This week’s Golden Cow Award for Corporate Arsehattery goes to Samsung for this piece of meaningless bullshit in a survey asking about my experience using their website.
Now as background, I was after the technical specifications of the Samsung Slate Series 7 tablet PC, but couldn’t find them. There was no section or link labelled “specifications”. That’s a fail, I reckon. So I decided I would do the survey.
Like all such surveys, it asked the kind of questions that market research companies think are important, such as how soon I was thinking of buying, what competing brands I was looking at, and my demographic details. But this question caused me, literally, to laugh out loud.
Thinking of today’s website experience, how successful has the Samsung website been in conveying the following concepts of the Samsung brand?
And the concepts listed? Fresh, clean, inspiring, unique, interesting, elegant, contemporary, intelligent, engaging, bright, simple, relevant, upbeat, forward-thinking, charismatic, chic, unexpected, visionary.
WTF? Who the heck thinks in those terms when visiting a website? “Oh, I couldn’t find the technical specifications. This website just doesn’t convey the charismatic or chic brand values.”
I’d like to find whoever was responsible for this idiocy and ask them to define, in concrete web development terms, the three key differences between a brand experience that’s “fresh” rather than “clean” or “simple”.
And then I’d like to bury them in a ditch.
Far more amusing than the comics in the daily local rag. I imagine an internal performance measure containing – “site perceptions to be 7% more visionary and 3% more inspiring in the following quarter”. Who the heck thinks in those terms when visiting a website? More broadly who thinks in those terms when interacting with a company in any way ?
It’s missing all the relevant questions:
– How much more stuff will this visit compel you to buy ?
– Will this visit inspire you to recommend Samsung stuff ?
– Isn’t this marketing survey warranting a large pay-rise for us ?
At least those writing this are not out roaming the streets, knocking on my door, and trying to sell me a vacuum cleaner.
@Matthew Godfrey: Yeah, I was thinking that some of the questions did seem to relate to KPIs. “We’ve seen a 20 percentage point increase in people who are satisfied or very satisfied with the website.” But there were questions similar to some of those you suggest, such as asking whether the site visit increased or decreased the likelihood of you buying a Samsung product.