Web marketing thoughts for small businesses

I have been reading Seth Godin’s book titled Purple Cow, which is about creating products or services so remarkable that word spreads like a virus and attracts customers better than traditional marketing techniques. It is a very interesting book and I highly recommend it. Visit Seth’s website for more information on Purple Cow.

As I was reading Seth’s chapter called The Opposite of Remarkable something stood out to me. His argument is that the opposite of remarkable is not bad or mediocre, his belief is that the opposite of remarkable is very good. Very good?! Wow, what a strong statement to make, but after more thought I have to say that I agree with Seth.

Why do we like very good? Very good is safe, very good is comfortable; however, creating remarkable is what allows our businesses to stand out from the rest of the competition and attract more customers. As I was chewing on this, an old client of ours came to mind and helped me realize how important remarkable is and just how easy being reverting back to very good is as well.

Triune Designs image representing personality, unique and one of a kind.

Years ago, when we started Triune Designs as a company that provides web marketing, we made a conscious decision to not provide pre-made website design templates. The reason was because we felt that every company was different and templates just do not bring out a company’s true personality like custom website designs. This is the reason why I love our home page image so much. Before ever buying into the purple cow concept, we believed that being different and unique (in the article’s case, remarkable) is a good thing and it should be embraced.

A while back our design team created a custom website design and pegged our aforementioned client’s personality exactly. The website imagery conveyed a very professional atmosphere while also speaking volumes about who the company was (without even a word of content added yet).

Over the course of a couple of post-design meetings, the client requested that we change a few of the images to create a more “corporate” feel. After a lot of discussion and in the interest of providing excellent customer service, we made the appropriate changes. Unfortunately, what this did was move the design from remarkable to making a website design that blended in with the rest of the competition. Do not get me wrong, it was a very good design and it is one that we provide in our portfolio. The problem was that we lost remarkable and moved to very good.

The lesson I have learned was that being scared of moving away from safe and ultimately standing out led our client to step away from remarkable and head back towards being very good. The major problem is that most often very good does not create buzz, it does not spread the word about your company like wildfire. Very good is safe and everyone else is being safe. As a result, that means you are more likely to blend in with the rest of your competition. So, go out there and take a chance, be different, be the girl on our home page; do the remarkable and make people talk!

Tags: corporate branding, corporate identity, web marketing, website design