There is a concept in sales call benefits based selling, this is where you sell your product or service based on the benefit it will give your customer not on the features of the product being sold. For example if I was selling you home cleaning services I would talk about the fact you could get 2 hours back a week to go to the cinema not on services I could provide such as dusting or cleaning the oven.
This same approach can be used in a search context either using a simple keyword interface or with content filters / navigators or wizards.
The key advantage of using a benefits based searching technique is that you can reduce or if your lucky remove the complexity of the search scenario. As the searcher you no longer need to be an expert in the topic you are searching, you only need to consider the reason behind your search.
For example lets look at the scenario of a consumer searching for a new camera, you could allow them to search on size of memory card, number of megapixels, size of battery or even length of lens. All of these attributes would require me to be knowledgeable about photography. How about you switch this around and allow the consumer to think about how they will use the camera. Do they want to take pictures for 3 months without downloading them, do they want to print pictures off the camera and create large posters, or do they want to take pictures of distant objects. All of these questions can be used to identify the attributes that are important to the consumer, more importantly these are all questions that can be answered without having a deep knowledge of the topic being searched. This is the advantage of benefits based searching.
Retail is a great example of how benefits based searching can deliver you consumer advantage, I think local search is the next sector in which this paradigm will take off. When you consider the disparte topics that local search sites cover, you can’t expect consumers to be experts in all of the these fields. Educating consumers with content is one mechanism to improve the search experience, benefits based searching is another. Just make sure you have the ability to link the benefits users are searching on to the attributes you have stored in your database.
What with Google place search, Groupon types sites, Paypal bricks and mortar payments and Facebook launching deals and venue search, the local search ecosystem is coellecing together, but search is just a means to an end.
A consumer has a need that can be serviced by a local business, they don’t care how they find the business or if it was recommed by a close friend or if 99 other people use that service they get 10% off the price, what they really care about is fulfilling their need whether it be to take their partner out for an aniversairy meal or gettng an extension built to house their growing family. The ecosytem is not about local search but about local commerce and this is what Yellow Pages companies were all about, to bring buyers and sellers together.
The local commerce ecosystem is made up of a number of key components:
- Search – Google places
- Coupons – Groupon
- Payments – Paypal
- Social graph – Facebook
- Check ins – Foursquare
- Reviews – Yelp
It seems that they is an opportunity to deliver an end to end capability across the local commerce ecosystem, but not as a stand alone platform. Web 2.0 / 3.0 has show us that the web is no longer about monolithic stand alone sites, its about integration and interpolation across different destinations, platforms and devices, its about the glue that brings it all together and maybe this is where Yellow Pages has an opportunity, it can be the glue that simplifies how a consumer interacts with local businesses, a friendly trusted guide across this new environment.
More thoughts to follow on this topic.
I have been in Australia for 3 weeks now and I am surprised at the state of the eCommerce industry out here, the large retail brands have not yet grasped the idea of the internet. Never mind selling online or even reserve on line and collect in store, some brands still have a PDF catalogue on their site as opposed to a fully functional online catalogue. Even when retailers start to look at using an online store as a marketplace their application leaves a lot to be desired, UI is poor especially navigation, search and product information. Amazon is yet to enter the Australian market which means there is a huge opportunity to land grab – who will be first, I look forward to the day when i can buy something meaningful online and get it delivered to my home.