools and agents blow that model away.
You cannot own/control the context. The encounter with the user will not be serial/sequential.
A site like Virtual Vineyards is doing all the right things for today. And they could be successful in the long term if they evolve as the Internet evolves. The risk is that they will put too much store in their current model because it works, and they will peg their future on their look-and-feel context approach.
I suspect that instead of Web-page-design context, they should focus on building audience, on interaction with and among users, on serving audience. In so far as Web-design context is a means to better serving the audience that's great. But they should stay alert to all the new ways that come along to do that -- rather than focusing just on the design.
Keep in mind that I am drawing sweeping conclusions from very limited evidence. On the other hand, when describing an alien landscape, it doesn't take too many data points to determine which way the gravity pulls. And there is no doubt that ever more sophisticated search tools are coming very soon.
So the analysis at the teleseminar of why Virtual Vineyards is successful today was excellent and right on target. But I suspect that that formula for success -- branding based on the context of a Web site -- is likely to be short-lived. And I wouldn't recommend that others try to follow in their footsteps.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
Buy Richard's book Web Business Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
<
| Internet Business Showcase: | ||
|
|
|