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What animal comes to mind when you think about computer storage?
For
millions of computer buyers - the answer is - mice.
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Megabyte the Mouse
- is on a quest - to remap the enterprise storage frontier
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His quest started in 1998, but the storage
landscape keeps changing and there's still a very long way to go. During the
next decades as his adventures unfold, he will share this information with other
storage seekers on the STORAGEsearch.com web site.
If you have any suggestions for where he should look please
see
add url or email
Zsolt@STORAGEsearch.com.
Most of the links and most of the subjects now on this site were actually
suggested by readers.
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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...
Animal
Metaphors in the Storage Market |
In the summer
of 1998, I decided to launch a new web directory, which became STORAGEsearch.
There were many reasons for doing this.
- readers of our print buyer's guide for Sun Microsystems customers (the
SPARC Product Directory)
had been asking me to produce a similar directory covering SCSI and related
storage products as far back as the early 1990's. Before the web, that
investment would not have been justified in our situation as a small publisher.
- like many others in the market, I believed that readers of our
SPARC Product Directory
were also likely to be involved in buying storage. However, when we
experimentally tried adding RAID
systems to the SPARC web site in 1997, most readers seemed to ignore these
pages, which didn't bode well for potential advertisers.
- a desire to increase our business. In the long term we would eventually get
ALL the significant buyers in the Sun market using our SPARC directory. What
next? Starting another web directory seemed like a good idea in the long
term, because otherwise the total revenue of the business would reach a plateau.
The other area we looked at was communications, but words like "SCSI",
which were already in the SPARC directory, seemed a lot less scary than Cisco
networking routery like "ANSI-X?@packety!routery%-424". So to avoid
headaches, STORAGE came out top
choice.
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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