Inventing Elephants

This surprised me, yet now that I go to discuss it, it seems so obvious.

When I first followed a link to www.e-strategies.co.uk from the Squarespace developer boards I blinked in surprise at the first page.

We build beautiful, modern websites that you can edit yourself and which have advanced features that enable you to market your business without having to rely on anyone else.

Or - we set up and design a Squarespace website for you. 

Throughout the site there was similar language.  Two examples are “We have partnered with Paypal”  and changes for updating the website “are instantaneous and completely free of charge.”  The first is something anyone can do and the second is a standard part of the Squarespace package.  In many places they restated Squarespace’s benefits as ones that E-Strategies provided.

And they do.

They just use Squarespace as the tool to get there.

And the average customer isn’t interested in that.  They just want to see what the benefits are to THEM. 

The writing on the website does a fantastic job of presenting the benefits to the potential customer, blending together those provided by the tool and the extra value added by the designer, which includes being a coach to teach the customers to maintain the website on their own.  The company even offers classes on various aspects of web usage.

It seems such an obvious approach now that I see it.  Yet my first reaction was something along the lines of “that’s sneaky” and “why?!”.  As I looked more closely the value of the services and how reasonable it is to make the path to the final tools transparent made a lot more sense.  The approach didn’t seem sneaky at all, but instead helpful to both the customer and the company.

It made me wonder which other services are presented this way, so that the store front I interact with isn’t necessarily the direct provider of some of the benefits, but instead uses them and adds to them to reach me.