Tips, tools, and best practices for B2B marketers.
Ugly = better?
March 28, 2006 | Posted by: Nicholas
Some people say so. The one pulling in ten grand a day from his site (plentyoffish.com) is the one worth listening to. Craigslist, Google, and MySpace offer other proof.
With this interesting bit on why it might work:
Why does anti-marketing design work? Well, for one, big companies will never do a site that doesn’t look pretty. Why? Cause of the prevailing belief that great brands need to be beautiful. Look at what corporate branding experts study. Apple. Target. BMW. Everything those guys do is beautiful. Aesthetic. Crafted by committees of ad marketing department experts.
But, go deeper: we’re sick of committee-driven marketing. We don’t believe it. If we ever did. We’ve built a bulls**t filter that filters out well-designed things in a commercial context.
12120 Sunset Hills Road
Comments
by Lee
Ok are you serious? This guy is spouting off about good design in relation to a dating site with cheesecake photos? Did I miss the point? Maybe it’s that if we add some girly photos to a site we don’t have to worry about design?
Seems rather simplistic to say that you don’t need good design to sell just because some sites are successful without it. I think the point is, if the site provides what the user wants, design takes a second place to content. As we’ve always said here at EB “content rules.”
For me it’s providing the right content first, in a well designed way - the old one two punch.
by Nicholas
@ Lee: I think the point is, if the site provides what the user wants, design takes a second place to content.
I think you can take this one step further and say that if the site isn’t providing what the user wants, there’s a good chance that content took second (or third) place to something else. Content (and the user’s needs) should always come first and everything else should flow from that.
It’s a cliche because it’s true: Form follows function.
Although, another site that would support the ugly = successful theory: MySpace.
by Nicholas
A new rant on this topic.