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What animal comes to mind when you think about computer STORAGE?
Megabyte the Mouse has been seen by millions of web surfers since 1998 article:- Animal
Metaphors in the Storage Market | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Why do we have
Megabyte the Mouse on STORAGEsearch? - by Zsolt Kerekes - the Publisher background info for marketers and anyone else who may be interested... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In the summer
of 1998, I decided to launch a new web directory, which became STORAGEsearch.
There were many reasons for doing this.
We already had a storage manufacturer database, which came out of our research process of sifting through thousands of computer companies to find the Sun Resellers (that was pre-web). But there was a big difference in starting the 2 web sites. When we started the SPARC web site, we already had a proven publication which thousands of readers used to buy for real money. It included thousands of data items, was well known, and respected. In the STORAGE area we were starting as a complete unknown to everyone outside the Sun market, and we were also starting with little content. I decided that we would research new areas as we added them to the site, and luckily we got a lot of helpful suggestions from early readers. But why would readers want to visit a new site as it developed, and would they come back? While pondering these ideas, I read a book called "Creating Killer Web Sites". This book didn't aim to cover direct marketing, and how to get new readers, however it was EXCELLENT at analysing how you could use visual ideas in your site. It also introduced the concept of visual metaphors. I had seen some of these ideas:- using animals to promote services, some years before in a book called "Services Marketing" by Christopher H. Lovelock which I found useful some years earlier when converting from a product to a services mentality. So Megabyte the Mouse was created, along with metaphors like cheese for data, barrels for storage, bikes for fibre-channel. Not all the ideas are that strong, but they have helped us to create a site which is visually memorable, and many of the visual ideas I learned got fed back into design changes in the SPARC site, which also improved as part of this process. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Once I created the concept of
Megabyte the Mouse the next problem was how to translate this into effective
images. The drawings are actually done by David Mellor at
Dynamite Design. I knew of
David's work, from projects he did for customers of our sister company
Downes Strategic Marketing.
Janet Downes and I worked on a list of subjects for the web site, and created
some storyboards and visual ideas for what we would like to see. David breathed
life into these with the first few graphics for RAID, RAM and SCSI, and since
then the character has taken on a life of its own. Megabyte has been joined by
Terrabyte and Cheeperbyte, and there are more characters waiting in the wings
for their subjects to make an appearance on the site. It's always a pleasurable experience to see the new images arriving in my email. The images are produced on a MAC as very high resolution files, which we may use later for posters or other media to help promote this site. We have also started using some of the Megabyte icons (initially for articles and broken links) on the SPARC Product Directory site. These characters have now become known to millions of people through our promotional work with other computer sites, events organisers and the readerships of our own computer sites. The characters help to bring some fun into the serious but sometimes unexciting world of enterprise storage systems. In 2006 our storage readership is approaching 1 million unique readers/ year. Over 5,000 independent web sites link here, and there are over 100 original designs of the Byte family graphics. New ones are produced for new subject areas every month. This site has become a very effective promotion tool for our advertisers. Although new storage web sites appear every week, ours is easy for readers to remember and recognise. It's the one with the mice! Other famous animals used to promote computer products have been the dalmation dog (used by HP for its printers) and the Linux penguin. So we weren't the first, and won't be the last. But for millions of computer buyers, if you ask them what animal do they think of when they think about storage? The answer is mice. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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See also:- What does a mouse, a goblin and a pirate have to do with marketing? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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