When you’re dreaming up e-commerce solutions for your website, it’s easy to get carried away. That’s what happened to Harold McAdam of NetDesign Associates. He is the webmaster for a company that develops unusual marketing campaigns. “We do all sorts of crazy things,” McAdam said. “The craziest thing we did one time was to drop thousands of pork rinds on the city of Austin, Texas. It was pretty successful I think, because sales went up by 50% that year.” McAdam says his company specializes in over-the-top marketing, so he had to come up with a way to market their website in an equally crazy way.
Viruses: Not a Good Marketing Tool
What he came up with was a marketing blunder fit for the Guinness Book of World Records: worst web design e-business solutions ever! He decided to create a marketing website that would simulate putting a virus on the person’s computer. When a person surfed to the site, he would immediately be confronted with a large flashing warning icon: “Warning! Your Computer is About to be Flooded with Awesome. Loading software now!”. McAdam thought that his target audience would be amused by this prank, and he thought they’d be intrigued by such an edgy company. The bottom line? They weren’t. He had made the classic mistake of assuming that people outside the company had already bought into the ethos of the company. It is a classic mistake. As a marketer, you know the company inside and out. It is easy to lose perspective and start to think that all your customers do too, and just as important to avoid going down that road.
What happened? Panicked, most people shut down their computers to avoid the virus, and they never visited the site again. People wrote on message boards about the potential virus. Sales seemed to be lagging. So, one day the company’s CEO finally logged into the website to see what was amiss. He was horrified to find McAdam’s senseless marketing ploy. He immediately fired McAdam (his brother-in-law) and hired a new webmaster with a little more sense for prudence. He produced a more straightforward campaign highlighting the company’s history. The real punch line to the story: their website is now back and running as a serious enterprise, using a strategy that is centered on making fun of how stupid the old one was.
When you’re designing your ecommerce marketing plan, it’s okay to be creative. But please, don’t end up like McAdam; make sure you get someone else to check your work before you go public.
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