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:
See From Our CEO at GSK
According 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 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:
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:
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
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:
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:
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
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:
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.
“helping the world grow the food it needs”
Food for a growing world population is at the centre of the food security question. (Yara)
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.
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.
Syngenta, Agrium and Yara all mention food security issues on their home pages, and link from the home page to more information.
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:
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.
These 5 companies between them show that demonstrating the significance of a topic is done by:
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
New research from comScore and dunnhumbyUSA shows that online display advertising does have a positive effect on in-store sales for consumer packaged goods brands.
According to the research, consumer products brands get a median 21% sales lift from households that are exposed to online display advertising, and 5 out of 6 online display ad campaigns boost sales for consumer products brands.
The study also found that 70% of online display ad campaigns generated double-digit sales lifts, and 40% of online display ad campaigns generated sales lifts of 30% or more. Furthermore, the research showed that targeted online display ads (from in-store buying data and online browsing data from the study sponsors) generate an in-store sales lift of 42%, which is twice as high as non-targeted campaign results (21%).
These are some significant results that further support developing an integrated marketing strategy that raises awareness and purchase intent across media channels. It’s the continuing exposure to targeted communications where audiences already spend time that increases brand favorability and sets the stage for purchase decisions and conversions at the store level. Online display advertising is just one more place where marketers can expose audiences to their messages and stake a place in consumers’ minds, so when it’s time for the consumer to make the purchase decision, the brand is top-of-mind.
There has long been a debate in business circles about the direct effects that online display advertising delivers with executives relying on click-through rates and immediate conversion percentages as the measurement stick to judge a campaign’s effectiveness. The results from the comScore and dunnhumbyUSA study provide more proof that online advertising can do far more than drive immediate sales. Just as television commercials are unlikely to motivate a consumer to jump off his couch and head to the local store to purchase a specific consumer product, neither is online display advertising meant only for that purpose.
Show the results from this study to your executives next time you need to justify your online display advertising budget. It might make them realize they’ve been very short-sighted in their vision of online advertising success in the past. In fact, staying with that old way of thinking is going to lead to missed opportunities that competitors are more than happy to take from your brand.
Image: stock.xchng
