Gucci and its effective website

Abstract

This article is going to analyse the effectivness of the Gucci’s website utilising the AIPD diagram and looking at the online consumer’s hierarchy of needs.

Introduction

Gucci is a well known italian luxury fashion brand and referring to Forbes, Gucci is ranked the 38th most valuable brand with a brand value of $12.4 billion. The Gucci’s website is a very well made and friendly use website. It offers a very visual experience, showing the current season’s fashion with a very artistic book look and campaign video. Moreover, the website is very focused on the online shopping, providing a very friendly use online shopping section with an in depth description of the clothes, prices and pictures.

The effectives of the Gucci’s website

Looking at the AIPD (Simeon, 1999) diagram, the website could be considered very effective:

In fact, the website is very brand focused with images and videos about the company and the brand. Moreover, the website has a very good and friendly-use graphical interface which offer a very good user experience. In addition, as previously said, the webiste offers a very well made online shopping with a wide variety of products. Considering the performances and the firmness of the website, it is very fast and offer a safe mode of payments.

 

Gucci.com (2017)

The OCHN framework

In e-commerce Web site design, the understanding of which characteristics can be successfully applied to a website design and the relative value in shaping a consumer’s experience are fundamental in the development of a satisfying website experience.

Past research has identified 3 macro categories of interface characteristics in the OCHN framework:

  • Structural firmness which is the characteristics that influence the web site’s security and performance.
  • Functional convenience refers to the characteristics that helps the consumer’s interaction with the interface.
  • Representational delight refers to the characteristics that stimulate a consumer’s senses.

Valacich, Parboteeah,Wells (2007)

In the OCHN framework, these categories are needs to be satisfied and based on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, once the less important need is satisfied it is possible to step to the higher level.

In the research conducted by Valacich, Parboteeah,Wells (2007), the structural firmeness was found to be the most basic need, then the functional convenience becomes the primary, once the structural firmness has been satisfied. FInally, the representational delight becomes the primary once the funcional convenience has been satisfied.

However, based on the ERG theory, which is a refined version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, says that more than one need could be positioned at the same level and depending on the type of website, the value of categories changes depending on the nature of consumer’s task.

In fact, A consumer has different goals when using a website. These goals determine what type of tasks the user is going to perform. Therefore, when designing a website is important to know what sort of tasks the users are going to perform on the website and how each category within the OCHN framework support different types of tasks.
Marketing literature highlighted 2 different type of tasks: experiential (hedonic) which are orientated to entertain. Es. Music website, games etc. Goal directed (utilitarian) which are oriented to find a problem and are typically visited out of necessity. Es. Bank etc.
However, recent research, introduced a third type of task which is called Hybrid that is a mixture of experiential and goal directed.

Conclusion

In conclusion, following what it has been previously said, The Gucci’s website broadly meets the three macro categories of interface characteristics of the OCHN Framework. Moreover, the Gucci’s website could be considered an Hybrid. In fact, the Gucci’s website is Utilitarian because the main users’ tasks are goal directed ( online shopping, information about products) , however, thanks to the high level of graphic, the precence of media (pictures and videos) and the attention to the details, the website could be considered also Hedonic.

 

Bibliography

Valacich, J.S., Parboteeah, D.V. and Wells, J.D., 2007. The online consumer’s hierarchy of needs. Communications of the ACM, 50(9), pp.84-90..

Gucci.com. (2017). Gucci Official Site – Redefining modern luxury fashion.. [online] Available at: https://www.gucci.com/uk/en_gb/ [Accessed 6 Nov. 2017]

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