Beauty Biz 101

"Women's new embrace of e-commerce" is to thank for an expected 33 per cent sharp jump to $1.6 billion in online sales of cosmetics and fragrances this year, according to a new report from Forrester Research. So when are more cosmetics and fragrance companies going to stop expecting to pull in customers with email spam and start engaging them with something valuable?

When looking for information online about Power Dose by L'Oreal, I could find almost no worthwhile mention of the product on the entire internet. I could not even find out how much it costs or what the different varieties of Power Dose products do and are called (there seem to be several different Power Dose products - one for curly hair, a volumising one, a colouring one - so I suspect the one used on my head is named something more specific than Power Dose). Look at the L'Oreal website. Surely they can afford better than a terribly user unfriendly Flash monstrosity.

Get with the program, guys. Your pretty Flash sites are doing you no favours. Make it as easy as possible for women like us to spend money on your products, to spread the word about them, and to help build your brand without you having to spend a penny. Now, it's easier than ever. Ignorance is no excuse; it's shameful.

Comments

[Amy Alkon]

Great point, Jackie. What is it with these people who stick these dreadful flash things on their sites? My first impulse is rage, immediately followed by "where the hell is the 'skip' button"? What is this, a sort of corporate mid-life crisis playing out in abuse of technology?

[Jack]

People who know little about how internet users (read: people, not robots) use the internet are dazzled themselves by Flash movies when the web design agency shows them to them. They have no idea what frustration and worthlessness it translates into for the people they are trying to turn into customers (or trying to retain as customers). Worse, once you get into the meat of the site, there is nothing there of value. They think that people just sit there at the computer and take whatever's thrown at them, a captive audience. It's tied to Doc Searls's take on the word "consumer":

Consumer is an industrial-age word, a broadcast-age word. It implies that we are all tied to our chairs, head back, eating 'content' and crapping cash.

The companies who have Flash sites think in those terms. Happily, they are either swiftly changing their approach to the internet or going the way of the dodo.