Re: UKNM: Communicating trust poorly: Zoom.co.uk

[Chris Locke]

At 09:12 AM 6/16/99 +0100, Azeem wrote:


<snip Zoom rant>


I completely agree.  A mysterious ad campaign for a brand that unless you

one of the 0.0001% of people who read the business/sci-tech sections

religiously you'd not associate with Arcadia.


Then, a site which is a step back to frame-based content aggregating

'portals' with no further explanation of the Zoom branding.  And, to

compound the error, many of the pages loaded into 'content' frameset are

direct from the companies sites, so unless you watch the fringes of your

browser you might not even be aware of which provider/brand the content is

from.  Then there is no attempt to integrate or contextulise the content

outside of just loading it into the frameset.  And also, once you drill

down the content site's pages their own coding breaks the frames and loads

new pages into the full-browser, thus magically removing Zoom's branding

altogether (this happens with Expedia, thisislondon etc).



>Questions:

>

>1. Why aren't Zoom up front as to who *and* what they are?


I dunno.  Zoom is perceived as a meta-brand for Arcadia online, but the

execution is confusing.


>2. Why when one registers does it not tell you you are signing up for an

>ISP service?


dunno - it seemed clear to me that it was an ISP offering from the first

page about it, but again, why do I want to have a Zoom email address when

no-one knows what the brand is and there's little attempt to establish

'lifestyle' qualities for it?  And why the hell do I want to apply for

internet access from a web page?  . . .surely if I'm looking at that page .

. . 


>3. Why can't you contact Zoom, except by the heavily promoted premium rate

>phone number?


they've gotta make money somehow


>>and number four

>4. Who is behind it anyway?


Eva Pascoe/4th Room?  I think.


Consolidating an on-line offering across many brands within a Group is

always going to be immensely difficult (see Pathfinder etc).  In the

clothing market it's even more difficult, as Zoom needs to represent a

single brand offering across shops & customers as diverse as Burtons, Top

Shop, Evans and Hawkshead -customers that may share precious little common

ground.


They wouldn't build an Oxford Street store that used a single visual feel

to sell to all these customers, and they wouldn't create an ad campaign

that used the same visuals for all these customers - so why on earth would

you create a site that subsumed the unique and valuable brand identities of

these clothes shops under something that was so vague?  Each of the

indivudal operating companies within Arcadia are very good at selling to

their market - Zoom may prevent them from doing that on-line.


Chris. 

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