Week 4A:  Defining Target Markets

          This analysis of the web sites for Subway Sandwiches and Hungry Bear Deli focuses on target markets.  To a certain extent, they share the same target market, hungry people looking for self-serve fast food for any meal.  They have photos of their food to tempt users if they aren’t already hungry.  Both have three-slide banners on their home pages, although Subway makes you click away an entry screen to access anything on their site. 

          The goal of these sites is to get people to place an online meal order.  There are subtle differences between the two sites and one of the places this is detected is in the ordering schemes.  Subway uses almost all photos for ordering, including when choosing options for a selection ie. what condiments should go on a sandwich.  The user just clicks on the photo of the condiments or other options (type of bread, meat selection, etc.) .

 

          Hungry Bear Deli also sports online ordering with customization of each order,  but their offerings all have thorough descriptions while there are only photos of some items.  Customizations are done using the nouns that name the condiment or selection option.  So more reading is required to order on the Hungry Bear site.

 

          The differences between how one orders food is propagated throughout the site.  All of the top two levels of navigation are primarily photos and large graphics with a minimal word count.  This expands Subway’s market to include those who have lower-level reading skills such as children, tweens, and the sight-impaired.  More people can easily order off of the Subway site compared to the Hungry Bear site.  On the other hand, from a purely subjective point of view, the food images on Hungry Bear are more appealing.  Almost all of the Subway photos are of sub sandwiches where Hungry Bear depicts a wider range of food.

          The two sites are similar in other ways.  Both use large graphics and a simple color scheme on the first level pages of their sites.  Subway’s main color is green, possibly to symbolize healthiness, and it is accented by a bright yellow, an analogous warm color to go with the cooler green color.  Hungry Bear’s main colors are green and red, with red being the complimentary warm color to the cooler green.

          They both use big, bold text with a lot of space around the graphics for easy reading and attention-getting.  Subway’s site requires potential customers  to click through to see anything on the site, already getting the user trained to engage some more.  The ordering pages are nicely laid out, with lots of appropriate negative space to set off the options.

          Subway has a lot more information on its site than Hungry Bear Deli does, but it is all in lower levels that users choose to drill down to.  The further down the tree the user gets, more text and fewer photos are offered up.  Subway really wants people to get to know them if they are so inclined.  They have all of these sections at the bottom of every page:

Our Plan is one of those entries and it includes sustainability policies and their progress on them.  

This is a global company but they want their potential customers to know they are environmentally conscious and respectful.  We should all care about this ,but younger people care more because they are worried about what they will inherit from preceding generations.  This is more targeting aimed at a younger audience.

          This contrasts with the simple banner across the bottom of Hungry Bear’s pages.  It has six social media icons on the left side and Jobs, Contact, and Email Signup on the right side.  This site is significantly simpler than the Subway site and they don’t have places to drill down to.  Their Catering section is simply a form to fill out for inquiry. 

          Both sites are set up for hungry people in a hurry to order a meal, but Subway’s site appeals to a wider audience including really young people and those who don’t see well.  The look and feel of the upper levels of the two sites are strikingly similar and it isn’t until a user hits the lower levels or goes to place an order that the differences show up.  One can almost click away on just photos to order on the Subway site whereas a user has to read the text on the Hungry Bear site in order to place an accurate order.  Unless a user specifically drills down to lower levels on the Subway site, both sites are a quick read for those who like to read everything on a site.

Week 3:  Interlude

I commented on blog posts for everyone in my current group, which is group 1, the pale blue group.  These are the students whose blogs I commented on:

• James Anerar – I enjoyed his wry take on the web sites he reviewed
• Yoshinori Enomoto – Interesting choice of dad’s business in Japan
• Sophia Hecker – I liked the proposed name for her cannabis business
• Sarah Marcotte – As always, an intriguing and enjoyable read
• Lynnette Takasugi – Sounds like her existing business brand is all set
• Kaleb Waggoner – Impressed with his high school business

Week 3B:  Developing a Brand

     My brand is rather fractured because I have not really approached marketing in an organized fashion.  In one sense, it is just overwhelming.  The usual cure for that is to break it down into steps, but I don’t know what all the steps should be.  In another sense, business has always seemed boring to me.  I want to design and create, but participating in business activities seems stultifying. Writing a business plan seems like a huge obstacle.

     It is also difficult to do marketing because I have a few sets of products.  As an artist, I make jewelry, art glass, home décor items, and commissioned pieces.  As an Interior Designer, I create residential spaces and stage homes.  And somewhere in there, I also do pet sitting.

     It all started in 2005 when I retired from the computer industry and when I discovered beautiful beads on eBay.  I started buying these gorgeous beads because I had to have them, they were so stunning.  After I amassed a substantial quantity of beads, I decided I ought to learn how to do something with them and started teaching myself how to make jewelry. 

     In preparation for my great eBay jewelry selling career, I created a primitive logo that I used on all the invoices, packing slips, and other branded documentation one would use with an eBay presence.  I made it in a variety of sizes for different purposes.

   

However, I did not sell any jewelry on eBay or Etsy, which I tried next.  There is so much jewelry from Asia made by children and at such cheap prices that I could not compete.  To beat those prices, I would have had to charge less than my materials cost me.  This was rather depressing, especially because at this time, Etsy was still supposed to be a site for handmade artisan work.  They have since changed their approach which made the site even less likely to be a good market for me.

     In 2008, I started taking classes at Palomar College.  I took the three-class sequence of Jewelry and Metalsmithing along with Enameling and Stained Glass.  I had enameled a little when I was a teenager and was delighted to become reacquainted the medium.  In my Stained Glass classes, we also learned how to slump and fuse glass.  I because addicted to glass art in all forms, of which enameling is only one, the application of glass to metal. 

     I also finally started selling some of my work, at the bi-annual Student Arts and Crafts Show that Palomar College puts on every semester.  I did really well in the beginning when I had quite a variety of things to sell.  But I didn’t replace the stained glass and other larger pieces when they sold, so after a few years, I only had jewelry and small décor objects like wine glass charms left to sell.  Jewelry pieces are small and even though they were very reasonably priced, they were just too much temptation for larcenous students and other customers, and I ended up losing so much product to theft that it was no longer worth my while to participate in the sale. I went from making $800 per sale to losing money. 

     Meanwhile, Palomar College didn’t offer these great studio art classes in the summer so I took an online Interior Design (ID) class.  I loved it; I was a natural.  I realized that I had been doing it all my life, with my many dormitory rooms and apartments and condos, and with my siblings’ homes.  It turns out I have a great sense of color and balance.  My stained glass instructor called me the Master of Color as I prodigiously poured out stained glass pieces.  I ended up taking the entire sequence of Interior Design classes and getting my A.S. in Interior Design.

     I did an internship in Interior Design with a designer who specialized in kitchens and baths, and had a great time.  The designer hired me on permanently when the internship was over and I worked there happily for three years.  But when she simplified her procedures and let me go, I discovered that not very many design firms wanted to hire people part-time and I didn’t want to work full-time.  That resulted in my being mostly unemployed for the last three years. 

     For starters, I do all these things because I love and enjoy them thoroughly.  That’s not to say that I haven’t tried to monetize the activities.  I started by getting some business cards designed around one of my favorite colors, purple.

I didn’t put a title on the card, figuring I could use it for business and personal purposes.  They mostly got used for personal purposes like when I met an attractive man in a club or on the beach. 

     I studied kitchen design as part of my ID training and created a fictitious company called Kitchen Korners.  Since we had to create drawings, I also designed a logo for this made-up company using my other favorite color, turquoise.  I used a whimsical font, a variation of Comic Sans, I think.   

Kitchen and bath design is my favorite in that it combines ID with technology, two of my passions.

     As time went on, I decided that I wanted a logo that included my initials, something I could sign artwork with, something classy and unobtrusive.  My initials spell out my first name so it would also be clever.  I had been looking at some of the online freelancing sites like www.fiverr.com and http://www.freelancer.com in 2017, and decided to have someone from one of them design a logo for me to see what they came up with. I told the gentleman I ended up hiring that my favorite colors were aqua and purple and that it would be great if he could work them into it.  He came up with a logo that could be used both to sign my artwork and as a traditional logo.

          

The logo has my initials kind of smashed into each other with the N using the final stroke in the A as its initial stroke.   I like it but didn’t end up using it for anything for a while.

     Sometime later I joined the Good’ol’Gals, a women’s networking group that had members setting up booths during the monthly luncheon meetings in a marketplace.  Around the same time, more and more people were admiring the jewelry I was wearing, mostly chain maille bracelets and pendants I had made myself, or copper enamel pendants that I created.  These two circumstances combined to inspire me to really get my act in gear on this jewelry and art business career.

     In 2016, I had started calling my business Jan Neff-Sinclair’s Custom Creations as much of what I made was done to a client’s specifications.  The term creation was also vague enough to cover jewelry, art glass, and décor objects. I made up some 4 x 6 art cards, a play on business line cards that show what a business’s products are. 

     I even included a small panel listing the classes that I taught.  At that point in time, I’d taught a preliminary stained glass class at the San Diego Quail Gardens and done stained glass demos at Palomar College.  I also taught enameling to fellow students at Palomar College and even had a handout for beginners to use when I wasn’t in class or was otherwise occupied. 

     Palomar scheduled Jewelry and Metalsmithing I, II, and III all in the same large studio room with the Enameling class.  That was four classes in the same room with only one instructor.  At times, he had an instructional aide but not always.  He spent so much time with the Jewelry and Metalsmithing I class that it really helped him out to have myself and my friend Noah teach the beginning Enameling students who hadn’t done it before.

     I made up a price list along the same design guidelines because when a show popped up that I could participate in, I didn’t always have enough time to put a price tag on every single individual piece for sale. 

     I eventually came to the conclusion that my business name was too long and no one would remember it.  It was too much to type in if someone wanted to look for me on the Internet.  It might be accurate but that wasn’t the point.  So I came up with Jan’s Jems as a new business name.  It is short, alliterative, a cute misspelling, and ambiguous enough to include everything I did.  After all, just about anything can be called a gem if it is special. 

     In 2017, I had also noticed that other people had business cards with the same design as mine; they had no doubt gotten their cards from VistaPrint, too.  So I designed a really fancy card that was even stacked or layered, so it would stand out from the dozens of other business cards people collected.  I even went so far as to commit to a title for myself. 

It was a gorgeous card that I really liked but it was too expensive to give to just anyone.  I finally realized that I was hoarding the cards, which certainly was no help to getting my business off the ground.  Something had to change.

     In 2019, I decided it was time to get serious about this business stuff.  I was no longer working at the Interior Design firm and I missed the income.  I decided that I needed a web presence.  I had not yet decided if that would be as just an artist or if it would be as an artist and an Interior Designer.  But to get out in front of it, I got the domain name and email address.  Unfortunately, someone else had already nabbed JansJems as a domain name so I ended up with  http://www.Jans-Jems.com which had a hyphen.  I still cannot decide if the hyphen makes it too hard to recall or not.; sometimes I wonder if I should have gone for http://www.jans.jems.com but some people don’t realize that you can have more than the single period before the com and would never enter it correctly.    The email address that went along with the domain I selected was Jan@Jans-Jems.com. 

     Of course, now that I had a web site and email address, I needed a new business card.  I couldn’t justify the expense of the last style of card that I’d used so I went for something different although still colorful and classy.  This card is purple-based and has a silver embossed leaf pattern on it.

The problem with this card is that I have yet to stand up my web page or set up my email address.  So every time I give someone this card, I have to cross out the lines with the web site and email address and write the Yahoo email address I usually use on the back.  Not very professional. 

     And if you believe what the Motley Fool (Izquierdo, 2020) has to say about branding, I did it all backwards with no research on the front end at all.  No wonder it seems scattershot and disorganized.  It appears that I have a lot of research work to do. 

     The Motley Fool article about building a brand lists elements of a brand.  I have some of these elements:

• Logo
• Color palette

I sort of have the elements:

• Typography – Comic Sans, Arial, other whimsical but readable fonts
• Personality
• Artwork – fun, exciting, unique, bold, attractive, eye-catching, good value
• Interior Design – comfortable, relaxing, custom, gorgeous, #NoBeigeZone, nothing overpriced
• Voice
• Artwork – ???
• Interior Design – everyone deserves good design

I don’t have these brand elements:

• Style guide (implies a lot of work that might be overkill)
• Iconography (I don’t even know what this means outside of a logo)

     My research needs to begin with customer or client definition.  In my case, there will be a lot of overlap between my artwork clients and ID clients.  I see my customer segmentation approach to be a concentration of just a few segments.

     I ought to research tools some as well.  I’m pretty familiar with MailChimp as I use it to put out a bimonthly newsletter for the political club where I am Communications Chair.  It can’t do everything I need though, I don’t think.  Bitrix24 was recommended as good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for startups so I will research it. I think I need a blog, an online store, a portfolio, and an education section that can contain articles and videos.  If I can make part of the education section into a subscription service, that would be even better.  It would be great if the online store tied into Facebook stores, eBay, Amazon, Walmart, Instagram, Shopify or something similar, and the new PayPal marketplace.  Whether this is a realistic expectation for a package that doesn’t cost $100 month remains to be seen.

     I don’t have an angel backing me so startup funds are extremely limited.  I will have to make do with less expensive offerings.  However, with my Software Engineering background and a familiarity with basic web design, I might be able to kludge together everything I need on a platform that doesn’t have everything built-in.  The journey continues . . . .

References

Izquierdo, R. (2020, June 30). How to Build Your Business' Brand in 5 Steps. Retrieved September 24, 2021, from the blueprint: A Motley Fool Service: https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/how-to-build-a-brand/

 

 WEEK 3A: AESTHETICS, 

DESIGN, & BRANDING

SITE RATINGS

Characteristic	Pearly	SES	e-namels	Thompson
Concept	5	5	5	5
Contrast	5	4	3.5	5
Repetition	4	2	4	4
Alignment	4.5	2	3	4
Proximity	4.5	3	4	4
Hierarchy	4	3.5	4	2.5
Typography	4	2	3	3
Ease of Use	3.5	2.5	4	2
Depth of Content	4	4	4	4

https://pearlysupply.com/

https://course.pearlyenamel.com/

Pearly Karpel is an Israeli glass and enamel artist with a background in software and chemical engineering.  In additional to creating and selling enameled pieces, she sells various forms of enamel, copper blanks, an enameling course via online videos, and enameling supplies, some of which she designed.  As far as I can tell, she sells her artwork on Etsy, and everything else on Etsy and on her web sites; she has two with the 2nd devoted to her online enameling course.

Pearly’s web sites are pretty well organized and it is clear that one is a retail sales outlet and the other is the delivery platform for her enameling course.  The sites look good and are relatively easy to navigate with a few exceptions.  There are two ways to contact Pearly via the retail site, a chat window in the lower right-hand corner and a form for getting her newsletter.  She lists her email address as well and has icons leading to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and her YouTube channel.  

The enameling course web site also has a contact form and one for the newsletter.  Her email address is shown on some pages as are icons for Facebook, her YouTube channel, Instagram, and an unlabeled link to her retail site.  The social media icons lead to different pages than do the social media icons on her retail site.  It is not known if this is an oversight or not.  The course web site is not as polished as the retail site despite the fact that it is copyrighted in 2021 versus 2020 on the retail site.

There are a few navigation problems.  The Newly Arrived and Video sections are not listed in the navigation bar across the top of every page on the retail pages.  You have to notice that they are on the Home page a little further down from the top of the page.  If you have a small screen, you may miss those sections totally.  There is only one blog entry from a year ago, but it looks like there could be more, but there isn’t a way to get to them if there are.  One can get to the enameling course web site from the retail site but it is not obvious how to go back in the other direction.  

These sites looks like they were probably created by a professional and updated by Pearly.  This is due to a few spelling errors and typos along with some of the issues mentioned above.  

Pearly’s sites are comfortable to look at with her logo prominently displayed on every page.  The colors are pleasing and there is enough hierarchy and proper spacing of items on pages. Her brand is clear.  This all combines to make Pearly Karpel’s web sites nice places to visit.

https://www.enameling.com/

Schlaifer's Enameling in Gardnerville, NV was founded in 1990 by Joan Schlaifer.  She was lucky enough to grab the URL she got which is definite driver to her site for enamellists.  Joan died of breast cancer in 2015 and the business is now owned by Joan's husband Steve and Vicki Mathieu.  Schlaifer’s Enameling sells powdered enamel, both currently manufactured and hard-to-find vintage; other forms of enamel; copper sheets, blanks, and larger forms; other supplements; and enameling tools.  They carry the entire line from Thompson Enamels, the only remaining U.S. manufacturer of vitreous enamel for artists and hobbyists.  

This site is not as organized as it could be although it is clear that is a retail site devoted to enameling.  The site looks amateurish but with trial and error, one can navigate to any product.  The product descriptions are thorough enough to educate a beginning enamellist but the entire site appears to be done in one font, Arial.  One can join their email list, and their email address and phone number are provided.  When Joan was alive, you could contact her with enameling questions as well as orders.  There are no social media references.

There are some real problems with this web site, but for an enamel artist, one can buy almost everything they might need.  The biggest issue with this site is a rare one: there is no online ordering.  An order form is available on the web site and it can be emailed, FAXed, or snail mailed to their Nevada location or you can just call in your order.  There is no consistency between pages nor a constant navigation bar.  One can always go to the Home page and start over if one gets lost navigating.  The site doesn’t have so many levels of hierarchy that one can get totally lost. 

There is an alphabetical product list but a novice enamellist might not know what some of the products are by name.  But if you know what you want, it is easier than trying to drill down through product categories.

The site was updated in the last year or so and is actually better than it used to be, but it still looks somewhat unprofessional.  Consistency among pages and in spacing, proximity, and alignment would make the site look more professional and less jarring in places.  Changing up the font and font sizes where appropriate would also contribute to a more put-together look.  The logo is a stylized SES but it isn’t clear what the final S stands for.  They could use a more modern logo to sell their brand. 

https://www.e-namels.com/

Scott Ellis founded e-namels.com as a clearinghouse for surplus enamels but has grown the business to the point where his motto is The World's Leading Supplier of Vintage Enamel.  He carries an extraordinary range of foreign-made, specialty, and hard-to-find out-of-production enamels.  Scott also creates hand-spun copper forms and sells some copper shapes but the emphasis is on enamel.

It is apparent that the site’s main purpose is to sell enamel in its many forms, but there is also some information on the art of enameling and a rotating slideshow of enamel artwork on the Home page.  The site is well organized and navigation is simple.  There aren’t too many levels to work through or drill down.  The site uses the same font throughout but differing character sizes help establish a hierarchy. 

It is really important for an enamellist to know what color an enamel is going to look like after it is fired and the photos on this site make that very clear.  It is one of the best features of the site and took a lot of work to do since so many different types and colors of enamel are available.  The descriptions also include vital information like what temperature to fire the enamel at.

This site does not seem like it is professionally done but it does have the feel of a labor of love, which it is.  Enamel is in Scott’s blood: his dad has worked at Thompson Enamels for over 35 years and his uncle creates floral wafers.  Since the inventory levels change constantly, having a site that he can tweak himself to list when items are out of stock or available again is really helpful.  There are a couple of places on the site where you click on something and nothing happens or what is displayed is not particularly helpful, but those are not in the important parts of the site.  There are no social media connections to the site either.

The only real branding that the site has is the logo.  It isn’t a beautiful site and the only design appears to be done to maintain consistency between pages.  However, enamellists love the site anyway due to the large selection, accurate color photos, and good descriptions.  Scott sells what many artists are looking for.

https://thompsonenamel.com/

Thompson Enamel has been a manufacturer of vitreous enamel for metal for over 119 years.  Thompson is the last remaining U.S. manufacturer of enamel and only makes unleaded enamel. Many enamel distributers retail Thompson enamel so one could say that the company competes with itself.  Some of the most well-known and beloved enamellists have worked for or with Thompson over the years.  Their web site has recently been updated and it is easier to use than it has been in the past.

This site is similar to e-namels.com’s site.  It is clear that the site’s main purpose is to sell enamel and the supplies necessary to practice enameling, but there is also some information on how to enamel and how to use some of their products, as well as a rotating slideshow of enamel artwork on the Home page.  The site is somewhat organized but navigation is not as easy as it could be. The site uses the same font throughout but differing character sizes and the use of bolding help establish something of a hierarchy.

Like e-namels.com, Thompson’s site shows what the different colors of enamel look like on different backgrounds.  This could be copper, silver, foil, or white enamel.  The descriptions contain information on how to use the products.  There does not appear to be a newsletter or any social media tie ins.  Interestingly enough, in the contact section. Tom Ellis, father of Scott Ellis from e-namels.com, is listed for technical support.

Browsing items for sale is not that easy.  Although the products are all grouped in a hierarchal fashion, hierarchal access is difficult.  There aren’t too many levels to work through but there is no top level category page.  It is possible to navigate though the hierarchy but you have to do it in non-intuitive ways as shown in the next figure.  

If you are already in a subset of a category, you can click on the higher level category as shown in the first circle.  If you know the name of the product, you can search for it.  You can browse by category which provides a drop-down list but you can’t see all of the categories or sub-categories at one time.  This makes it hard to determine the scope of the site.  

The items for sale can only be viewed in groups of twelve.  When there are 59 pages of 12 items each, it could take a user a very long time to locate what they want to buy unless they know its name and can do a search.  There is no way to change the number of items displayed at any one time.  

Although Thompson’s web site is better than it used to be, it still does not appear professionally done.  The lack of hierarchical access and being forced to view all products in groups of twelve only seal that fate.  It’s clear that the tiered categories are present but they aren’t easily used for navigation.

CONCLUSION

Design and aesthetics are important for a pleasant web site experience but ease of use is even more important.  If a user cannot easily do what they came to do on a web site, they will go elsewhere unless the site has the best price or exclusive access to something. 

The best site of the four reviewed has both a pleasing design and easy navigation.  There are also a few extras like videos to enjoy.  It appears that Pearly’s site is professionally done.  Ironically, the two sites that need the most work are updated from how they previously appeared and have improved greatly, but not enough.  Neither has any design and navigation is not that simple.  The last site does not have much of a design either but it can be navigated easily and has a lot of hard-to-find products in one place.