The Other
Blokes Blog

What’s In It For Me – WIIFM. That phrase came bouncing in to my mind unprompted after reading an intriguing article on Freakonomics by William Watson in today’s Montreal Gazette.

Freakonomics is the current No. 4 on the New York Times best-seller non-fiction list. Stephen Levitt, one of the co-authors of that book has some intriguing ideas, perhaps best summed up by a quote from the website for the book, “Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: if morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.”

Levitt covers many fields but one of his favourite themes concerns the use of economic incentives to change behaviour. Thinking on this, I began to question how many company websites are using that thinking. So many of them just sit there extolling the strengths of the company. It’s a company-centric approach. The other end of the spectrum is the customer-centric approach. Following the Freakonomics theory, the website should be beaming out the answer to the #1 customer question, “What’s In It For Me?” How well does your company website highlight the answer to WIIFM?

Tags: Freakonomics