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Archives for March 2009

Dell Named Leading Green IT Brand

green-factorAccording to a new study called Green Factor (a joint program from Strategic Oxygen and Cohn & Wolfe), IT managers and executives believe that Dell is the greenest brand.  3,500 CIOs, and senior IT managers in 11 countries were given 26 enterprise IT brands to choose from and asked to select the greenest.  Dell captured 30% of the votes.  Hewlett Packard came in second place with 26% of the votes.

The more interesting part of the survey is the criteria that IT professionals used to evaluate companies in terms of their “green-ness.”  According to the survey, IT professionals look for companies that have: [Read more…] about Dell Named Leading Green IT Brand

Energizing Your Brand Through the Media: Act II Popcorn Finds a Way

Act II popcorn has been around for quite some time and perhaps even appears in a lot of our cabinets at home. Their popcorn (in my own opinion) is light, awfully good and buttery and is just perfect for a movie night at  home or with friends. It’s even good with a 52-hour movie stint, something Act 11 did a few years back that caused them to buzz the market and explode with their product.

Act II Popcorn, parent-owned by the Conagra Foods Company, held a movie fest/movie marathon that was used to introduce their newest product into the market. History begins with its predecessor—ACT I, an early microwave popcorn that had to be stored in the refrigerator. In 1984 ACT II, a shelf-stable microwave popcorn, hit the stage. It was the first mass-marketed microwave popcorn. ACT II has brought Americans many firsts since then, including the first flavored microwave popcorn, the first fat-free microwave popcorn, and the first kettle-corn-variety microwave popcorn.

To introduce this concept and product to the consumers, Act II held a movie fest which lasted for approximately 52 hours at the Heights Theatre in Columbia Heights, MN.

Con Agra foods was holding the ACT II popcorn “pop fest” at the Heights, which broke the (then) worlds record of continuous movie watching. The first movie started on Friday Morning at. 9:30AM, and the last movie did not end until 7:00PM on Sunday night.

The participants could have ALL of the popcorn they desired, with 15 minute incremental breaks at designated periods, but NONE of the participants at any time could fall asleep or leave the theatre. They were competing for a Guinness Book of World Records championship. The winners of the movie competition would receive a year’s worth of Act II popcorn free, their faces on specially marked packages and the chance to claim bragging rights in the Guinness Book. And all of this for doing something that really is fun: watching a movie and eating hot-buttered popcorn.

This clever act of advertising, media relations, branding and marketing helped to make Act II a popular popcorn with a hard-to-forget creative branding strategy. Their goal was to embed the image and thought of their product into their customers minds, and create a desire for their product for the next time they’re in the grocery store on the popcorn aisle. Has it happened to you yet? Are you an Act II popcorn eater? Does their marketing strategy work on you?

What was so clever about this campaign is that they involved, heavily involved, the participation of their customers and made it fun for them to interact. The marathon lasted for about three days or so, and was just enough time for the product to create a buzz and gain media attention. (YouTube News)

Conagra Foods actually ran this campaign over a year ago, but the residuals are still evident today. The company is still enjoying profitable increases in their stock with a growing and successful product line. Is is all or partly due to the Act II commercial? Not really of course, but it is branding strategies like this that can help a corporate entity establish themselves as a market leader and a competitive force. Kudos to whomever the advertising executive or committee was who thought of this type of marketing strategy. It did well for the brand!

What kind of creative things can you think of that would explode your brand? Would your company be willing to try anything that would bring them exposure? Is it worth it to them or is it something that is reserved only for the “creative brands?”

Lexus Loses J.D. Power and Associates Dependability Survey Top Spot – Three Brands Take the Lead

Since Lexus hit the luxury vehicle market, the brand has been extremely popular and closely associated with quality and reliability.  Those brand messages were supported year after year (since 1995) when Lexus took the top spot in the J.D. Power & Associates annual ranking of auto brands based on reliability (problems experienced by consumers after three years of ownership).  That is — until 2009.

The newest ratings from J.D. Power & Associates show the Lexus brand not only dropping out of the top spot in terms of reliability but actually dropping to #3.  So which brands stole spots #1 and #2 — Jaguar and Buick, which were up from #10 and #6 in 2008, respectively.  Bet you didn’t expect to see Buick there.  Other brands that followed behind Lexus were Toyota (who owns Lexus), Mercury, Infiniti and Acura.  And which brand came in dead last?  Suzuki.

This J.D. Power & Associates dependability survey rating is for the vehicle brands overall and includes all models under that brand name.  J.D. Power & Associates rates a wide variety of factors related to the automotive industry, and companies often use the ratings in advertising and promotions throughout the year.  Of course, we can assume Lexus won’t be releasing any ads this year that say, “Look — we dropped from 1st to 3rd in the J.D. Power & Associates dependability survey.  Now is the time to buy a Lexus!”  And the new tagline – “Beat by Buick” – now, that has to hurt the brand ego. [Read more…] about Lexus Loses J.D. Power and Associates Dependability Survey Top Spot – Three Brands Take the Lead

Hard Copy Reports from Online IR

For most investor relations departments, the Internet and the company website have been a great addition to the arsenal of tools used to communicate with shareholders, analysts, and the media.  But, for all of the online world’s advantages, there are still some things and some people that are just a little better when they are offline.  Mixing the two is just one of the important challenges IR faces.

Annual Reports Online

Offering the company annual report online has become a no-brainer at many publicly traded companies.  In the past, many investors requesting the annual report really only wanted certain information.  Tailoring a report to each user’s specific needs would have been a regulatory nightmare with the necessary disclaimers likely running as long as the full annual report itself.  So, investors requested the annual report, and IR put them in the mail.  Many trees were lost, and many printers grew wealthy.

Fast forward to today, and investors can generally get any company’s annual report with just a few clicks.  Some companies offer online versions which allow the investor to browse through all of the information online without ever leaving their browser.

Other companies offer their annual reports in a downloadable format such as Adobe PDF.  This solution allows investors to save the file to their computer and then review it at their leisure whether online or off.  Additionally, for users that want hard copy, the pages of interest are just a printer away.  The investor gets the best of both worlds, online reading and electronic tools when wanted, and hard copy printouts for highlighting, note taking, and just easier reading.

No longer must an investor wade through 80 pages to find the 6 pages and 4 tables that they are actually interested in.  No more skilled investor relations professionals spending 3 hours a day in the mail room pasting labels.  No more clear-cut forests, and the sons and daughters of the printers now go to state schools.

But, is something missing?

Hard Copy Reports in the Mail

It is easy, and perhaps unfair, to stereotype the investor who wants a traditional printed annual report mailed to them as older or technologically behind the times.  IR departments still dutifully mail out full hard-copy annual reports to multitudes of shareholders.  But, there are many investors and potential investors who are technologically savvy but, for one reason or another, want to get a printed copy of the annual report in the mail, not a file to download.

For these users, the IR website can accidentally become a fog of semi-confusion.  As they click around the site, they may become more confused as terminology changes, links go to places they did not expect, and the simple question they have, “How do I request an annual report to be mailed to me?” seems to go unanswered.

One frustrated user resorted to posting a comment to an article here on Good Investor Relations Websites, no doubt after arriving via search engine query that apparently did not contain the exact words required to get the answer he wanted.

PG.com - Investing

Ironically, the information the investor wants is very easy to get.  The catch is, that you have to know the difference between what you want and what it is called on the website, and that is where an investor relations team needs to bend over backwards to ensure that everyone can get what they are looking for, regardless of whether or not they speak “IR”.

Consider the household giant Proctor and Gamble.  In many ways, PG could be the poster child for an easy to use informational IR website.  The Investor Relations website is easily found via a prominent link in the main menu across the top of the company’s main page.  The site constrains its width to ensure proper function even with older monitors or small laptops.  The landing page has easy to follow navigation to virtually anything an investor could want, including the Annual Report.

Click the first link (the heading is not clickable) and you’ll find yourself in the online annual report, just as promised.  If you clicked hoping to find a way to a non-online annual report, you are still in luck, but only if you look very closely.
PG-annual-report-online-links

Of course, clicking this link goes straight to downloading the PDF, so depending upon your connection speed and how you have your browser set up, you could be in for a bit of a wait.

There is of course, the archive, and the Financial Report menu and tab, all of which go here.
PG-annual-reports

Again, information galore, but no place to get the hard copy.

Right about now, if you work in IR, or analyze their websites (or other websites), or if you know something about usability studies, or if you are just one of those people who spends a lot of time online, you might be screaming, “There it is!” while pointing at either Contact Us or Request Information.  And, you would be quite right.  In fact, if you pay attention to the bottom status bar, you’ll notice that the “Request Information” link points to a file called annual_report_order.html!

So, yes, there it is, right in front of your face.  That is, if you know what you are looking for.

request-annual-report

Consider the investor who does not spend hours on the Internet.  Perhaps a small business owner running a very successful enterprise which is so successful precisely because he spends 10 hours a day in his shop assisting customers.  After a long day at work he spends time with his family, not online.  When he heads to the PG website — he actually typed www.proctorandgamble.com but that’s ok because the company thoughtfully redirects to PG.com from that domain name – he wants to fill out a form and get a copy of the annual report.  So, why not click Contact?

Many users are used to “contact us” being some bottomless pit email account that is read and responded to by an intern buried within the bowels of the company somewhere underneath the mailroom.  That isn’t where he wants to make his request.  Besides, the whole reason he came online in the first place instead of making a phone call was because he wanted to do it quick and easy at 11:00pm and consider it done.

Best Practices

In the end, the company does everything right.  The PG IR group offers up a smorgasbord of easily accessible and usable information, and yet, just one nuance can put an investor’s objective tantalizing out of reach.

What is an investor relations department to do?

  1. Remember multiple terminology – just because someone who works around investors all day long knows that report and results often mean the same doesn’t mean that everyone does.
  2. Make It Obvious and Then More Obvious – don’t just put “Contact Us” on your site, let people know why to contact you.  An investor FAQ can do wonders.  Anyone looking for info is likely to read a section called Frequently Asked Questions.  Inside, they can find and answer like, “Use the Contact Us link to request any printed materials.”
  3. Link It More Ways – Just because the link is there on the landing page doesn’t mean the same info can’t be linked from more pages.

Keep these concepts in mind, and you can have less confused shareholders every day.

Freshening Up

Spring is here–which encourages thoughts about new growth. So here are some updates and extras relating to previously planted posts, plus two new seedlings.

Following up on Silver Linings, the post about a grassroots employment campaign that took root on Twitter:

  • Job Angels now has a website—minimal, but helpful if you want to pass the story along to others. It contains a brief version of how Job Angels got started, along with links to the various social media implementations of JA.
  • Nice news: The number of Job Angel participants (following and being followed) on Twitter has more than doubled in the month since my original post.
  • In a similar spirit, David Szary at Recruiter Academy offers food for thought about recruiting and life, with a post that starts off by asking “Are we forgetting what we do for a living?”

Recalling three recent posts that took a deep dive into Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work—it was fun to see a segment exploring the list on the CBS News program Sunday Morning for March 15. “In Good Company” focuses on Fortune’s #15, W. L. Gore & Associates. (The “associates” are the employees, every one of them.) If you missed it, it’s not too late to watch!

dan-schorr-21Just after All Atwitter was posted, a delightful segment on National Public Radio program Weekend Edition captured veteran journalist Daniel Schorr (now 92!) discovering Twitter. Schorr—who began his career in 1946 as a foreign correspondent and has covered every noteworthy event since—still appears weekly as a senior news analyst for NPR. And his Twitter following is coming up on 6,000.

And two new items worth taking note of:

  • Job Radio. I won’t lie! I had fun channel-surfing this clever site, which offers assorted audio content about job-seeking, career-building, and more. And while there, I discovered—
  • Jobs in Pods, a product/blog that focuses on “jobcasting.”

(And by the way . . . if you’ve been wondering how things are going for Skittles—no one has yet analyzed the longer-term outcomes of their radical website makeover. But I’ll keep watching!)

Bad news, transparency and the corporate website

It’s not often that my two lives intersect: work and domestic … but late last week they did exactly that.

free-fromAlerted by email from the Food Standards Agency that one of our major supermarket chains had recalled an own-brand product due to a labelling error resulting in a potential allergen risk, I wanted to find out more. The Food Standards Agency site was down (no, probably not because of massive public interest in this particular allergy alert) so I went to the supermarket site.

Nothing. Not in the press release section, nor in the customer-facing sections.

I know this is a very small issue from the supermarket point of view, but the impact on the individual shopper can be significant.

I also know that very many companies would deliberately not post bad news about their product on their own site.

However, many companies have a page in their media section that provides coverage of the company in the papers, which could be good news or bad. A few (very few) companies post information about recalls too. The one that comes to mind instantly is HP, who have a page about recalls and replacement programs.

Since the supermarkets are sending information to the Food Standards Agency to let them know about a product recall, you’d think it would be easy to send the same information to the web team – and an easy job for them to post the information online when it arrived. And it’s not as though the information is secret, either, as the supermarkets usually put this information on posters in the shop, and on the shelves, as well as online at the Food Standards Agency.

Think how you could spin it: Supermarket X keeping you informed about the safety of our products; Supermarket X keeping you healthy and safe; Supermarket X is honest enough to tell you when we make a mistake.

That’s not so very far from the recent announcement from SC Johnson of their new website informing consumers of the ingredients of their cleaning products. Very transparent …