Dismology/Dizmology? (Or, clarity in guerilla marketing.)
On my normal walk home from work, I noticed a new piece of sidewalk art on Manhattan Ave:
Before you can say "Really? MORE street art in Brooklyn!?", let me 'splain:
This is obviously guerilla marketing for what I thought was Dismology. Thinking it interesting, I snapped the above pic with the intention of Googling the word when I reached home.
Unfortunately, the search term "Dismology" brought back no main landing page or social media presence. I was dismayed- how could anyone who takes the execution time as well as public property defacement laws into their own hands execute a campaign like this?
I stared at the picture some more, confused.
"Dismology", it turns out, is not correct. "Dizmology", however, is. The stencil's backwards "Z" fooled me! Searching for the latter term immediately gave me a number-one ranking for a landing page.
Dizmology is a New York City-based artist specializing in everything from sculpture to photography to the designing and building of armor. It's a well-designed, minimalistic site with high-resolution photos of the artist's work, and I'm glad I found it.
But this is an important lesson on the clarity of guerilla marketing efforts. Perhaps the error was mine: PEBKAC. (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair, a popular acronym among those who perform tech support.) Unfortunately, a misleading stencil kills this campaign's effectiveness, which is too bad. There may be individuals who give up after an initial unsuccessful search.
Who knows how many people made the same mistake I did in searching for "Dismology" versus "Dizmology"? (And that group is likely a smaller number.) The golden rule of conversion is to make a call to action as simple as possible, which this campaign got 50% correct. Not knowing what a Dizmology is would prompt what is now a natural reaction: Googling the unknown term.
Without a close-to-100% success rate after running the correct search term, a campaign isn't reaching its full effectiveness.
Don't let that be your campaign.
UPDATE: I can't stop thinking about this. Was I being dense, or did the sidewalk art throw off anyone else in spelling "Dizmology"? Share in the comments (you'll need a Disqus login!)
