corporate marketing

[svero]

This is a little non game related, but relevant in the sense that I have to buy stuff for my company from time to time like dev tools and so on. I've been fishing around for some stuff and.. well...

Am I the only one? or is what's considered as the "golden standard" in corporate marketing really REALLY **REALLY** as stupid as it seems? I mean.. I think if I wanted to design a site to absolutely ENSURE without any doubt that nobody would ever buy anything from me I think I'd design it like a standard corporate site.

And yet they all use the same basic formula it seems, so one has to expect that on some level it must work? For who though? Who does this nightmare appeal to? Or is this just a case of follow the leader, where you have literally hundreds of sites poorly designed for no particular purpose other than they kind of look like IBM? Lord knows having worked for big big corporations in the past, I know that the decision making process isn't always very good. So that wouldn't surprise me entirely.

So what is this "golden standard" of which I speak? I think you'd all pretty much know it if you saw it.

It's usually a white a blue site, heavily peppered with words like "management, solutions, Empowering, Global, paradigm, and enterprise". It's a site that does the very most it can to hide any actual information from you, instead relying on paragraphs and paragraphs of complete garbage that really say nothing at all like "Here at ZKZ inc. management we strive to empower your business using unique managment solutions paradigms to help drive your company in the 21st century." The front page of the site usually has a picture of some well trimmed spiffy corporate looking people in suits and wearing one of those ear things to talk into. Usually there's a few from a number of nationality's and sexes to show how diversified they are.

If you do somehow manage to slog through the site the only way to get any info is to fill in some huge form and have a sales representative contact you. Presumably one of the people in that picture. You can forget about getting a price for anything, and chances are 1 out of 2 times the form leads to a dead link.

[Abscissa]

I completely agree. It's nice to hear someone else ranting about it too :).

I'm always amazed at how many words they can use to say absolutely nothing at all. I still don't understand how it's even possible to have such a complete lack of content with all of that wordiness, but somehow they manage to pull it off. I also don't get how they manage to make any sales when there's absolutely no information on their actual product, service, or price. But again, they manage to pull that off as well.

Unfortunately, I think it does appeal to certain people: the typical mindless MBA.

heavily peppered with words like "management, solutions, Empowering, Global, paradigm, and enterprise".
Don't forget "synergy". :rolleyes:

[Matthew]

http://www.huhcorp.com/

[Abscissa]

http://www.huhcorp.com/
LMAO, That's awesome :D.

I love this part:
Appearance is everything to us, because we'll get more of your money by looking cool than we will by doing quality work.

[JiriNovotny]

Oops :(

But I'm getting new website soon :)

[svero]

Well your site might in fact be exactly correct.. who knows? I'm not sure it isn't exactly what you want. You'd think with so many companies doing it there's got to be some logic behind it? Doesn't there? Maybe not...

Huhcorp is great... clearly I'm not the only one.

[Jim Buck]

Wow, one of the best rants on this messageboard yet. :)

I think these sites are somehow driven by executives meant to sell to other executives, though it's actually the underlings that would go through the process of looking for products to buy on the internet... hence, it's targeted completely wrong.

I remember a quote Joel Spolsky said when .NET was still vaporware, everyone was excited about it, but there was no clue as to what .NET really was - "Read the white paper closely, and you'll see that for all the hoopla, .NET is just a thin cloud of FUD. There's no there there. Try as you might to grasp onto something, the entire white paper does not say anything. The harder you grasp, the more it slips right through your fingers."

This is EXACTLY the same description of these corporate types of websites.

[cliffski]

I agree 100%. I hate it when there aren't prices for things. "phone us to discuss prices". Well no thanks, because thats an international phone call, and will take me 100 times longer than just reading your prices. Besides, companies that dont quote prices for their services always remind me of dodgy street-corner rolex salesmen, and I tend to not deal with them.

[otaku]

When I had my web site designed I forbid the designers from using a blue & white colour scheme ala Microsoft, or a green & white colour scheme, and pointed at a lot of corporate sites and said "not like this!" Several designers came forward with generic "corporate looking" template sites that used a blue & white colour scheme with either some sweeping panoramic scenery or some people in suits lined up against a steel & glass building shot from a low angle. Hellloooo???

[otaku]

One more thing, this site (http://www.memetrics.com/) belongs to two friends of mine. They started a games company in Venice Beach, CA about a decade ago and when it went belly up in 1998 decided to move to Australia and jump on the dot-com bandwagon marketing a lot of nonsense. Almost the same crap as the "huh" joke website, except this one is for real.

I don't recall the URL unfortunately but there was a website that you could give a URL to and it would return an index rating (much like readability index) of just how much bullshit and "synergy"-like words it contained.

[alfie]

The front page of the site usually has a picture of some well trimmed spiffy corporate looking people in suits and wearing one of those ear things to talk into.

It could be fun to have one of these pictures on a game site. Modified of course, with a joypad in both hands and a Crosshair tatooed on their head. With a corporate mission tagline..."We are serious about games".

[Anthony Flack]

The Tubes were making fun of this back in 1981 with the artwork (http://images.google.co.jp/imgres?imgurl=http://www.connollyco.com/discography/tubes/completionbc.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.connollyco.com/discography/tubes/completion.html&h=200&w=200&sz=23&tbnid=9T26flfI3fQJ:&tbnh=99&tbnw=99&hl=ja&start=7&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dtubes%2BCompletion%2BBackward%2BPrinc iple%26hl%3Dja%26lr%3D%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26sa%3DN) for The Completion Backwards Principle. ("The Tubes Group: Credibility. Growth. Direction.")One of my favourite record covers, although not exactly my favourite record.

If you're going to take the piss out of this sort of thing, then best to play it deadpan, I reckon. The huh? website was too sarcastic.

[svero]

Yeah I admit I was a little dissapointed that huh was obvious about. I would have preferred if it had been more of a joke you had to get. Like the dihydrogen monoxyde site.

[baegsi]

I especially love mission statements. This site (dilbert) (http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi) helps buidling one :)

[Spaceman Spiff]

Ahhhh. Another peeve close to my heart....

Years ago, in another lifetime in fact, I worked with those people.... They are not like us.

Seriously, the company I once worked for made products for CPA's (Accountants). I was one of those "techie" types .. you know, the ones who made actual product, and to punish me for my good work on a spin-off product, I had to work closely with marketing people. And those people were different enough to be a separate sub-species.

The "HuH" website hits the nail on the head in describing them. They grew up, lived, and had their world view in another world. Since they didn't actually create anything tangible, they were all about image and impression. Typically they were good-looking, vapid, conformist, and never gave the external world any signal than an unusual passion (or even interest) lay inside. The Anti-creative types in my mind. Oh, and those photos. Every newsletter, sales brochure, etc, had to have a stock photo of an "idealized" business person, or other situation with blank smiling faces, which had nothing to do with the product, which some study somewhere must have concluded would send exactly the right sub-conscious signals to purchasing managers.

Sort of like how the general media thinks showing a photo of a group of people clustered around a computer, pointing at the monitor, can accompany the majority of stories that have the word "technology" in them, as if it is a shorthand idiom of some sort.

[ErikH2000]

I worked in a small company that was trying very hard to be a big company. They sold software, and the software was pretty good, but they felt the software wasn't marketed very well. So they made a new marketing department out of quick hires. The marketing people would mostly go off and do their own thing, with little understanding of the products. They would ask questions to learn how to tweak their copy here and there so it would be factually correct, but they floated a little too high above the products. Later on we created a "technical liason" position where this one guy would explain things to marketing, but he didn't have much influence. I think the basic problem is that because marketing was so important to the company (and it was), and people already at the company were very bad at it, the new marketing people were allowed to do stupid things unchecked.

-Erik

[Gnatinator]

I hate this too. When designing my site (http://www.photonikgames.net/) I tried to keep away from any common colors at all.

I also dislike that all sites usually use full 255,255,255 white. It is like stairing at a bright lighbulb. How good do you think your vision is going to be in 20 years if your constantly looking at bright white pixels? It pisses me off. Because of this I try to tone down my monitor whenever possible.

[Abscissa]

"Try as you might to grasp onto something, the entire white paper does not say anything. The harder you grasp, the more it slips right through your fingers."
That sounds exactly like my experience with the so-called white papers in Symbian and Nokia's developer sections.

[donmc]

This reminds me of the last company i worked for. It was a small software company; I was the head of software development. I was working on a new suite of software and the marketing department was out trying to sell it before it was done. We got the constant barrage of questions about when they could show demos to customers.

Worse yet they would constantly "promise" features that customers wanted. The marketing/sales people had very little understanding of technology and thus had no idea whether the features were even possible to add -- design documents meant nothing to sales/marketing or the CEO.

Eventually i printed a sign and stuck it above my desk that read "Software driving sales, not sales driving software". One day one of the sales guys stops by and comments that my sign is upside down. Eventually they quit bringing their lofty ideas to me and went directly to the CEO himself. He was the worst of the bunch, and would visit engineering about once a week with a new "top priority" feature for the software. It was difficult to placate him enough with his new "vision" and still get the project out the door.

don

[cliffski]

One day one of the sales guys stops by and comments that my sign is upside down.
don

This is genius. Big corporate places are amazing arent they? I worked for the computer science corporation, it had over 50,000 staff and their own sponsored astronaut. he used to appear in their corporate videos smiling in his spacesuit. I'm not kidding.
The place was so inefficient that it could take 4-6 months for the forms to be filled out so that new employees got corporate email accounts. Many of them were on 6 month contracts from india, so generally the coders used hotmail to communicate. 70% of the forms we got through to set up mail accounts were for people who had already left.
I have a friend who still works there. he admits he doesnt even know what most of the acronyms in his dept title mean anymore. I tend to call IT people 'tech support' but he works in "distributed and collaborative e-infrastructure services'.
I'm serious.

[Emmanuel]

I used to run a 60+ people embedded software company as CTO, and I can tell you it's not always management (programmers love to waste a week changing the name of a class by hand, and I understand it, technical perfection is more reassuring and more under our control than mostly human-emotion-based stuff like sales).

This said, your point about forms is dead on: one of my guys had defined our "process police" really well: they slow everyone down to their pace. Processes are good, but the level of processes that I had allowed the company to get burdened with - entirely my fault for not speaking up - was ridiculous.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[Nauris]

Dont you find it ironic, that Google Adwords on huhcorp.com actually finger to real websites that are as absurd as huhcorp just for real? :)

[digriz]

A little OT:

I remember sitting in a cubicle next to some marketing people having a meeting about the colour of the cursor being displayed on screen. After 4 hours they decided on white and then they were all congratulating each other on what a great decision it was. *sigh*

Me and the guy i was working with were crying with laughter, the marketing people next door didn't get it. They thought we were upstarts because we were wearing jeans instead of fake armani suits.

I think indie game websites need to look professional because if they don't, people won't buy. It sounds a little odd coming from me but if i go to a game site and it looks like crap i don't trust it.

[Anthony Flack]

Right, save the URL of this thread, for next time someone says, "but how can independents compete with the big companies?"

[milo]

I agree 100%. I hate it when there aren't prices for things. "phone us to discuss prices". Well no thanks, because thats an international phone call, and will take me 100 times longer than just reading your prices. Besides, companies that dont quote prices for their services always remind me of dodgy street-corner rolex salesmen, and I tend to not deal with them.
A price list would be irrelevant in many cases. For many of these types of products the price is "how much money do you have."

Here's an example - at my last job we needed to use an online update solution from a major installer vendor. The list price on the product (i.e. the price they quoted me over the phone when I called to ask) was something like ten thousand bucks, plus an annual support subscription. Our COO called their sales guy and negotiated the base price down to fifteen hundred.

--milo

[Martoon]

I tend to call IT people 'tech support' but he works in "distributed and collaborative e-infrastructure services'.
I'm serious.

That is absolutely priceless. :D Especially that uber-buzzword "e-infrastructure".

[ErikH2000]

A price list would be irrelevant in many cases. For many of these types of products the price is "how much money do you have."
I understand the thinking behind that approach, but I expect it's being used in more situations than it should be. It's basically just a lazy way of selling to segmented markets. It should be better to do the extra work of creating products and pricing that will tend to reflect what different customers are willing to pay. I.e. you release "professional" and "enterprise" products with differing features/price tags. Then they could stop scaring off people like me that hate talking to salespeople.

An article about this by Joel Spolsky that I like:

Camels and Rubber Duckies (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

"Working my way backwards, this business about segmenting? It pisses the heck off of people. People want to feel they're paying a fair price. They don't want to think they're paying extra just because they're not clever enough to find the magic coupon code." -Spolsky

-Erik

[Lerc]

A price list would be irrelevant in many cases. For many of these types of products the price is "how much money do you have."

Well that's ok. If everything were like that there would be nothing I couldn't afford.

[Abscissa]

Right, save the URL of this thread, for next time someone says, "but how can independents compete with the big companies?"
I'm glad someone pointed that out. I've been thinking the exact same thing for quite some time. "How can I compete? Drastically reduced overhead on expenses and communication/management." Also, I think that large numbers of employees and the bureaucracy it necessitates are often just band-aids for lacking competent workers in the first place. Hence, a lot of products really don’t need the big development teams and big business departments they normally end up having. (Not saying that management and bureaucracy are bad things, they’re just overhead that sometimes is needed and sometimes isn’t.)

[svero]

Maybe there's some flexibility to being small. But all these examples dont mean that there aren't teams in big companies working efficiently. And with the extra money to throw at the best musicians and artists big companies do often have a leg up over individuals.

[Abscissa]

Maybe there's some flexibility to being small. But all these examples dont mean that there aren't teams in big companies working efficiently. And with the extra money to throw at the best musicians and artists big companies do often have a leg up over individuals.
Agreed. After all, that's why none of us are trying to compete with UT2003 or GTA3.

[svero]

But it's even true for small games. If you can afford to you just go ahead and hire Rod Smith or Anthony Flack.. throw enough money at them and you'll get really great game art. Then you hire the best musicians. I know some I like charge somewhere from 15-50k to score a game. That's a good starting point. It won't make a game fun, it it's just not a good concept or you can't tie everything together nicely in the design and code, but it certainly can't hurt the sales if the game is even halfway decent. Fact is most of us cut a few corners and have to do some of the art and music ourselves etc..

The one thing I'd say about downloadable titles is that all of us are facing the same general file and hardware restrictions. Your musician can give you a score of 18 wonderful tracks but at the end of the day we're all ogg compressing it at low quality and chosing the one best track etc... So those sorts of limits help even things up a bit. As file sizes continue to grow and inet speed increases for general consumers and hardware gets better on average a lot of those differences will dissapear and then we'll be harder pressed to match the quality of art and sound. But at the end of the day the one thing that really sells a game is whether or not it's fun to play. You can't art yourself out of a gameplay hole. So I think we'll always be able to compete on some level.

[Nexic]

Me and my brother are always making fun of these kinds of sites, when ever we find a really cheesy one we tell eachother about it, then spend a good couple of hours laughing our heads of at it.

In many ways those sites provide me with more entertainment movies, music and games put together! Perhaps it's a secret conspiracy...

Check this one out (its for real)

http://www.forbes-consulting.net/

[svero]

http://www.forbes-consulting.net/

Amazing.. simply amazing... what a load of bs...

[Anthony Flack]

I think the thing is, with a small company, you can actually make sure all your money is put to good use, and none is wasted. Want to pay me massive sums of money to do your art? Money well spent. Yes sir, really well spent, yup...

Er, what I mean is, even though you might need to spend some cash, a small, efficient company can still do far more with less. Which means you can be profitable in places where a big, bloated company would lose money.


Especially that uber-buzzword "e-infrastructure".

I like it. Because it is surely pronounced "Ian for Structure"

[Anthony Flack]

Oh, and that forbes thing - pity it's all flashy so I can't cut and paste, but I particularly like how the very first thing you read is about how strategy and the customer come second.

Also, on page two, where they talk about their approach, and say, "by the way, this isn't just a meaningless list of words we made up".

[milo]

Oh, and that forbes thing - pity it's all flashy so I can't cut and paste, but I particularly like how the very first thing you read is about how strategy and the customer come second.
Reading comprehension? The top part of the page is a list of problems that business people often face, expressed as hypothetical quotes from the people experiencing them. The bottom part of the page explains how the consultant can help solve those problems. I agree that it's a weak site design. The Flash effects are silly and the overall design is way too disorganized for the type of business they are advertising.

But why do you think the text is BS? This is how business people really talk when they are on the job. For the consultant to phrase their web site as if they were hawking "Betty's Beer Bar" would make them seem like idiots to their customers. It doesn't matter to them that you guys think they sound like idiots already - you don't have a half-million square feet of manufacturing space in Cologne and Prague that you need to consolidate.

--milo

[Abscissa]

Reading comprehension? The top part of the page is a list of problems that business people often face, expressed as hypothetical quotes from the people experiencing them. The bottom part of the page explains how the consultant can help solve those problems. I agree that it's a weak site design. The Flash effects are silly and the overall design is way too disorganized for the type of business they are advertising.
But it's still kinda strange to read that before they mention that those are problems they aim to solve ;). I totally agree on the overdone flash though. Ick!

[svero]

But why do you think the text is BS? This is how business people really talk when they are on the job.

You must be missing some kind of bs gene or something. If you can't see how vacuous the site is.. gah... so depressing. How could anyone defend this. It really wants to make my brain explode.

- S

PS : I have a automative transport crossing solution I'd like to e-sell you

[Ricardo C]

It doesn't matter to them that you guys think they sound like idiots already - you don't have a half-million square feet of manufacturing space in Cologne and Prague that you need to consolidate.

--milo

That's right, my assets are much smaller, and worth a lot less. And yet I wouldn't trust those mooks with them ;)

[svero]

It doesn't matter to them that you guys think they sound like idiots already - you don't have a half-million square feet of manufacturing space in Cologne and Prague that you need to consolidate.


Oh and.. I've made or been very instrumental in purchasing decisions for major US corporations, and I believe it does matter. I haven't always run my own small company. A site like this is very off-putting. I don't know if they're good at consolidating warehouse space or not, but their website is designed in such a way as to give the impression they're padding a lack of real experience and expertise with substanceless lingo and filler. I really can't believe I have to explain this.. but anyway.. look at at their site.. They say stuff like...

"experience in excess of 350 projects involving some 7 million square in 40 countries"

That comes across as bs. A good company would write "We've worked with ..." and go on to name the actual clients, and projects, and probably have a few quotes from people that they worked with endorsing them. There's a notable lack of anything of that sort on the site.

Take a look at ibm.com as a counter example. IBM is a real company that provides real things that people use every day. It comes across very clearly as a legitimate service. Can you really not see the difference?

[milo]

I really can't believe I have to explain this.. but anyway.. look at at their site.. They say stuff like...

"experience in excess of 350 projects involving some 7 million square in 40 countries"

That comes across as bs. A good company would write "We've worked with ..." and go on to name the actual clients, and projects, and probably have a few quotes from people that they worked with endorsing them. There's a notable lack of anything of that sort on the site.
Point taken. I had only given the site a cursory look, and misunderstood what you were complaining about.

--milo

[george]

when working in the sales business, you are supposed to give as little information as possible, just enough to allow the user to decide to purchase (or so i hear)... i suppose the problem with these companies is that they are only trying to sell, not trying to help customers or provide a quality service, etc. etc. though i am sure they are making much more money than us... :-(

[Anthony Flack]

Reading comprehension? The top part of the page is a list of problems that business people often face, expressed as hypothetical quotes from the people experiencing them.

No, no problems with reading comprehension here. I know what they meant. But the fact remains - would you want the first thing on your website to read

Forbes Consulting: "We're always fighting at least one fire; strategy and the customer come second best..."