Let the product speak

I recently took a look at the websites for two 'super cars'. One is the Audi R8.The other the Koenigsegg CCX. I'm not sure that I saw what I expected, or experienced what I was supposed to.
But a quick word about the cars – they couldn't be more different.

The Koenigsegg is the baby of a Swedish man (Christian von Koenigsegg) who got bored with the import industry and decided that what he really wanted to do was build a sports car. So he did. The first version of which boastes some 650 + bhp and a staggering top speed of 230+ mph. Later version have taken the power output up to 980bhp and untested top speeds. Possibly urban legend, but this car holds the record for the fastest speeding ticket ever given, at 243mph. The car has some real lateral thinking about it, from the way the doors work to the way that the cylinder block of the engine is a rigid, reinforcing component of the chassis.

The Audi is different. Developed from the Le Mans super car then tuned down to something for the top end of the domestic market, it is a design that whilst holding true to the Audi brand style, looks at least as good as the Koenigsegg. The performance, whilst not being quite as extreme is to 200+ mph and given that if doesn't carry the £600K + price of the Koenigsegg this seems like a fair trade off. The Audi is the technological marvel you would expect, from the engine to the aluminium space frame chassis.

This is where something strikes me as funny about the marketing and the way the websites are done.

The Audi micro-site for this model is amazing. The level of interaction and just plain cool it provides is very high and it allows easy access to lots of information about the car.

The Koenigsegg website is not as advanced, showing you information in a common, tested and slightly old fashioned format.

The difference is that with the Koenigsegg website, I found I was looking at the car, and with the Audi site, I was too busy playing with the cool interactions. The upshot of this is that I was left feeling like the koenigsegg was a more honest website with less about the marketing message itself and more about the product in it's own right.

The message I took away from this? Something that echoes an odd request from a client a few years ago who asked us to design them a marketing powerpoint that looked like they had done it themselves. Don't make the website cooler than the product it's trying to sell... and too much glitz and gloss just makes the message look untrustworthy...it's all about balance.

Pale