In designing brand sites, automotive manufacturers and their agencies face an interesting challenge. How do you create a space that serves the client's business needs of representing the product and brand, while also meeting the objectives of the consumer to incite one of the largest considered purchases of them all?
In many ways, the answer lies in the use of "personas," which have finally started to gain critical mass since Alan Cooper introduced the concept in 1999. A persona is a brief profile of a fictitious customer intended to demonstrate the characteristics of a company's customers. Ideally, a persona is created for each of a business' audience segments. In the case of automotive, this might include existing customers, prospective buyers and brand enthusiasts.
Personas articulate user research and transform it into seemingly living characters, complete with demographics, attitudes, goals and online behavior. Their ability to evoke empathy and a greater understanding of a site's target audience enables businesses to make more informed recommendations and decisions in the design and development of their sites. While I'd hope that every design firm looks to its customer's needs to guide the design process, in reality it's often a case of good intentions without the follow-through. Personas are a constant reminder of who will be using a site and why. They allow companies to gain a deeper understanding of their prime prospect, identify his problem and effectively offer a solution.
A persona for your brand
As design personas have amassed awareness, a secondary type of persona has emerged. Dubbed the "brand persona," this represents a company's most important brand attributes. These days, both design and brand personas are used to determine site structure and design. One represents the user, while the other represents the product and how it's perceived by that user.
Which brings us back to the question of how to design an automotive site that meets everyone's needs. All OEMs want to present sites that speak to their customers, both to fuel customer acquisition and to ensure consumer retention. Typically, this goal is achieved through a strategic combination of architecture, information, usability and, yes, branding.
Let's say you're a luxury automotive company that has built your image on vehicle styling. Although that image may be critical to your brand, it might not correlate with the actual behavior of your customer, who may care far more about issues like reliability and performance. When it comes time to design your site, you're forced to reconcile this brand message with the more realistic needs of your site user, straddling both the brand and the practical attributes of your cars.
Avoiding virtual road blocks
"You have to consider what you want your customer to accomplish, and deliver on a combination of practical goals and emotional goals," says Harley Manning, vice president and research director with Forrester Research and expert on personas. "Your own goal might be to provide information or reinforce, on an emotional level, how your product will make the user feel. But you have to be mindful of the user's goal, which trumps the need to project your own image."
Easier said than done. Consumers come to your site to take some sort of action, and the way in which a company chooses to reinforce its brand can in fact become a virtual road block. "Using (branding) concerns to screen people out with typeface choices and so on is not practical," Manning says. "It's important to design from a position of knowledge and confidence, as opposed to preconception, which could turn into misconception."
In other words, both brand and design personas are invaluable in their ability to guide site development. Certainly having a one-page representation of your brand and your customer in front of you at all times will keep your design and development teams on task. But their use must be appropriately weighted. A site can be both on brand and effective at delivering on the consumer promise, if the designer is as mindful of the customer's needs as those of the company.
Tips to persona design
The first rule of persona development is that a persona is only as good as the data behind it. As such, agencies should work with manufacturers to tap as much existing user profile data as possible, supplementing it with their own independent research.
To avoid one-dimensional representations, it's also important to involve numerous agency departments in the persona process. Draw expertise from strategy, internet architecture (IA), engineering and creative departments to inform the persona process and build more robust representations. The more accurate and thorough the persona, the more valuable it will ultimately be.
The recent release of the semi-annual J.D. Power and Associates 2007 Manufacturer Website Evaluation Study (MWES) probably has most auto companies considering the current state of their sites. Whether you're at the top of the list or not, when it comes time for an enhancement or redesign, remember to add some personality.
Steve Glauberman is the CEO of Enlighten. Read full bio.
