Radiohead King of Limbs - Marketing and Design
This post is about marketing and web page design - the takeaways are:
- If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you
- If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it
- Set expectations and then over deliver
Marketing (Part 1)
Radiohead are notorious for their lack of communication, they have the best signal to noise ratio of any band I know. This means that when they do communicate, people comment on it.
The band announced the release of their new album with a simple blog post on their website on Monday. I don't regularly visit Radiohead's website, but I found out about the record’s existence from a news aggregator on Tuesday.
Marketing (Part 2)
I read eleven music related aggregators and I receive three of them in email format, the rest are RSS feeds. I scan their headlines every morning and if something catches my eye I dig deeper.
Pretty much every one carried the story about Radiohead's new album and in every format I was able to click through to the band's website. Once I had verified the information and pre-ordered the record, I then tweeted to my network about it. Over the next two days I saw people in my own network going through the same experience and tweeting and blogging about the record to their network.
Design (Part 1)
When I arrived on the King of Limbs website I immediately knew that I was dealing with the band:
Band name (brand) is big and easily identified – the text is simple and straightforward and the graphic immediately funnels your attention to the purchase process. Note how there is no menu navigation – there is only one way off this page and you choose it by identifying which market you are – brilliant!
Design (Part 2)
There are two products on offer – the higher margin one is presented first, but again – look how clean and simple the language is. Look at the relative size between the title and the text and the information delivered. There are only two visible buttons on this page – the pre order and order button – there is no doubt what the purpose of this page is.
Although menu navigation does make an appearance it is super simple – no drop down menus, no multiple options, simple and clean. The rest of the purchase flow is just as easy – there are no “up sells”, no additional offers and no superfluous requests for information.
Marketing (Part 3)
When Radiohead announced the new album on the 14th, they said it would be available on Saturday 19th.
When I woke up this morning and looked at my network on Twitter I saw that people were already listening to the album.
http://twitter.com/thebluesage/status/38611832986025984
I immediately went to the site and saw that they had released a day early, I downloaded the album, started listening and immediately told my network the news.
By exceeding the expectations that they themselves had set, they delighted me and made me feel good about the whole experience.
Takeaways
If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you
If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it
Set expectations and then over deliver