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Archives for October 2011

Being Extra Helpful

Getting users to think you are truly focused on customers / users can take a lot of work. Being extra helpful on the website can contribute to this. Even on a simple financial calendar, UBS offer:

  • Contact us links for each event (we haven’t seen that before)
  • An additional prompt for the user to think whether they have any questions with a link to an enquiry form
  • Guidance for how to use the calendar reminder functionality
  • A short, easy to remember url for the page e.g. www.ubs.com/calendar

We like this because:

Even if these features don’t get used much, it gives the user the strong feeling that UBS are trying to go the extra mile to be helpful to the website users.

See UBS Events

Spotlight on the CEO

Journalists always want to know what the CEO thinks. GSK have provided a page in their Media section with all the CEO’s speeches, articles and presentations.

We like this because it:

  • Gives the journalist what they want
  • Increases visibility of the CEO and their views

See From Our CEO at GSK

Hyundai Ranks #1 in Brand Loyalty

hyundai elantraAccording to research by Experian Automotive (reported by Motor Trend), Hyundai took the top spot in terms of corporate brand loyalty among American car buyers for the second quarter of 2011.

Suffice it to say, Hyundai has come a long way in the past decade — from the cheap brand with even cheaper quality to the #1 brand based on loyalty. But that’s not all. Hyundai’s Kia brand ranked well for individual brand loyalty with three Kia brands landing in the top 10.

Keep in mind, Hyundai didn’t change its brand image overnight. It took a long time for Hyundai to catch up to other corporate auto brands and finally oust brands like General Motors and Ford that led the brand loyalty list for years. During those years, Hyundai successfully changed its image by altering its brand promise from “cheap” to “good quality at a good price.” It’s a brand promise that is nearly always sure to appeal to many consumers (particularly during an economic downturn) and works as long as the brand consistently delivers on that promise.

Hyundai hasn’t just talked the talk about good quality and good prices over the past decade. The company has walked the walk and proven its commitment to its brand promise. For example, by offering one of the first 10-year, 100,000 mile warranties, Hyundai differentiated its brand from its competitors. Many of those competitors copied the Hyundai warranty, but most couldn’t part with their lucrative extended warranty products. Hyundai put its brand promise on the line by communicating its belief in its promise of good quality at a good price. The 10-year, 100,000 mile warranty was the perfect way to prove the company meant what it said. This is the type of program that attracts new buyers, encourages repeat purchases, and is a public relations dream come true.

Unlike other car brands that have touted good prices and good quality, Hyundai has not gotten complacent. The company realizes that what’s good today, most likely won’t be good enough tomorrow. With that understanding in mind, Hyundai continues to introduce innovative new designs, products, and promotions. Not long ago, ads hyping a new kind of return policy on Hyundai car purchases got people talking (and buying). The ads told consumers that they could buy a Hyundai with less worry because if a buyer lost his job in the next year, he could return his Hyundai!

In 2011, Hyundai is reportedly on track to sell more cars in the United States than ever, and its market share in the U.S. market has more than doubled over the past 10 years since its brand repositioning plan began (via NPR). Furthermore, Hyundai ranked 61st in Interbrand’s list of the Top 100 Global Brands of 2011.

Clearly, Hyundai’s efforts are working. What do you think of the Hyundai brand turnaround? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Flickr

Apple Breaks More Records with the iPhone 4S

Apple continues to sell more iPhones, break its own records, and surpass expectations with the launch of the iPhone 4S on October 14th.

When the iPhone 4 launched, 600,000 units were pre-ordered within the first 24 hours. The iPhone 4S beat that by nearly 67%!

When the iPhone 4 launched on June 24, 2010, 1.7 million units were sold within the first three days that it was available. The iPhone 4S beat that by over 135%!

Here are the statistics for the iPhone 4S to date from Reuters:

  • 1 million iPhone 4S units were pre-ordered within the first 24 hours of its availability.
  • In the first 3 days that the iPhone 4S has been on the market, 4 million units have been sold.
  • During those first three days, the iPhone 4S was available in 7 countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Canada. The iPhone 4 was only available in 5 countries in its first 3 days on the market.
  • The iPhone 4S was available through the 3 primary wireless carriers in the United States (Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, and Sprint) at launch. The iPhone 4 was only available through AT&T Wireless when it launched.
  • Analysts predict that the iPhone 4S will hit 25 to 30 million units sold within its first 3 months of its availability. It will be available in a total of 29 countries by October 28th and over 70 countries before the year ends.

There is no doubt that Apple does at great job with tease marketing and building a demand for its new products by tapping into consumers’ emotions and baiting them with new features that consumers “need” to live better and be cooler. Consumers who are buying the iPhone 4S quickly cite several new features that had them lining up at the doors to their local Apple stores to get their hands on the latest and greatest smartphone:

  • Siri voice command
  • AirPlay wireless mirroring
  • Higher megapixel camera
  • IOS 5
  • 4G network
  • 2 antennas
  • Speed — faster processor, faster camera, and more

The exterior of the iPhone 4S doesn’t look very different from the iPhone 4, and there are still negative aspects of the iPhone that haven’t been addressed (e.g., the battery life is better than the iPhone 4, but not much). However, consumers cannot wait to get their hands on the latest and greatest Apple product.

With each new version of its products, Apple adds just enough new features and improvements to make them the hot new gadget to own, and the marketing push behind product launches is genius. Apple updates its products approximately once per year (or less), so there is always a great deal of anticipation around a launch. Again, Apple is the company to benchmark when it comes to emotional branding, relationship branding, and tease marketing. Whether you’re an Apple customer or not, if you’re a marketer or branding professional, you need to study Apple and learn how to leave consumers always wanting more from your brand.

Image: Flickr

Augmenting Corporate Reality

Can we augment reality for corporate purposes? Will we, in some maybe-not-so-distant future?

It’s not immediately obvious, at the moment, how a company might use augmented reality for practical corporate purposes:

  • it’s still early days, so the technology isn’t – quite – there, though this is changing very fast
  • the applications so far tend to be oriented around games, or retail
  • it’s probably not going to be cost-effective for internal use – yet
  • and it seems to be a largely solo experience, at the moment, due to device/technology constraints.

I always enjoy listening to a good speaker enthuse about a topic they know well, so I was looking forward to the BrunchBytes session on Augmented Reality – and I wasn’t disappointed.

Dr Paul Coulton walked us through an outline of augmented reality issues and information:

  • a definition: augmented reality is a combination of the real and the virtual, is interactive – in real time – and is perceived as 3D.
  • some of challenges of generating the virtual elements
  • the development of technologies needed to create a believable display
  • the pros and cons of different display devices
  • techniques used to generate the display
  • And finally a warning to consider what benefits it would give the user apart from being ‘cool’.

All of which makes an excellent primer for those of us with no expertise in the area. You can see his slides here.

The vital question is of course what would you use it for? Being able to check out information on your mobile by overlaying information on what you see while out and about is, of course, useful – but only for the individual, and for those companies for which it would work to make branding/adverts/offers available through that channel. How could you use it to communicate with your corporate stakeholders? Investors; journalists; job-seekers; suppliers…

One ideal would be to have a display—unmediated by any handheld device—that can be viewed and interacted with by more than one person – spatial augmented reality. But this isn’t easy, so any dream you might have of being able to display and interact with your financial data and future projections in 3D at an AGM will just have to wait a little longer.

However, there are some ideas around, a few of which just might have corporate application:

Recruitment

Coventry University is using Aurasma’s augmented reality app to promote themselves to prospective students via physical printed items (posters, logos) around the UK. For companies who recruit graduates in large numbers – or who recruit in specific niches likely to be interested in this kind of technology and its application – this might be a good use.

Work support

This could be an overlay of instructions over a keyboard, mixing desk or other instrumental display… it’s a stretch, but perhaps this might be helpful as part of your employee training programme, or even integrated with your social media monitoring workflow software (displaying information known about individuals, previous interactions or next steps requested by an earlier shift)

About Us

Several companies provide ‘flythroughs’ of their physical locations on their corporate website; maybe 3D versions could be done by augmented reality (see www.arsights.com for example)

Education

Rolls-Royce’s Journey through a jet engine was a great way of educating people on a core product. Could you use augmented reality to do something similar?

Collaboration

Although single user applications are interesting, I think the future for corporate use might be for collaboration. A recent research study looked at augmented reality technology used to support collaboration between different organisations in a crisis management scenario (in this case, rescue services, police and military personnel). While your crises are likely to involve media channels rather than physical environments, there might be some mileage here.

Maybe a better case could be made for augmented reality conferencing (see Zugara for example, or the NTT’s T-room), potentially adding back in those visual and interactive cues that we all use to help in communication, and which are stripped out by audio/2D conferencing. Even here, though, the costs and practical issues are likely to be overwhelming…

On-the-fly translation

There are a number of apps available now which use your phone camera to ‘read’ the text and superimpose the translation over the original text. See QuestVisual’s WordLens, for example, or Tencent’s QQ Hui Yan. Now that’s something that might be useful for a multinational.

What do you think: is augmented reality something you can see a corporate use for? And – perhaps more interestingly from my point of view – can you see a relationship with your corporate website?

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The image above is from a Toyota video of their new iQ car. Do watch the whole video if you haven’t already seen it.

Want to see more? Some links I found interesting:
How Stuff Works
Sixth Sense
2011 Horizon Report
Intel’s OASIS

Lessons From Food Security: Telling Us What Matters

Food – its production, distribution, sale and consumption – is of vital importance to each one of us, and there are many companies which work within the industry.

There are even more that are engaged with food in some way as part of their corporate social responsibility programme: many taking hunger as a focus; a few looking at obesity.

There’s a very real imbalance here – some of us have too much food; others too little – but in the longer term, food security is going to be a problem for all of us. As the world’s population grows, the space available to feed us all shrinks.

From the Syngenta site:

it takes less than a second to add two people to the world population. In the same second, farmland available to feed our growing population is shrinking by an area about the size of a soccer field.

For Blog Action Day 2011, I thought I’d look at 5 big companies who work with crops (seeds, fertilisers, nutrients and protection), to see the techniques they use to communicate their interest in this vital topic – and to see if these are tactics you could use for a core topic related to your business.

These companies are:

  • Agrium – where the future is growing
  • Mosaic – helping the world grow the food it needs
  • Potash – helping nature provide
  • Syngenta – bringing plant potential to life
  • Yara – knowledge grows

Taglines and Mission Statements

While not all the phrases listed above are being used explicitly as taglines, they are used to describe the companies. I’ve also looked at the mission and vision statements, which should encapsulate the company’s essence in a few carefully chosen words.

  • The phrase associated with Mosaic is their mission statement, not a tagline, but it does clearly refer to food security:

    “helping the world grow the food it needs”

  • “We help provide food and biomass which can be used for renewable energy for a growing world population”.

    Food for a growing world population is at the centre of the food security question. (Yara)

  • “PotashCorp is a key player in meeting the growing challenge of feeding the world”.

    This establishes the need to feed the world as a big issue (which it is, obviously!) by using ‘growing challenge’; note the reference to the increasing scale of the problem.

  • Agrium’s vision is to “make an increasingly positive impact on stakeholders while helping to feed the world responsibly”. Again, we see a strong reference to feeding the world (though not to the population growth problem).
  • And Syngenta are “helping growers around the world to meet the challenge of the future: to grow more from less”.

    Like PotashCorp, there’s a clear reference to this as a difficult problem: but also a reference to the double-whammy of more people and less land for farming.

While these statements vary in the strength of reference to food security, all are relevant.

Home page real estate and navigation

Syngenta, Agrium and Yara all mention food security issues on their home pages, and link from the home page to more information.

  • Agrium offer a teaser link from their home page to their Malnutrition programme, and a reference to feeding a growing world is one of the features in their home page rotator. It’s interesting that there’s a mention of population growth here, but not in the vision statement; I wonder if they considered using ‘a growing world’.
  • Yara have a teaser link to their Food and Climate magazine: Feeding The Future from the home page, and one of the main stories in their rotator is about agricultural productivity and hunger. Food security is one of the sidebar links within the Sustainability section, leading to their own page on this topic – but there’s also a link to food security initiatives at FarmingFirst. Linking out to expert sites is a good way to demonstrate your own knowledge on the topic, as well as to provide useful information for the visitor.
  • Syngenta go the furthest: not only do they raise the question ‘What are we doing about food security?’ on the home page, but Grow More For Less is one of the tabs in the main navigation, as well as being the entire focus of the rotator, clearly highlighting the importance of this topic to the company.

Highlights and Features

As well as using the food security issue as part of their investment case, Potash provide a video of their CEO discussing food security issues. This is a good use of senior management to demonstrate the importance of the topic.

Agrium promote their messages about food security throughout the site, in two places:

  • a Facts section at the top of the page, which highlights food security in the supplier section and in the careers section (neatly integrating a CSR message to appeal to potential candidates)
  • and an Explore section in the right hand sidebar, which offers links to press releases about food security – notably in the corporate governance section

Mosaic reiterate their message about feeding the world, and the value of their global presence to this mission, across the site (in the leading paragraphs for the About, Products, Sustainability and Careers sections, for example) and they identify food security as one of the three key focus areas in their Community Investment page.

Yara identify food security as one of the ‘Shaping Issues’ that are of strategic importance, and which are key global issues. They also discuss global trends in a separate section, which include population growth and food demand.

And as mentioned above, Syngenta have an extensive section on food security, as well as a discussion of their involvement in Vison 2050 and the challenges of feeding over 9 billion people by 2050.

Takeaways

These 5 companies between them show that demonstrating the significance of a topic is done by:

  • linking to it in the main navigation – the higher level the better
  • devoting some prime home page real estate to it
  • engaging senior management to talk about it
  • adding dedicated pages
  • adding multimedia on the topic
  • explicitly saying that it is a key issue
  • integrating it with other sections, not just the obvious one
  • demonstrating authority by being a resource for further information
  • relating it to a variety of stakeholder interests.

What do you think: do these 5 corporate websites convince you that food security matters to them?

This post is part of Blog Action Day, which this year is discussing food.

Previous contributions to Blog Action Day were:
2010: Mixing Oil and Water
2009: Climate change and the corporate site
2008: Celebrating the FTSE 100: action on the breadline
2007: Enticing the green investor