Corporate Eye

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Archives for March 2009

Burger King Whopper Bar Aims to Redefine the Brand

burger-king-the-kingWhen you think of Burger King, do you think of cheap, greasy, fast food?  Burger King hopes to change that perception with the new BK Whopper Bar where the tagline, “have it your way,” is being taken to a whole new level.

The first of what will become a chain of BK Whopper Bars opened at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida this month (check out the pictures from the Orlando Sentinel theme park blog here).  According to the press release, the new bars are intended to take the “fast food” brand image out and replace it with a more gourmet appeal:

“Elevating the HAVE IT YOUR WAY® brand promise to new heights, the WHOPPER™ Bar restaurant embodies the power of personal choice by offering guests a customizable, premium and indulgent WHOPPER®-based menu.”

But wait, there is more to this brand re-definition than just dressing up the interior ambiance of a traditional Burger King location.  Here is more from the press release: [Read more…] about Burger King Whopper Bar Aims to Redefine the Brand

Places I want to work (Surprise #2)

pearson-lead

Actually, example #2 turns out to be less surprising than #1 (Home Depot), since I have quite a bit more experience in communications than in home improvement. But I was in the publishing industry for several years at the beginning of my career, and wouldn’t intentionally look for an opportunity to return.

So the appeal of Pearson’s site actually was unexpected.  And the site is certainly a complete 180 from the sturdy look-and-feel of Home Depot, with an “employer brand” character that might best be described as beguiling. The tone is direct and sincere, the design is casual (even artless), and the information is simply but adequately presented.

There isn’t a great deal of practical detail, because Pearson is made up of several different components (Pearson Education, Financial Times Group, and Penguin Group) that hire independently. So the parent site focuses on a basic presentation of the company philosophy—and there it has great success.

The key message is stated on the landing page: “We have a simple but ambitious goal: to be the best company to work for in the world, so that our people have the skills to leave, but choose to stay.” Variants of this message are repeated frequently, and are backed up with a sort of detail that is frequently missing in recruitment rhetoric: qualities of the company, and the qualities they are seeking.

Pearson uses words that are not typically found in company self-description. Example: “At the heart of everything we do are three core values: bravery, decency and imagination. These define the culture of our organisation and have always underpinned the way we do business.” Although there are sections on the site that cover the usual matters (benefits, diversity, training, etc.) what comes across most powerfully is the sense that “core values” is not just a bit of jargon, but a real description of their operating philosophy.

Here’s one more quote from a section titled “What we look for in Pearson people.” That’s a very helpful topic to present, I think, and the first item on the list is: “We are in the information business so we expect people to be forward-looking and creative in their thinking. We also assume that they will have a genuine passion for our business.”

And that last sentence actually forms a bridge for my own thinking. One of the strengths I pointed to on the Home Depot site was an image placed squarely in the middle of the Careers landing page—a blackboard with the phrase “What’s your Passion?” written across it in a bold hand.

Not that every Careers site needs to sneak in the word “passion” somewhere! But in both these cases, the idea of passionate engagement is integrated into the messaging (visually in one, verbally in the other), and strengthens an overall impression that the company really cares about making a match that works for both employer and employee.

Delivering a meaningful message won’t overcome lack of functionality or nonsense navigation. But it will make a good site much better.

How to Control and Protect Your Company’s Brand

All PR is good PR, right?

Maybe not.

Anything or any advertisement that brings attention to your business theoretically should be good for business, you would think. Just because your corporation is being talked about in the news because of the financial scandal that it was involved in last week, could be enough attention to bring in a few more customers, right? What about the “questionable” employment practices that your company embraces that got them a court summons to explain said practices – – you would think that the attention from it would be flattering for your company. Not so. No, all PR is not good PR and your company should take measure to protect themselves and their brand in any way or ways possible.

But, is it really even possible to protect your brand and your brand’s image without getting a few nut jobs that could out-do what you’ve worked so hard to mold? Oftentimes, years of hard work and playing by the rules can all be undone with a couple of poor choices and not well-thought out decisions.

The Coke brand was affected in a positive way by two Facebook users who weren’t satisfied with what they were finding on their favorite social networking site in the Coke venue and decided to start their own following…without the express permission from the Coca-Cola executives that is. But, this story has a happy ending as Coke actually embraced their proactive measures and wanted to (of course) capitalize on what the Coke evangelists had started. Although Coke “didn’t want to have anything to do with it directly”, they still worked with the two writers and seemingly didn’t have a problem with what they were doing.

But all stories don’t have such a happy ending.

The Smarties candy company ‘smarted’ about what some young folks were doing with their brand. More specifically, they were smoking smarties. Not so good for the Smarties company and not so good for this type of viral YouTube messaging to be such a popular place on the internet. Things like this is what can give your brand a bad reputation and a bad name. Since you can’t control what people do and other people’s behavior, what can you do to limit the instances that your brand is mentioned in a negative context? What can you do to make sure that your brand gets good PR and leave the negative stuff for losers?

1. Sing praises

No, not to the Almighty, but to your brand. Take all available opportunities to shed positive light on your brand. Whether that’s through the engagement of social networking sites (like the Coca-Cola evangelists) or through your marketing efforts, know that you just cannot say enough good things. A little conceited? Sure but who else is going to do it if you don’t at least spark it.

2. Acknowledge the defectors

Some would say you should ignore them, but I say don’t. People who try and hi-jack your brand (in the sense) are often just vying for attention, almost like children. Like in the case of Smarties smart-pants – – they wanted to show that they could do something that wasn’t right with the Smarties candies. My solution would have been to issue a commercial or even another YouTube message that shows the dangers of teenagers and smoking. Counter-balance the negative attention with a positive spin.

 3. Lower your expectations.

Yes, your brand is wonderful. Yes, your product is amazing. Yes, there is no other business anywhere else who can work magic quite the same as you. But, no matter what, people are people and there’s not a thing that anyone can do to change them. For you to think otherwise or to try and change them is a fruitless effort and can bring on unlimited frustration.

When you protect your brand and control your brand’s exposure, you are not going out and “getting” everyone who dares to speak against it. This can make you look like a marketing bully of sorts. But what you are doing is simply controlling and keeping under control the amount of PR attention, whether negative or positive is in the consumer’s faces. Instead of playing media police, become their friend and work towards the effort instead of against it. It should feel a whole lot better.

Recruiting in the Headlights

AIG Headlines

Few companies have received more negative notoriety in recent months than AIG. Yet on their Careers site, it looks as if nothing in the world has ever happened to disturb the company, or the happy futures of its prospective employees.

Since it’s been reported out loud in many places that AIG has four PR firms at work, in addition to their in-house resources, it seems obvious they are concerned with making the right impression.  And the corporate home page strikes just the right note, with a simple but effective acknowledgement that problems exist and efforts are at work:

AIG home pageThe look is clean and friendly, and the large “Moving Forward” link takes the visitor to a well-spun news page that focuses attention on restructuring.

But click on over to Careers, and it’s like landing in an Oz of flashy graphics and enthusiastic copy:

AIG Careers
The lead line is: “Wherever you are looking for opportunity, AIG is there.” And in view of the recent publicity about AIG (and financial institutions in general), it is difficult not to regard this statement with a certain irony.

Of course it is absolutely right to continue recruiting, even if a company is experiencing difficulties. And it might even be reasonable to try and keep the Careers section in a bubble, if that were possible. But such could only be accomplished with careful attention—which doesn’t appear to have been paid at AIG. If a natural curiosity were to lead the job-seeker to click on the “Our Organization” tab, and then choose “News,” here’s what they would find:

AIG Careers News
The lead line is: “We celebrate the accomplishments of our employees around the globe. Check back frequently to read updated reports of achievements in the office and in the community.”

But the corporate news feed inserted beneath this caption creates a bit of a disconnect, since it’s generally a stream of financial and legal items that are certainly not celebratory, and bear no relationship to employee accomplishments. On the date I checked (3-12-09), the first item was “AIG Issues Series C Preferred to Trust for the Sole Benefit of the U.S. Treasury.”

It’s hard to say what a company should do in AIG’s circumstances.  But I thought it might be worthwhile to look at another approach, so I traveled over to Citigroup, which has been similarly in the headlights.  They may have been in a better position fundamentally, since their Careers site is much more serious (one would even say sober) in design and execution.

Citigroup Careers

Very little copy on the landing page–and nothing that moves! The presentation remains restrained throughout the site, which has considerable depth, and includes a lengthy, realistic-yet-encouraging message from Citi CEO Vikram Pandit. If visitors access “News” from the Careers site, they are taken to the Press Room, where stories are presented completely, and in context—which plays much better than the bad-news headline scroll at AIG.

It’s understandable that revamping the Careers site may not be a top priority at AIG. But some small changes could have made the presentation seem more appropriate. Here again, perception means a lot . . .

And attention is important. A footer on the Careers landing page announces: “Last Updated Date 10/30/2008 9:58:53 AM.” And that just seems too long under the circumstances.

Tattoo Barbie Drives an Online Brand Buzz

Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie is the newest introduction to the Barbie brand product line up – I kid you not.  Mattel claims the tattooed Barbie has been selling well, but the opposite seems to be true if you look at the online buzz.  This month, online conversations have been all over the Internet with parents and consumers questioning the appropriateness of tattoos on a doll targeted to young girls.  They do not believe Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie is right for the Barbie brand.  Mattel has responded by saying the company has no plans to change or discontinue the product.

What do you think?  Does Mattel have a responsibility to develop products with the Barbie brand name that are all appropriate for the primary audience for the brand?  Is it ethical to sell a Barbie-branded doll with totally stylin’ tattoos on it? [Read more…] about Tattoo Barbie Drives an Online Brand Buzz

Does Your IR Yahoo? (Or DMOZ)

Investor Relations can be a detailed, complex service provided within a large multinational organization across language and cultural barriers.  As such, sometimes the basics can slip through the cracks.

For experienced IR professionals, it would be intuitively obvious that anyone looking for “investor relations” at a specific company would either search for the same while using the company’s name, or that one would go to the company’s website and find a link to investor relations from there.

But, what about other potential users?  Perhaps users who don’t realize that what they are looking for would fall under the purview of IR, or those who are not especially familiar with such a concept?  Certainly, such users are not likely become major shareholders anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that the data or information they seek won’t help to shape the opinions of others who might actually be desirable shareholders.  How would they find your information?

Open Directory - Business Major Companies

Are you in there?

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Our pseudo-hypothetical question comes not from hours spent thinking about the possibilities of IR, but rather courtesy of a gathering of adult men around the backdrop of a basketball game that no one was really watching.  For those of you who happen to have not attended an American university with a respectable football (American, not Soccer) team, but a basketball team with a tradition of epic futility, let me assure you that the purpose of the gathering from the first moment was actually to just get a bunch of friends back together in the same room where they could talk.

During this gathering a friend of mine who is both a successful professional and a very intelligent human being, remarked about how he had stopped using a particular company’s products, and that he was working to have the company also banned from the vendors list at his firm based upon the fact that the company in question did significant business with the government in Darfur. What struck me as odd, was that the company in question has a reputation as a rather clean and upstanding corporate citizen.

It turns out that his daughter had done a report for a school project, and that she had used many different sources of information for the project.  Long story, made short, she had misinterpreted an article which listed the company in question as having declined to support a public boycott and thus was listed by the boycott organizers as a “friend” of the government in Darfur.

Three seconds on the company’s website led me to the company’s statement regarding the boycott effort in which it referred to its corporate business and ethics guidelines prohibiting the company from endorsing, engaging in, or contributing to any effort regarding elected officials.  Such a policy is common among multinational companies that don’t want to get dragged into local politics, nor give off any appearance of influencing elections particularly in smaller democracies where such influence might be seen as “buying” government officials.

Though such a policy is not necessarily intended to cover a situation like the one in Darfur, it is nonetheless true that boycotting against government officials would violate the company’s policy.  However, the company did support and endorse various condemnations and calls for action against the events transpiring in Darfur.  In addition, while the company could potentially join a boycott against Sudan, or against other companies that did business therein, it could not take part in a boycott which specifically mentions the government and government officials.  Such a distinction is, not surprisingly, lost on the passionate.

It Is An Island That Cannot Be Found, Except By Those Who Have Already Been There

Captain Jack Sparrow says those words in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean.  At first, it sounds like nonsense, and indeed if one follows the logic all the way back to the beginning it makes it impossible for the first person to have ever been there, but it does suggest a certain truth.  If you know where you are going, it is much easier to get there.

The ethics policy of the company was linked prominently from the Investor Relations page, and a press release stating much of the same was similarly easily available from the page.  So, why didn’t a carefully researched paper turn up such items?

The company in question is one that has a significant brand name in the retail space and thus has a customer focused website using the company name, and another more corporate and operations focused website under a variation of the name.  Having gone to what she assumed was THE company website and found nothing, and also having gotten no response from the inquiry she sent – to the customer service department – the intrepid researcher assumed the company was whitewashing its position by not saying anything, thus their inclusion in the list of bad actors.

Interestingly enough, she found the company site by using the dmoz directory.  The dmoz directory is an open directory project in which human beings catalog and list websites much in the same way that Yahoo used to do (and still does) prior to the ascension of search engines and Google.  As an “open” resource, dmoz is held in high regard in many areas of academics which explains why she started there.

The catch?  The company’s corporate site is not in the directory, likely because it has never been submitted.

All of this adds up to a company that did everything right being dropped from people’s mental list of acceptably behaving enterprises and in doing so, could have cost it millions of dollars in sales either by propagation of the misinformation, or in this case by being dropped from a large organization’s approved vendors list.

IR Best Practices Internet Directories

While this single example will not apply to all companies, of course, the fact remains that there are millions of people who are not familiar with the nuances of corporate websites, ethics policies, investor relations departments and the like.  For them, finding you depends entirely upon luck, unless you put up signs along the road.

No Investor Relations group can control the actions of Google or other search engines, but there is no reason to not have any and all company websites or portals listed in the major web directories, as well as in those that carry some authority for your specific industry.  Often, getting listed is as simple as filling out a form requesting to be listed and then waiting for them to get around to you. (These directories tend to be overwhelmed by submissions.)

In the end, a simple amount of effort could pay off handsomely when the next person or group looking for information finds not only the public face of the company online at thecompany.com proudly declaring its annual sales event, but also the next listing at thecompanycorporation.com and gets their facts straight.