Sunday evening thoughts: client references on websites.
As a product guy, I allocate at least 30 minutes a week to take a look at other digital products. Product Hunt is a great recourse for this, as is Twitter and Mind The Product channel on Slack.
Usually a session opens up a lot of new tabs. Going through each website, scrolling down, quickly going through the various feature, pricing and team pages to get a feel of the product & company.
The last couple of weeks, I started asking myself why every company likes to put (the same) references to clients on their site like a badge of honour. It was sparked by seeing this on the website of Airtable:
Having the WeWork logo on their seemed odd to me. More so with the title line “Trusted by forward-thinking companies”. Not exactly the link anyone is making anymore today.
But it was not this link I wanted to focus on here. I wondered if people actually value these references to clients. Considering it is super easy to just put any logo on your website to give yourself some credibility. It doesn’t always represent reality nor does it validate your product as a good product.
Some examples of other products I use daily referencing their clients:
I never know what to think of these references and I’m skeptical to the actual value of mentioning them like this. Having worked on quite some company websites, I’ve experienced having to put logos on the website even if everybody inside the company knew it did not represent reality correct.
The idea from a marketing point of view is that websites with social proof elements have a better conversion. Maybe I’m becoming sceptical of tech companies in general that I trust personal reviews on a website more than just a logo from a random “big” company.
