Don’t Let High Involvement Products Be Hamstrung By A Not-Ready-For-Primetime Website

The Web is becoming the prime brand touchpoint for most high involvement products, and an inferior website can seriously cripple your chance for success (or your dealers’/distributors’ chances) right out of the gate.

If your company sells high involvement products or services, you will need a capable, differentiating website that helps customers or prospects make big purchasing decisions in your favor. Recent research by Yahoo and OMD shows the product purchase behavior for high involvement products often exhibits a pattern called the long and winding path. This path represents consumers hungry for information, and when buyers are in this mode, marketers stand the best chance to convert prospects to purchasers. The research goes on to point out the Web is the ideal place to intersect with people on this long and winding path.

Another reason companies selling high involvement products need a professional, compelling, and highly functional, website has to do with the typical purchaser’s process of elimination scenario. Behavioral psychologists point out that when purchasers are faced with a number of possible choices, their first series of decisions involve which brands NOT to consider. In other words, if there are six possible choices, they will use readily available information and material at hand to scan the field and throw out the weakest choices. They can then winnow their final decision down as quickly as possible between two or three finalists. Often consumers will use simple visual feedback to decide “which of these companies/products don’t make the grade.”

It takes a website with a clear viewpoint and strong professional appeal to make the first cut. After that, brand credibility and product suitability will be built by following a number of important website criteria and elements. The Standford Guidelines for Web Credibility is an excellent research-based resource to get started (credit to John Maeda at the Laws of Simplicity for the pointer).

In addition, if you’re going to harness the ultimate potential of the Web for your company, a whole host of new technologies, applications, design implications, information architecture considerations and web analytics are available to move your marketing and sales effort to a whole new level. The Web is now far too versatile and powerful to be used simply as brochureware for buyers and prospects. In fact, with the pervasive, high-speed broadband penetration into most high-disposable-income households and businesses, the Web should be thought of more in the context of a super-charged 24/7 interactive TV program than with printed material such as sales sheets or brochures. Rich media content on your website that includes conveniently placed video, animations, and sound can add considerable selling potential.

As Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.” If you want to change the results at the bottom of the sales funnel you have to start by changing things for the better at the top of the sales funnel. For most high involvement products or services that involves a serious devotion to one of the key brand creation and affirmation tools at your disposal: your website.