I hate tricksy titles or descriptions. A spade is a spade not an ‘earth and debris relocator’. Often names are designed to make little ideas seem bigger than they are. Some product names are just plain silly, such as the Ford Probe, probably so named because there are still agencies out there who think the best way to market a sporty car is by cross referencing a gent’s tackle. The possible exception to the keep it simple rule is anything to do with chocolate bars, where you can get positive galactic – to wit Milky Way, Galaxy or, my personal favourite, the Mars bar.

But creative agency Hoop Associates have coined a term that I’m warming to, even if it did originally conjure up images of World War II films starring frightfully British actors defusing doodle bugs with nothing more that a pair of plyers and a packet of Players cigarettes.

Hoop use the term UXB, the acronym for Unexploded Bomb and have applied it to User eXperience Branding (UXB). The basic premise is that, online, user experience and brand experience are the same thing. For example, the experience you have when searching for something on an organisation’s website is an experience that strongly influences what you think about that organisation (and its brand). At CDA we talk about usefulness being the language of brand online. The Content Lab’s re-definition of UXB might be Useful eXperience = Brand.

Websites have to be useful because they’re dealing with a very different kettle of fish (or bucket of customers) from a printed brochure or DM campaign. People are passive recipients of this traditional offline messaging. Online users are active and dynamic. They’ve gone online to do something and they will judge all online encounters by how well this ‘do’ is enabled. The start for any website communication is responding to user action. Here in the lab we also talk about reply-focussed communication, the subject of another posting on this blog.

So we like where Hoop are coming from on this one. We’re also aware that there are still plenty of businesses out there who are pouring fortunes into their online presence (even in the current climate) but who have created websites from the perspective of what they want to say and sell and not what users want to read and do. And if that blows up in their faces – they only have themselves to blame.

Read more from CDA about usefulness as the language of brand

And Hoop Associates answer the question – what the heck is UXB?

Right, I’m off for a Mars bar.