In search of CSP of the website on the Internet - November 2000

It's been quite sometime, since I wrote for the mag. With quite a few projects on hand, I was hard pressed for time. In the second last issue, I talked of the utility of the four or five lettered words and how with the falling level of concentration it becomes imperative to get our message across in as short a phrase as is possible.

What with the wireless devices becoming part of our life, the same principle of keeping it simple holds true. You have to communicate what ever on the earth you want to say in a combination of two or four words with each word not comprising of more than 3 / 4 letters. On a 4 square inch display area, how many liberties can you take with big words?

In fact, as the popularity of PCs coined such abbreviated terms like FAQ, E mail and E cards the wireless revolution will lead to the invention of new abbreviation to enable message communication in the fewest possible alphabets. In future, we might have "Rt" or "R" becoming the universal standard for restaurants and "Tk" standing for Tickets. The development in the wireless applications has also demonstrated the importance of content, or more precisely good contenting.

For website it is the content that drives the site in the long run. Surfers don’t come to portals to see the flashiness, nobody want to see your flashiness at the expense of his money and more importantly his time. Which brings me to the importance of "Usability" (something which I will take up in more detail in some of my future issue) for the success of a site.

The aim of portals should be to minimize the time surfer spend on their site as portals in the real sense are gateway to the world of online information. Oppositely a niche website or a vortal can take the liberty to keep the surfer hooked onto the site. But this should be by providing him a pleasurable experience and not by making his navigation longer, forcing him to go to more pages to get more impressions for your ad banners. In the end, the visitor should go back with a good experience, for if it is not so, there are other sites promising him the world.

As we enter the second phase of the web revolution, branding becomes important for websites to have a distinct or unique standing amongst the numerous websites offering similar services. Websites are already showing desperation to have their differentiating factor in place and are splurging in the offline media. They need to realize that usability and content are to any online branding. The media buying and creative execution of the ads can only help bring the traffic to your site. When the surfer goes online the site should justify the perception created by the promos and present a good enough experience (a combination of compelling content and ease in Usability) for him to come back.

Any proposition offered by the online brand has to be driven by Content, and to be Unique it has to be framed in a usable interface. Call it the CSP (Content Selling Proposition), a positioning based on content that will drive sites once they run out of the freebies. The other day a client was asking me the USP of the site I am presently working on. In spite of my telling him the CSP of the site, he kept probing me for the USP, which in the conventional marketing sense a website can never have. Conventional branding procedure cannot be applied to brands operating in a world driven by information and inhabited by knowledge workers with deceptive identity.

A website can never have the conventional intangibles features leave alone the tangible one. It is how absorbing/funky/serious/boring/appealing/useful content your site has, that will determine the CSP of the site. This together with Usability will determine how far your site will go.

Well another very hectic fortnight lies ahead of us, hope all of you enjoy the pressure. You can get back to me about how strongly you feel about my thoughts. I will enjoy it.