How to be different…or not

The online world makes companies easy to compare: you just open several browser tabs and find the product or company websites you want to compare and flick from one to another.

That’s hard to do with magazine articles, or TV and billboard advertising.

I’ve done a very basic and sweeping comparison of 21 websites belonging to pharmaceuticals and medical device companies to show how easy it is to do this kind of comparison.

Rankings

Benchmarking results for global corporates were published yesterday in the Financial Times with an article called Corporate websites: How well are we being served? by David Bowen of Bowen Craggs & Co.

The “Index of corporate website effectiveness” (rankings list) is available as a download (pdf or html) from the FT.

Looking through the rankings and the websites, it’s clear that it takes both investment and hard work to produce effective websites. The standards set by Siemens, BP, IBM and the others raise the bar for everyone else. It won’t do to be a global corporate and have a sub-standard website.

Last year the FT benchmarking report was done by Hallvarsson & Halvarsson. Some of their webrankings are available online.

>Bowen Craggs & Co blog

>Summary on e-consultancy

Why being “passionate” doesn’t make you different

Every company seems to be passionate these days: passionate about customer service, passionate about delivery, passionate about solutions. Not to mention passionate about creating passionate users.

The trouble is, when being “passionate about” everything from selling woodscrews to building user interfaces becomes a must-have core value, then everyone starts to look, well, pretty much the same. And I stop believing what they’re telling me.

Is your company really that “passionate” about direct marketing, new-generation cleaning products, central-heating solutions or whatever it is you do? Or are you just saying it because everyone else is? And if everyone else is saying it, shouldn’t you be saying something that makes you different?

You’d think companies that specialize in communications – companies that are supposed to know how words work, after all – would avoid falling into this trap. But no.

I just typed the phrase “passionate about communications” into Google.

On the first two pages of the search results I got there were no fewer than eight communications companies with that same phrase on their websites (including “the largest independent media agency in the UK”).

If they can’t even make their own sites stand out from the crowd, how are they going to help you with yours?

Shouldn’t usability companies use usable copy?

If you’re trying to sell the advantages of usability (or “user-centred design” or “good customer experience” or whatever it’s called this week) then your own website should be the first place to start.

So why are the sites of so many UK-based usability companies badly written, full of invented jargon and reliant on meaningless corporate-speak?

Well, maybe it’s because they think that’s what their clients actually want to read…