David Glaze, vice president of creative at Web design firm Genex in Culver City, CA, sets up Web sites for movie studios and automakers. He discusses the pivotal role of these sites in branding and customer service.
DIRECT: Can a Web site make or break a company's image?
GLAZE: The Web site is the first face of the company. If you don't have a good experience from the Web site, you won't think highly of the company.
DIRECT: Is a movie Web site branding the studio that made the film?
GLAZE: No, but it is trying to create anticipation and awareness, to have huge box office sales.
DIRECT: How does a site reflect brand?
GLAZE: You hear a lot about CRM, but a site needs to have CEM — customer experience management. Brand has evolved from logo and typeface to be much more of a feeling and experience. It's about two-way communication with the customer and consistency across channels. When I go into Williams-Sonoma, I expect a certain feeling from the store and the sales staff. The same thing is true on the Web site.
DIRECT: Give us an example.
GLAZE: We just did [Honda's] new Acura site recently (www.acura.com). The company wants Acura to be a legitimate luxury brand and is trying to move it into the area where Mercedes is. People evaluate design through association. We use rich imagery, sophisticated-looking typography. For this type of site, photographs fade in and out beautifully. We animate in certain ways — not so it's blinky, but so it has little succinct sounds and beautiful detail photography. A visitor could examine the detail of a headlight, for example.
DIRECT: How do you manage to convey excitement?
GLAZE: We try to show the experience of the film, the specific elements the filmmaker would like to get across. For the film “Minority Report” (www.minorityreport.com), which is about a police agency that predicts murders before they happen, we created a Web site as though it were the actual Web site of the agency trying to recruit officers.
