On Jul 6, 2008, at 3:57 PM, Robert Hoekman Jr wrote:
Purely philosophical question:I've been studying social psychology a
lot lately, and have become incredibly interested in the
persuasiveness
of sites and applications—how to make them more persuasive, what
makes them so now, etc. But it makes mewonder:
Should the persuasive elements of a site design be left to marketers?
I'm getting on this thread a little late, but I am delighted by the
discussion.
I want to throw a word out here and see what kind of reaction it
inspires:
Merchandising.
*Marketing* is how you get people to know about your product and to
desire it and to want to buy it. *Merchandising* is how the product
itself is _presented_ to customers to make them want to buy it. In a
Venn diagram, I think, merchandising would be the overlap between
marketing and product design. Some merchandising, of course, has
nothing to do with product design (for example, a life-size cardboard
cutout of Tiger Woods in a drugstore has little to do with the design
of the razor he's shilling), but other forms of merchandising fall
squarely in the realm of product design (for example, the inclusion of
a gratuitous vibration feature in the design of the aforementioned
razor).
It seems to me that we are talking about merchandising in this thread.
Are we? If so, why is the word so rarely used in the world of IxD when
it has been such an integral part of the product design vocabulary for
a hundred years?
I am working on a presentation on this topic (see me deliver it
September at Euro IA 08 or the O'Reilly NYC Web 2.0 Expo), so this
thread has been extremely helpful to me. Thanks!
-Cf
Christopher Fahey
____________________________
Behavior
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com
me: http://www.graphpaper.com
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