Blog Post #2
The website I chose for this blog assignment is Sephora. The website only uses pictures and verbal words to navigate around the site. A person with visual impairments wouldn't be able to gather informstion from the site since it's based on visual aspects, but a person with a hearing impairment could gather the main message from the site because there's no audio imbedded into the website.
The visual pictures match very well with the words because they show a picture of the product along with a verbal description of what the product is. For things with color, such as lipsticks or eye shadows, they show a sample of what the color looks like next to the name of that specified color. With the website laid out this way, you can see what the color looks like as well as know what the product is called incase you wish to purchase it at the store instead of online.
The only time this doesn't work is when you get to the fragrance section. The pictures conflict with the verbal description in this aspect, especially if they're trying to sell a new perfume. You can't smell something online, so unless you bought the perfume before, you wouldn't know what type of scent you're getting. They do try to let you know if the scent is either floral or musky to help you decide.
The visual pictures match very well with the words because they show a picture of the product along with a verbal description of what the product is. For things with color, such as lipsticks or eye shadows, they show a sample of what the color looks like next to the name of that specified color. With the website laid out this way, you can see what the color looks like as well as know what the product is called incase you wish to purchase it at the store instead of online.
The only time this doesn't work is when you get to the fragrance section. The pictures conflict with the verbal description in this aspect, especially if they're trying to sell a new perfume. You can't smell something online, so unless you bought the perfume before, you wouldn't know what type of scent you're getting. They do try to let you know if the scent is either floral or musky to help you decide.
posted by Pixie at 2:52 PM
1 Comments:
This is a really interesting choice for a rhetorical analysis. Like Clinique, Sephora is marketing cosmetics by way of appeals to a range of senses--mostly sight, but as you point out, the web is a poor medium to convey the qualities of fragrances. What's interesting to me about this "constraint" of the web is that the verbal text on the Sephora site seems to need to compensate for it by going overboard in its description of the scent.
Another way the site seems like Clinique's American web site is that it focuses on the packages of the products themselves rather than trying to establish a "lifestyle" image by way of photographs of models. It may be because as a purveyor of many different brands, Sephora has to negotiate all the different marketing approaches for the companies whose products they sell. Prada's brand image is different from, say, Urban Decay.
As you point out, the modality of color is especially important here, and it's always interesting to see how cosmetics companies deal with the racial/ethnic issues that are always in the background when things like foundations are at issue. The absence of many human images seem to avoid the problem in some ways. It's also interesting to see how the site tries to appeal to men as potential customers.
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