Re: UKNM: 'Wacky Names'

[Leigh Blue Caldwell]

Terry Kendrick wrote:

>

> My feeling is that being loyal on the net is a strange concept.   It's not

> about loyalty it's about the best deal.   I used Infoseek then Alta Vista

> Came along, then I moved to Northern light, a brief stop off for a couple

> of months with Alltheweb(FAST), and I currently use Google.   I have no

> loyalty whatsoever - the best deal will do.  The internet encourages this

> promiscuity because information is freely available and switching is

> easy.   I cannot think of a single site (apart from my own and my son's

> www.rtguitar.org) that I'm loyal to.  Most of my bookmarks are just there

> until a better deal comes along.


I don't think that 'loyalty' has to mean 'regularly using a service

out of an emotional feeling of goodwill towards it'.  It can just mean

'regularly using a service'.  You partly hit on it where you use the

word 'apathy' below.  But it's a bit more than that.


I use a few Web sites regularly - in particular news.com, Yahoo,

Altavista and daily-f1.com.  I know there are probably better ones out

there, but I happen to know and like those ones and I really can't be

bothered hunting for others.  Each time I'm using one, I'm usually

busy and need to find something quickly (Yahoo and Altavista) or just

sneaking in a couple of minutes of entertainment where I can (news.com

and daily-f1).


Either way, my priority is to get the information I want quickly on

this occasion, and I know the navigation and idioms of those sites

well enough to get what I need very quickly.  I can't think of a

single occasion in the recent past where I've been spending enough

time on the sites to make it worthwhile to pick a new one, learn its

structure or search syntax, re-learn all the searching lore that I

have accumulated on Yahoo and Altavista, and remember to use on future

occasions.


Similarly, my financial services - I am unhappy with lots of things my

bank does (and doesn't do) but not sufficiently (yet) to go to the

trouble of changing it.


To contradict myself completely, I do think that there is some

emotional connection to these services too - I happen to "like"

Altavista and Yahoo, and the way they do things - so it's not just

convenience.  I keep an eye out for the Yahoo profit announcements and

stock price, and the latest on the Altavista on-off flotation, much

more than I pay attention to the equivalent data for Excite, Lycos, or

whatever other engines are out there.


Interestingly, I did switch search engines recently - to raging.com,

Altavista's new faster, low-graphics service.  The switch within the

same company's stable seemed like a natural and obvious thing to do,

unlike, say, moving to Google, which many colleagues keep telling me

is better.


> Also, on the net,financial services are are not competing with the high

> street or out of town (such as other product areas  - groceries for

> example) they are competing with the direct telephone guys and gals who

> have seen that there is little added value so the best source of advantage

> is to strip cost out.  It's a brave (consultant's term for loony) thing to

> do to avoid driving by price even if you market with a smokescreen.  Try

to

> build in value-for-more-margin again all you like but you've still got to

> get some volume before you can even begin to talk about customer

retention.



There really is an emotional value in brands, even apart from the

feature-oriented added value of things like the Virgin One account.

Orange and Tango have been very good at generating this kind of value

in recent years, as have Pret a Manger and Carphone Warehouse and many

others.  It's harder in financial services, but First Direct have done

a good job and Egg, I think, are on the way to it.


On the Internet, brands have just as good an opportunity to create

this kind of feeling, as many have done.  For me, the examples above

apply - for others, Freeserve, Electronic Telegraph, or Scoot are the

choices.  All of these companies have competitors whose products and

prices are just as good, and most of their customers are aware of some

of the competitors, and yet they still stay 'loyal'.  Inertia only

accounts for part of this.


	Leigh.


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