Sat, 17-May-2008
Web watch - MMHK April
Published: Mar 25, 2008
Dwayne Serjeant, creative director, wwwins Consulting Hong Kong
Getting dressed, for some of us, can be an interesting exercise in coordination - what we wear says something about us and so getting the right combination of elements is all important! With some exception, we rarely all dress head to toe in one brand. Ask anyone who is fashionably dressed what they are wearing and the answer is usually a hotchpotch of retail and brand names. Along comes Polyvore. Taking cues from 2.0 companies like Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and others, Polyvore presents an interesting slant on shopping. Polyvore owns nothing - no products at all. Instead it reaches out to online retailers and brings back their items. Users can also tag products on other sites for inclusion, or sites can provide feeds back to Polyvore. It then provides a pretty interesting way of allowing you build sets of items, almost like fashion moodboards, and then name them and share them with friends and other visitors to the site. Your set for ‘Punchy power pitch' might be just the thing for another creative out there, and even if you don't buy it yourself, someone else might just find your unique sense of style perfect for themselves. If you want to buy the individual items that compose a set, click-throughs take you back to the original retailer for purchase. It also allows you to vote on the sets that you like, send links to friends and add comments. Much like Flickr, the whole site is really driven by UGCIt's still in its infancy, having been around for about 12 months, but I think it's a great example of an interesting idea that could be applied to other retail segments, not just fashion. Speaking of fashion, someone really needs to have a chat with them about the whole ‘look' of the site!
NOT: http://www.theflagshipexperience.com
Differentiating experiences on airlines these days seems to be getting harder and harder. As we're all used to travelling, squeezed in like sardines (bar first class), sometimes it's the small details that make the trip all that more bearable. In other cases it's a major overhaul that the airline has done to comfort us. So when an airline announces a major new fixture or service, I'm always keen to see how much it'll impact my expectations. American Airlines recently unveiled its ‘Flagship Experience' micro site, which looks like its going to promise great things - "Prepare to enjoy comfort at 30,000 feet." Clicking through the obligatory ‘start' screen, I'm greeted by not one, but three loading bars with nothing to do but tap my mouse button and wait - so far it seems on par with check-in queues at the airport! Eventually I'm treated to some nice 3d animation of a seat and 7 navigation choices. The content, the real reason I'm at the site, is relegated to a bunch of text-activated slide-up boxes. There are other small snippets of content ‘hidden' in buttons within the main visuals and admittedly the 3d is quite lavish, but it all seems a little vacuous to me. That's it? After waiting all that time, all I get to see is some cute animation, to read a few blocks of text? A case of style over substance for me. If this site is really aimed at first and business class travelers, who tend to be some of the most time-poor individuals around, I wonder how such a heavy site that is low on content, interaction and speed will manage to convince them to spend any critical time with the brand?
