Who’s Building your Brand’s E-Presence?

AuthorChris F. June 3rd, 2009 Comments View Comments

How does a lack of official offerings, in this scenario, affect the consumer?

In this scenario, consumers are ultimately left out in the cold: they either have to access the company’s cumbersome website on the go, or are forced to use unofficial, somewhat-supported third party offerings to “fill in the gap” where the brand isn’t meeting the demand.

Consumers are stuck if they visit a Company-X store that has a different result than what they were expecting, be it differing prices, the item not actually being in stock or another issue. Consumers won’t forgive Company-X if the API had outdated information, or if the developer of their selected application was loading cached data or programmatically (malicious or otherwise) altered the actual price: the consumer is left with a negative experience that affects Company-X itself.

Wait a minute?  Are you saying that Company-X shouldn’t have offered an API in the first place?

Certainly not! APIs help the consumer, but there’s a limited benefit Company-X can give the consumer if Company-X isn’t providing an official offering themselves.

How does a brand decide opening up vs. delegating their offerings to the community?

In the above 3 scenarios, we’ve explored a social network, an e-commerce company and a click-and-mortar company that has both physical locations and an online e-commerce solution. While the business focus for these three companies varies, the same principles apply when choosing their consumer facing touch points. With mobile becoming more popular in today’s economy, how does a company select their official offerings?

This is a tough decision for any company, one that primarily rests on the available resources a company has: both in budget and talent-wise. Granted, this work can be outsourced to a third-party developer as long as the work is intended to be an official, company-supported offering.

Remember, there’s a strong level of control any brand has with their official offerings. Once you forgo an official offering and delegate those opportunities to third-party developers, you may find that they can have more success than you will, and dealing with that scenario after it’s already happened can be a challenge.  Imagine if the only interaction consumers have with your store is a comparison tool that lets a competitor beat your price every time.  You can bet the app won’t mention your extended warrantee, free installation, servicing, free delivery, or any of the other important value-adds that justify higher prices.

In best practices, you should never rely on the community to “do the hard work” for you, especially when consumers expect the offerings to exist and be supported by the brand in the first place; the community should always be considered an ally in your effort to mobilize and equip your consumers beyond the offerings you already provide.

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  • http://www.agencynet.com james

    good article chris.

    I believe that APIs, when done correctly, with the proper support, vastly increase a companies value in the developer community, and through them the public in general.

    A strategy that i find interesting is that some companies are limiting the API usage to particular vendors, in order to prevent over saturation of multiple applications that do the same thing.

  • http://flexewebs.com/semantix Jason Grant

    There is a big fight going on at the moment for the ‘developer community’.

    The Open Source scene has been hijacked by big corporations to harness the power of ‘cheap labour’ which feels like they are independent, while locking themselves into working with a particular API (i.e. Google Maps, Microsoft Search API, etc.).

    What this leads to is a new form of a ‘corporate lock-in’ which most people (bizzarely) call ‘open web’ it cannot be further from the truth.

    Ah well I could go on and on about this.

  • http://chrisfullman.com Chris F.

    Thanks for the input Jason! I’ve particularly noticed this trend in the past few months, which in part prompted me to write this article.

    I wouldn’t go as far as saying that corporations are “hijacking” the Open Source movement, since the nature of OS is to adapt it freely regardless of the end goal. However, there isn’t merit for a corporation to look to the community (”cheap labour”) as a means to accomplish their own internal goals. In the example of “Company-X,” I can already see that their goal hasn’t been met as I still haven’t seen any real-world deployments using their API.

    My needs for a mobile site aren’t there. If they’re not creating it (and they haven’t, in this example), they’re leaving it to the developers to create it. Nobody has done it yet (and I really don’t have the time to do it myself), so I’m one of the many consumers that are left out in the cold.

    Target and Walmart, on the other hand, have recognized the need to provide their consumers with a mobile version of their site, and I’ve used them often – even when I’m in their stores.

    The key here is not relying on the development community to do the work that you should be doing. If there’s a demand for your consumers to have a mobile website, for example, then you should be developing it as an official offering — not looking to the development community to do it for you.

  • http://flexewebs.com/semantix Jason Grant

    I agree.

    There is much to be said about the entire API thing.

    One of the main ‘thinking points’ I am rotating around these days is that the whole notion of an API can already be heavily implemented through things like URL structures and widgets and should be reusable in any context.

    My ‘angle’ of comment was based on the idea that even though a specific URL is enough of an API, big corporations like Google create an API instead to ‘get developers bought’ into learning the API and developing with it.

    Once that becomes a ‘trend’ companies start hearing about it, so they start buying into it and then the whole thing goes out of control until a bubble is reached.

    In the process of reaching the bubble bursting point many corporations start thinking along the lines ‘if we don’t have an API we are going to be dead tomorrow’, etc. etc.

    Same happened in Web1.0 bubble when ‘everyone had to be online or else’ and the same is happening now where ‘if you are not on Twitter your business is dead’ model is being taunted around.

    APIs are just one of the big buzz words which we are going to look back on in time thinking ‘what was the fuss about’. The same thing as what will happen with Twitter.

    Oh boy, I have really tried to cover every topic in one here! :-)

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