If nothing else, Ling's Cars is remarkable. The car leasing market is interminably bland, full of hundreds of players offering the same deals on the same cars. There aren't many ways to stand out in that market, but Ling has done it by being absolutely bonkers.
That remarkability may also act as a form of social proof. On some level, we instinctively recognise that if Advantage Motor Leasing Ltd screw over a bunch of their customers, they could just rebrand as Premier Motor Leasing Ltd and carry on regardless. A faceless company with a Wordpress template website can easily shake off a bad reputation. Ling's business is deeply personal and highly distinctive, representing a significant investment in her reputation.
I was in the market for a car last year - nearly leased rather than buying - and nearly went with Ling. Here's why
1. I'd heard of them - marginally important, they had received coverage because of the design.
2. While the graphical design may make your eyes bleed, the site is supremely good at making the business of leasing a car simple. There are nice bits of text, written in colloquial breezy English, that explain exactly how leasing works and what the pros and cons are of different kinds of deals
3. It's wonderfully easy to compare the different cars and deals on the site and get an idea of the total cost of leasing.
4. The whole vibe of the site gives you the feeling that the conpany is quirky, human, but very straightforward and honest - not something you necessarily associate with leasing a car.
Ling is pretty active on Facebook, and responds to questions and comments.
She has said that her target market is 30-ish year old men, mostly - the Top Gear demographic if you like - and that is mostly who she targets. She does lots of green-screen videos - she made her own Desposito video in Mandarin and has started a series based on Wakaliwood films. She had a competition to win a Lings Cars mug on her website. Mine arrived with a cock drawn on the bottom.
Ling's Cars is not bad design. It applies a eastern design aesthetic to a western business. It's jarring because people in the west aren't used to it. Just have a look at any typical Japanese or Chinese ecommerce site eg https://www.dmm.com/ ... there's a lot going on. It's not bad; it's just different.
I’ve never been able to square the Eastern vs Western dichotomy of design aesthetic between the approaches to web vs product. Eastern product design seems to embrace minimalism far more readily than Western design, but the inverse is true for web design.
A very common view about why amazon lost Chinese market share is that amazon has much less information about the goods compared with its Chinese opponents.
I guess that this type of "optimization" happens naturally when someone accidentally commits to a particular way of business deeply. I don't think it is done with the goal of lead qualification in mind.
Why do I think so? It's because you're pretty much _never_ going to make a site like this if you're optimizing for immediately qualifying leads. All of this knowledge would be a result of trial & error.
A key point I'm trying to make (post author here) is that it's quite possibleto uconsciously stumble into a successful pattern. And to be blind to that faact.
Tim Brady, ex-Yahoo exec, on why success is a losy teacher:
When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything. It’s really true. It solves everything… or maybe better said, it masks all your mistakes. A lot of the mistakes you make get masked because you receive almost no negative feedback.
But then the bottom fell out and the board let Tim Koogle go. The upper ranks of management emptied out pretty quick, except for me and the CTO who stuck around. We got a new CEO and set of peers in upper management. Let me just say, I learned a whole lot more about business on the way down than I did on the way up.
"Nigerian 419 scammers (and other fraudsters) employ similar tactics -- their methods are intensive on the scammer's time, so the pitches they make are so obviously bogus that anyone with half a brain (or more) realizes they're bogus. Automatically selecting for those with less than half a brain."
Someone should create an scam responder bot tied to an email address that people can forward their spam emails to. The AI would then attempt to engage with the scammers in a human like manner, the intention being to increase their engagement cost. Anything like this exist already?
The design of Hacker News operates on a similar principle. It looks vaguely like an error page. Non-developers look at a think something is wrong, but technical people stick around and self-select into the community.
That remarkability may also act as a form of social proof. On some level, we instinctively recognise that if Advantage Motor Leasing Ltd screw over a bunch of their customers, they could just rebrand as Premier Motor Leasing Ltd and carry on regardless. A faceless company with a Wordpress template website can easily shake off a bad reputation. Ling's business is deeply personal and highly distinctive, representing a significant investment in her reputation.