[Sigia-l] "The role of anti-marketing design"

[Listera]

>From Scobleizer:

At the Northern Voice conference I met Markus Frind, founder of
Plentyoffish.com. He¹s Google¹s #1 Adsense user in Canada. His site is
pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google, he told me, and has
millions of passionate users. Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY.
Whew!

What¹s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it ³anti-marketing
design.²

Huh?

He says that sites that have ugly designs are well known to pull more
revenue, be more sticky, build better brands, and generally be more fun to
participate in, than sites with beautiful designs.

Ahh, yet another example of anti-marketing marketing.

He joins a good list. Google. Is it pretty? No. Craig¹s List? Pretty? No.
MySpace? Pretty? No.

He says he designed his site to be easy to use, fast to load, and
uncluttered, but he didn¹t pick pretty colors or fonts. He did, however,
spend a lot of time learning how search engines indexed their contents.

Why does anti-marketing design work? Well, for one, big companies will never
do a site that doesn¹t look pretty. Why? Cause of the prevailing belief that
great brands need to be beautiful. Look at what corporate branding experts
study. Apple. Target. BMW. Everything those guys do is beautiful. Aesthetic.
Crafted by committees of ad marketing department experts.

<http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/04/the-role-of-anti-marketing-desig
n/>

Another example of what happens when peoples' appreciation of design is
reduced to visual layout. Three cheers for hyper-specialization. :-)
 
----
Ziya

"Innovate as a last resort."