By Alton Jerome McFarland
The website for Radical Communications (located at www.radicalmail.com)
is focused on selling the RadicalMail email package. That package
has extended multimedia technology and web-interactive capabilities
that allow its users to initiate and manage email marketing campaigns.
The site itself isn't very large, but contains a fairly large amount
of content for non-entertainment site. Everywhere you go, there are
screenshots of the products in action and occasionally a Macromedia
Flash presentation.
It was apparent from my initial loading of the site, that the site's
aim was to impress visitors with sleekness and style. Their theory
is that those same visitors will want to use the RadicalMail products
to make their own emails as impressive. Since the RadicalMail site
is essentially concerned with touting the sophistication of its product,
it's no surprise that buzzwords like "dynamic" and "interactive"
are liberally used throughout the website. Since the potential buyers
of the RadicalMail product are marketers, the website focuses on the
external aspects of its product and how others will react to it. It
is no surprise that the "Technology" portion of the website
is the smallest section. Radical Communications realizes that it's
customers are probably not very interested in the technical aspects
of the product. In the world of marketing, perception is everything,
and the Radical Communications website pushes its product based on
the perception that that product will create.
It pays to know one's audience and Radical Communications seems to
know its audience quite well. The site is marketing to marketers,
and so when technical issues are put to the wayside there is no great
loss. How the product works isn't important to their prospective users.
Those users only care about results. If there was a cardboard box
that was guaranteed to make a company's marketing more effective,
those cardboard boxes would be flying off the shelves. Style is the
"cardboard box" of today's marketers and as long as that
approach keeps working, the concept of "style over substance"
doesn't have to be a negative thing.