I recently viewed this Hardee’s Ad and thought, “Can this be real?” It seems Hardee’s now sells little breakfast items that compete with donut holes. And this ad takes a blind taste-test theme, wherein the participants choose between the “A-holes” and the “B-holes”. (I swear, I’m not kidding)

Now I’ll be the first to admit: normally this sort of humor is right up my alley — I’m the one in the FutureNow office who sees “giggle-value” every time a new iPhone…

...continue to read "Hardee’s b-holes — do they sell?"

A student at the University of British Columbia Web Analytics course reached out to us via Twitter to ask some questions about creating personas, specifically Persuasion Architecture® Personas and the information is important enough that we thought we’d share our response:

“Are you saying that we shouldn’t bother with creating multiple personas with granular details but rather focus on creating only a few (4 if we use the logical-emotional, quick-deliberate quadrant)? But if we add the stages of the buying cycle in…

...continue to read "Dear Confused By Personas"

Occasionally we hear from clients after they’ve implemented some recommendation for improvement (from our OnTarget service), that they see a temporary dip in conversion. This seemingly goes against logic — after all, if you fix a problem, things should get better, right? — but Mammals aren’t entirely logical nor rational, at least not as often as we’d like to think, and particularly when it comes to learned and patterned behavior. Sometimes it takes your customers a while to “get used…

...continue to read "Improvement Starts With (Bad) Habits"

Well, it’s the Friday before Easter and everywhere you look there’s the Easter Bunny.  Despite the great press coverage, there are three excellent reasons why the Easter Bunny should not be your marketer:

Reason #1: The Easter Bunny hides his products.  I mean seriously, this is Bad Marketing Commandment Numero Uno, “Hinder Thy Customers From Finding Thy Products”. Now think about this: Senor Bunny has these colored eggs — (the plastic ones have candy inside, in case you grew up in…

...continue to read "Three Reasons The Easter Bunny Shouldn’t Be Your Marketer"

UI Designer David Leggett wrote an interesting article recently, “Tabbed Navigation, and What Makes It Useful“. His first, and best, point is a physical observance: in a real-world store one has a sense of the physical size of the establishment the moment one enters the store, whereas online there’s no way to estimate the relative size of the enterpise by a quick visual size of its sheer volume of space.

Is it Walmart-ish? Is it a Mom’n'Pop? And does it even…

...continue to read "Making Tabs Work For You"

Hot on the heels of a recent comScore report, we hear the interesting news that product videos views are up some 40%, year-over-year basis last October.  Now, that was done on a single rather small sample, but still this speaks to the increasing influence video will exert on product marketing online.

We’ve commented any number of times on GrokDotCom that rampant poor product imagery represents a consistent loss of sales for online businesses. Most retailers just end up using the low-quality, “ordinary”…

...continue to read "Video Views Up, When Will Sales Follow?"

[A personal story with a business ending]

Over New Year’s, I went on a dance cruise to Mexico — a group of dancers goes on a regular cruise ship and effectively “takes over” the dancing, especially late night — and everyone (including non-dancers) ends up having a great time. We’d planned this trip back in the summer, with my two wacky cabin-mates absolutely insisting that we upgrade to a Junior Suite something-or-other which had a lot more room and a balcony.…

...continue to read "Right Now Is Always The Right Time"

We’re pleased to replay Jim Sterne’s recent webinar with us, “Turn Web Analytics into 2009 Revenue”.

Come watch the Chairman of the Web Analytics Association talk with our own Bryan Eisenberg (himself Chairman Emeritus of the WAA) about proactively using Analytics Data to drive continuous Testing and generating actual dollars, a concept even more important this year than last.

Click the above image to watch.

By the way, we received a number of inquiries from folks who saw the video already asking, “what…

...continue to read "A Sterne Look at 2009"

It’s November and soon the pie, cookies and egg-nog will be flowing freely for a six-week gut-busting calorie fest. After that comes the resolutions. And then comes the first of February.

What does February 1st have to do with testing, you might ask?

Well, people are great with signing up for a gym membership the day after New Year’s. But the only statistic that really counts is, “how many people are still at the gym when February starts?”

Recently one of our many…

...continue to read "“My Assistant Does My Workouts For Me”"

During recent casual browsing, I noticed the following magicJack ad (on the left):

Now can anyone tell what the heck the product is? (I happen to know, since I also remember a late night commercial that explains it.)*

Put yourself in the place of the site visitor who is seeing this for the first time. I mean, thanks for the Freebie and all, and congrats that PC Magazine seems to like it … but what is it?

A product? Perhaps magicJack is a…

...continue to read "Sell Me Something, Not Some Thing"