Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

The piece from AllBusiness.com in today’s SF Chronicle covers some oft-ignored territory.  It’s a good primer on how to use an e-commerce site. I would add only this: most web sites, e-commerce or not, are pitifully inadequate when it comes to making the most important thing the most important thing.  What is this?  It’s your product’s most valuable benefit articulated in a compelling value proposition.  I don’t care how much eye-candy your web designer sprinkles around a laundry list of your product features.  Shoppers buy benefits, not the features than underpin them.  In our own research, only a small fraction of commercial/corporate websites addresses the benefits of product offerings at all.  Obsessed with technical features, techies and engineers discard the very info sought most by customers and consumers.  Why is this?  When you ask them, they'll mumble about the rationality of their buyers and how they must say things the way competitors say them.  HUH?  Our old friend at Business Week, Peter Coy, said it best.  Our buying decisions and purchasing behavior resemble Homer Simpson's logic more than Mr. Spock's.