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Your product names: are they simple or confusing? Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. Over the past few months the same issue has cropped up on many of the projects I've been working on. Whether it's creating brochures, web sites or other marketing materials, at some point we have deal with labels. By labels I mean product names and the section or category names we use to group products together. Often, you see the names of products used as titles for brochure contents pages and web navigation buttons. That's fine when the product or category names are going to make sense to 99.9 percent of readers. Just yesterday, I visited the web site of a chain of bike shops. I am planning a week-long tour on my racing cycle in a few weeks and I need to get kitted out. In particular, I need some waterproof clothing (this is the English summer after all). And there, in the row of navigation buttons was one that read 'clothing - waterproof'. Couldn't be easier. The trouble is that for many companies their product names and categories aren't always as clear. They don't always make sense to readers. Often you see that a software company's web site has a button that says 'products'. So you click that and then you see a list of links, all of which are product names like 'OpenLink' and 'XLS900'. Although some sections of the target audience will be familiar with these product names, some will not. And that means these companies are forcing people to click on every button in the hope that they will find a product that might be right for them. Guess what they'll probably do instead. So if you want your marketing to have instant appeal, and if you want to make things easy for potential customers, you have to think carefully about when to use your product names and when to use other labels. Even when you use category names you can still make things confusing. This struck home for me recently when I looked at the web sites of two Marketing Booster subscribers who wanted some feedback via my critique service. Both of the subscribers work for printing companies and on both their sites, they were using names for categories of services that I didn't understand - and I have been involved in commissioning printing for over ten years. So what can you do if you suspect that your readers might not always understand the product names or category names that you use? My suggestions are pretty obvious really, but they might help all the same. One way is to break things down by customer type. You can do this by size of company (eg 'services for multinationals') or by type of individual reader (eg 'services for print buyers'). Another way is to break things down by the different needs of your customers, for example 'high-volume printing options'. Only when you are sure that you have helped people reach the right information do you mention a product name. Look at microsoft.com and you'll see three simple links in the centre of their home page: home & entertainment, technical resources and business agility. Just to make things even clearer, they have three links below each of these headings, all of which are written in a way that is easy to understand. The Microsoft home page has great clarity elsewhere, such as the side navigation panel with links like 'information for home users'. And even when they have a product name that most visitors will be familiar with, they also use language for dummies like me, such as 'services for IT professionals (TechNet)'. If they used 'TechNet' alone it would be just another piece of jargon to most of us. This is something you can look at now or perhaps the next time you produce a new brochure or make changes to your web site. But then again, if your web site currently uses confusing product and category names as links to information then why wait to make things easier for your potential customers? Copyright 2004 Richard Groom |