The New Beautiful

An inspiring book. That’s what I first thought when I finished reading Unthinking (I highly recommend it), by Harry Beckwith, as he is a master storyteller with a gift for discussing marketing matters in marvellously authentic & amusing ways. Here’s just one of the gems I found in Unthinking:

“In 2008, Philips Electronics conducted a study intended to measure the cost to American businesses of returned products. Their conclusion startled many people: The cost was $100 billion a year.

In years past, this news would have clearly signaled  that America’s quality movement had miles to go, that for all the talk about quality circles and Six Sigma, American business was still failing.

But in 2008, people reacted differently to the news, because it appeared the quality movement had shown some effect. Only half of the cost of these products returned—50 billion—could be attributed to defects in the products.

So what was wrong with the other $50 billion worth of products? Nothing. We just could not figure out how to use them. They were too complicated.

Now, we might assume that our fellow consumers tried hard to learn about all those products before they returned them. We assume wrong again. These disgruntled buyers didn’t spend days or even hours reading the manuals and tinkering with the product. They spent just minutes—twenty minutes on average. Then they surrendered.”
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My 2¢: Can people find what they are looking for on your website?
What’s your bounce rate?
In short, bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave instantly.
How many pages does your website have?
Is it more than five? Why?
Unless you’re Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, seriously why? (Blog posts are excluded.)