Doing business online with consultants - #9

So, is your author totally in love with the peanut butter brands' websites? Not at all! Most of them had an awkward user interface design. One of the brands had a webshop but with most of the products being "sold out." Navigation was often not user-friendly. Many of the brands had almost the same website set-up (so much for differentiation).

Yet, the peanut brands were making it easy again to do business. Information, personalization, promotion, comparison, ordering, corpo-rate social responsibility: it was all there.

The consultancy firms truly excelled in telling their audience what they were doing. Their websites were totally about sending information but not at all about taking the client by the hand. About making it easy to do business with them.

Yet, how the consultancy firms' websites presented this information was very glossy: high-quality photographs and beautifully designed websites (for most of the brands)—but also challenging to understand the navigation and no help whatsoever if the client didn't know what to look for.

In short, the peanut butter firms offered a lot to make it easy to do business with them, but the execution often left something to desire. The consultancy showed their capabilities in high-gloss and left it at that.