Given they're all from the same company usually whose name escapes me right now, you'd think they'd be better at it?
I've never tested it, so I have no idea if it works. It's an interesting hypothesis at least.
Yeah, they all say that. The question is: if that's true, then why aren't more sites using "survey popups'?
It's easy to see how this happens; a clueless exec at big-corp decides they need data, survey company gives them a sales pitch they can't refuse, exec never bothers to actually check out the product.
These worthless surveys are almost exclusively on the websites large enterprisey companies that got off the clue-train years ago.
A business model worth of our admiration!
Extra negative points if your account creation process requires a phone number or e-mail address verification step.
A good e-commerce site will give you the option of creating an account only at the end of checkout and the account is totally optional. I've seen it before but unfortunately it's not the majority.
Agreed - and those surveys are often powered by? ... Google!
This is indeed a little hypocritical of them.
We need to do something abut intrusive ads, but I'm not sure this is it.
I think you wanted to say local maxima, but yes I agree.
Like most ticketing operations, they've built a niche monopoly. If you want to buy tickets online, they are usually the only game in town. If the obnoxious ads annoy you, their attitude is basically "fuck you, drive to the mall and miss your movie".
To be significantly successful, you need to stop thinking this way. Start thinking about what benefits you & your company.
It may seem like contempt for the consumer, and perhaps it is. But it's also possible the consumer is irrational and you can benefit in the short and long term.
I work in marketing, and have seen scant evidence for the value of a "brand". It's mostly branding people making an argument that comic sans devalues our brand, whereas the data clearly shows it doesn't.
The "long term harm" argument is indistinguishable from "i know better than you and I want it this way." It may be true, but it's unprovable.
To what do you attribute the success of, say Coca Cola, rather than generic cola? Price and a good distribution network? Surely brand must contribute a little.
In nearly every SMB branding exercise/project I've participated in, the need for a brand, and the benefits it provides, are entirely limited to the egos of the employees.
In my experience companies that do this are thinking very short term: how many people can we get through our funnel this month and how much money can we make from them? Yes it's hard to measure 'long term harm', but to assume it doesn't exist because it can't be directly measured makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
To me it is worth aspiring to be respected as a business. Obviously not to the point of letting your business fail because you obsessed over branding while nobody actually bought your product, but as a larger goal. A business that tries to squeeze customers for all it can and achieves grudging acceptance isn't something I aspire to be a part of.
Coca Cola has nearly infinite resources, compared to the jobs I've worked (<$75mm annual revenue).
Even then, can they prove the value of their brand is an effective use of their marketing dollars? What I've read has a lot of correlations that could be explained by other causes.
For a good read on this, check out the Intel Inside section on this article: https://conversionxl.com/cro-vs-branding/
Brand awareness is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers know that your product or service is an option when they are ready to make a purchase. You can't measure it from your marketing interactions alone, because the data set of your interactions is biased toward potential customers who are already aware of you. You can only measure it by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. The business purpose of measuring awareness is to help you find customers who have never interacted with your brand.
Brand affinity is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers have an emotional attachment to your product or service. A good shorthand is the degree to which a potential customer thinks of themselves as a "________ person." Think of a dude in a pickup truck saying "I'm a Ford guy, they've never let me down," or a person who won't even look at a phone that is not an iPhone. Again--the only way to measure this is by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. Measuring your marketing interactions alone will give you an artificially high measure of your affinity.
Design standards are important to both awareness and affinity.
A standard look helps the customer make mental connections between all the various times they've been exposed to your brand--this raises awareness. Comic Sans is not necessarily bad for awareness as long as you use it consistently in an intentional way. Randomly varying your fonts is bad, though, because it makes you "look" like several different brands, which means you will need to deliver more interactions to raise awareness.
Comic sans also might harm certain affinities, for example along the lines of being "sophisticated" or "beautiful." If a customer wants to think of themselves as sophisticated, they will seek brands that also present themselves that way. You're not going to see Mercedes Benz, which depends heavily on affinities of sophistication and elegance, using Comic Sans. You might see Scion, which depends on affinities of quirkiness and irony, use it. But again, the point is to be intentional.
Companies that are good at branding tend to be good either because they measure it compulsively (example: Proctor and Gamble), or because they are good at making internal opinionated decisions that stick (example: Apple).
Either way, the day to day operation of a strong brand does indeed look like a few people within a company telling everyone else what they can and cannot do with design.
I don't have any experience with billion dollar companies. Have you worked in the industry and seen how they measure their campaign efficacies in huge companies? I bet it's really different than what I've seen.
Based on what I've seen, it's a lot of story telling that "branding" works. The question is, does it work better than if the company had put those resources into other avenues? Improve the product. Decrease the cost to consumer. Better customer service.
Here's a good cro vs. branding article, check out the Intel Inside section. [0].
There's a lot of money being made by people working in branding. If their field actually wasn't very effective, I wonder if it would be possible for them to accept it. I generally wouldn't want to find out that my career has essentially been a waste, and I created no value. (insert sinclair quote here)
Both opt-in and opt-out ways of doing surveys on your website introduce bias. The opt-out (read: in your face pop-up) is more likely to make people angry which makes them more likely to leave negative reviews.
The opt-in version will only be found by people having a relatively extreme opinion about your site, good or bad.
The difference being in the quantity of the data. The first will probably be answered by more people, since the people who'd have completed the survey in the second case are probably more or less a subset of the people who would complete the survey in the first case. All of this makes it no surprise that most websites that want to have any kind of feedback from their users go for the opt-out strategy. More is better if less is not in any way more :)
It used to be that Google Now obeyed your browser choice when opening links. When it started forcing chrome, I had to actually uninstall chrome in order to make it use firefox to open the news article tiles it presents to me.
Is it? Grocery stores keep essentials far away from each other so you have to walk past stuff you don't want in order to get to what you want. Imagine a store where they had milk at the checkout counter! That's the retail equivalent of amazon.com ;)
The less expensive store-brand-label milk is at the back of the store where the big walk-in coolers are.
Supermarkets have varying strategies for stuff, including cold items. The supermarkets around me put ice cream in either a center aisle or the second to last aisle, in the front of the store. The "smarter" store from a data standpoint has pint ice cream in an end cap next to the florist to nab women. Milk is always back corner.
If they can figure out how to maintain the cold chain for ice cream, I'm sure milk would be easier to move around.
It not that it's impossible to maintain the cold chain with other placements, it's that there is a cost (including that imposed by floor traffic) in doing so. Putting it someplace where a large volume walk-in cooler can be directly loaded from a truck and the display stocked from that without employee floor traffic across the store reduces the costs (labor, losses, and otherwise) of selling milk.
My wife never buys me flowers :-(
But I am a sucker for a pint of ice cream :-)
Then again, I guess if you're going to target for milk you're probably doing it wrong...
I don't know if this is their logic, but it makes sense.
Additionally, any time you see milk that is shelf stable (doesn't require refrigeration until opened) its been UHT pasteurized and packed in special aseptic packaging.
And, yes, I've noticed that, for some reason, organic milk tends to be UHT pasteurized more often than non-organic milk.
If your sentiment were true, most heavily weighted expendables would all be located in the back simply because of labor. Labor is cheap when you can increase revenue from every potential customer with basic layout adjustments.
They are. At least in almost every grocery store I've been in. The milk coolers are almost invariably against the back wall, accessible from the stockroom (which itself has the loading dock), as is the butcher / meat department. Both of those departments are probably getting daily deliveries, and it's of stuff that needs to be kept cold, has a short shelf life, and in the case of milk specifically, it needs to be stocked from the back of the shelves so that the oldest items get bought first (i.e. it's FIFO not FILO). It's a real pain to do this if you can't get to the back of the cooler.
Bread, however, is generally in its own aisle because it's not stocked by the store. Vendors (the bakeries) send their own delivery/logistics people in to stock it, so the stores don't really care about how easy it is, and those vendors also pull expired or near-expired items back off.
Produce, despite being expendable and delicate, tends to be towards the front because it's very high-margin for the store and also requires a lot of continual employee attention (and it generally has dedicated employees who just do that). It's admittedly been a long time since I worked in a grocery store, but back in the day in the pecking order of grocery-store floor workers, the produce guys were sort of at the top of the heap. (Although maybe that was because they could hook you up with the "damaged" fruit...)
If it were more profitable for the store to stock milk in the front they would - I agree. But the reasoning isn't delivery layout when they manufacture their own layout.
Either way, I thought this was an interesting take on it http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/23/334076398/episo...
Their conclusion: the jury is out, but "never breaking the cold chain" is a good contender.
Idk being told to try making it more accessable by a consultant who's job it is to maximize profits and the grocer does "what it wants anyway" doesn't sound right on an industry scale.
More comparable would be like someone standing in front of the checkout and insisting you take a survey before you can pay. In that scenario I can very much imagine someone getting pissed off and leaving.
With this move has been a growth in convenience stores that are operated/franchised by the big supermarket brands. People go to these places for their milk. (And do a big online shop for the bulk of their groceries).
So people are just deciding not to go to the big box stores in the first place.
Anecdote, but this happened to me. Where I was living the largest 'Tesco Extra' imaginable opened up literally across the road. This was AMAZING. Well, not really, within a week we were back to the convenience store buying everything there, it really was too much hassle going to the giant Tesco. Didn't need the kilometre walk past the TV's, clothing and other stuff that was placed between the store entrance and the milk. The 24/7 novelty wore off too, didn't actually need to go shopping for that pint of milk at 2 a.m.
Another part of the problem was that the customer service in the local store was more friendly. They didn't have people to greet you or people giving you free samples or any coupons at the checkout or any loyalty cards. Just polite 'how's your day?' chat with the small team of staff - all known by name - sufficed.
With the big supermarket I don't think there was this inate customer service aspect, 'customer service' was contrived marketing, nobody cared about you. And so it is online. People that do marketing online care more about their Google analytics and loading up websites with spam-scripts than they do about 'reality'. They may have one result per quarter from that pop up, that extra sale is good, a result, success even. Not on their dashboard is how many people didn't buy because of the stupid 'enter email address now:' popup they had on there. Marketing people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, far too often they lack the skills of empathy and cannot see things from the customer's perspective. Hence they have to use things like statistics in an attempt to make up for their lack of intuition and appreciation of customer service.
You can buy self stable milk in the US but it's not very popular for some reason. Except for Yoo-hoo, that's a popular milk product that's usually sold in shelf stable "juice boxes"... and I think it tastes even better at room temperature.
When milk alternatives like soy milk, almound milk, coconut milk, etc., first came to market they were almost always sold shelf stable. I can only assume that's because refrigeration space in supermarkets is sparse and expensive (learned that from Shark Tank) and these were niche products at the time. Now that they are mainstream you can find them refrigerated right next to the dairy milk. I guess Americans prefer to buy milk that way.
Re: wine. Interestingly in the US, due to the fact liquor laws are regulated by the state, when you cross state lines your supermarket alcohol selection will vary drastically. Some states ban alcohol sales in supermarkets entirely. Some allow only beer and wine. Some allow only beer only. Some allow beer, wine, and liquor. I've never heard of a state that banned beer but allowed liquor but who knows, it's possible. It mind boggling just how many crazy (and different) regulations about silly stuff like this exists around alcohol in the US. Funny story, a friend of mine went to a supermarket outside of the state she lived in and was totally mystified she couldn't find Bacardi's. "I've never been to a grocery store that didn't have Bacardi's" She didn't know they weren't allowed to sell it there.
Personally, I'm in a "beer only" state and and wine coolers and malt liquor (colloquially known as "40s") are categorized as "beer."
I once has breakfast on a real dairy farm, they got their milk from the tank right after milking. After drinking milk that was in the cow just 3 hours before I cannot stand milk you can buy. I cannot say if this is because it was never pasteurized, or just that is was fresh, but the flavor was better.
Note, do not take the above as advocacy for unpasteurized milk. The risks are real enough.
What I actually want for this sort of problem is a browser extension that allows me to annotate domains in some way, and then treats links differently based on that. This is a half-baked idea; I have no time to make this, so I haven't been thinking about it much. (Please steal the idea!) But perhaps a way to quickly tag domain names - 'annoying popup', 'spammer', 'dead to me', etc., and then indicate the tags visually next to links/change the colors/something like that, so I can more easily avoid sites that annoy me.
Sadly, if "give it away for free and make money from advertising" is the dominant business model in an industry, it's very hard to disrupt. That's precisely because there aren't really any sustainable incentives for users to switch to a different model.
If one experience is awful and one is pleasant but 50c more then most aren't going to notice the difference.
Not to mention the effects on the advertiser, being disrupted from what I'm doing to see your ad makes me not want to see your movie.
For theatre's over reliance on advertising has already turned a lot of people away. We've all made and heard complaints about 20 minutes of advertising before a movie starts. The only thing they've got going for them anymore is timed exclusivity.
For what it's worth, I'm with you. I'd rather pay a small fee to avoid ads (and I do so whenever available.) But I've come to the sad conclusion that we are a small minority of consumers. Better to accept that than fall prey to the is-ought fallacy.
They don't really save time, as you need to show up early for a seat in most places.
The plumbing guys are dumb, but you don't know the business... of they are a local outfit they have a someone captive audience who can be abused a bit.
Their web site is for them to make money and considering that these practices exist, I have a feeling that they make more money by ad-sales than by actual sales of their actual product.
Long-term this is obviously a bad strategy, but who knows whether they even are interested in a long-term strategy.
I mentioned a site earlier today which sold plumbing supplies.[1] They pop up a "gimme your email" box which 1) cannot be dismissed, and 2) isn't even theirs, it's from "justuno.com", a spamming service.
These outfits have lost sight of what their web site is for. They're putting obstacles in front of a customer who's about to give them money. This is usually considered a big mistake in retail.
[1] https://www.tushy.me/