As a kid I was obsessed with shopfronts. As a passenger in my mum’s car on trips through our town, I spent most of my time absorbing every shopfront I saw. What did they sell? Did they invest much in their signage? Was it consistent?
I was clearly a weird kid.
It also feels like one of those connecting-the-dots moments where, as an adult, I find myself thinking about branding and marketing in business for a large proportion of my working day. Only now, I’m not on a high street in an ageing market town selling electronics, or school uniforms, or Polish foods.
But I still think about shopfronts. Because even businesses that don’t exist in the physical realm have them. In fact, they have more than one.
If you’re a retail business, your shopfront is your website. But if you’re a SaaS, your shopfront is your website, too. It doesn’t really matter what business you are, your shopfront is your website.
Your shopfront is also your social media. It’s the event or podcast you sponsor. Your shopfront is also the mention you get when someone asks an LLM about you.
So, everything is your shopfront now. And if everything is your shopfront, then you don’t really have a shopfront anymore.
Because, when you think about it, a shopfront is the part your customers walk through before they start a conversation or pick up what you sell for the first time. It’s a transient space. It matters, but only for a moment. First impressions count, but they don’t last.
And if everywhere is your shopfront, including the spaces where you have little control over how things look or what’s being said, how do you handle that transient, variable space? Maybe you can’t. And yet, we still want to put more effort into it than everything else.
SaaS products, especially those of the B2B variety, have long fallen into this trap. Invest heavily in the shopfront at the expense of what comes after. The giveaway is a lack of real UI on show on the marketing website. It’s either missing completely or approximated in an illustrative style. A promise of what’s to come.
If you can’t see any prices in the jewellery shop’s window then you probably can’t afford what’s inside. And if you can’t see real UI on a B2B SaaS’s marketing website, the product itself is going to be a world of pain to use. I’ve been there. I won’t name names, because there are many guilty parties.
The rest of the website is beautiful, illustrated, extensive. But it promises you a product, and a future, that will never live up to what’s on show. The transient experience is fleeting, yet it’s better than the lasting one. That feels wrong, right?
If you’re a marketer with a product, any product, you owe it to yourself and your employer to ditch your ego and get out of sight. And if you’re running product and your marketing website looks and feels better than the product itself, you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
Disney’s retail websites, and even the ones where you book extremely expensive holidays with them, are okay-but-not-spectacular. Conventional marketing wisdom would have you believe this is sinful. One of the most celebrated brands in the world has an average website? Don’t they care?!
I think the good people at Disney do care, of course they do. But they also know better than to make the shopfront the story. Especially when the product is orders of magnitude more impressive.
Let’s head back to my weird childhood once more. Staring at shopfronts in the back of a Rover Metro. The shops with the best signage and the most distinctive brand still had the potential to disappoint.
But there was a certain vintage of shopfront. Older, more established. The signage was understated, maybe hand-painted. Minimal. The window was big. And the product, the promise, was right there for all to see. The experience wasn’t transient because it wasn’t an experience at all. It was a window. It was transparent. It was invisible.
If you’re building your shopfront today, don’t forget to get out of the way.