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Archives for July 2009

Toyota Scion Unleashes Brand Manifesto

scion-toyotaIf you’re releasing something called a “brand manifesto”, then it better be good.  It better be unique, incredible, and downright jaw-dropping.  Last week, Toyota’s Scion brand released what it refers to as its own brand manifesto.  Unfortunately, it’s neither unique nor incredible, and it’s definitely not jaw-dropping. Instead, the Scion brand manifesto delivers a message that brands targeting young consumers rely on all the time – “we’re cool and we don’t conform.”

I’m not saying the new Scion ads using the messages of the brand manifesto aren’t good.  I’m sure they’ll appeal to some of Scion’s target audience.  All I’m saying is not to declare “brand manifesto” when it’s really just a new ad campaign.  If you’re going to go so far as to brand your brand message, then dare to be different just like the Scion brand manifesto claims but doesn’t deliver on.  It’s a missed opportunity that leaves the audience feeling let down, which is never a good thing.

The lesson to learn is this — don’t set consumer expectations that you can’t live up to.  A brand manifesto is something I’d expect to see from a revitalization attempt by a company like Microsoft, not Toyota.  I didn’t know Toyota was that desperate yet.  In other words, don’t exaggerate and don’t try to make your brand be more than what it really is.  I’m sure the Scion target audience of the youngest car buyers aren’t impressed by the announcement of a Scion brand manifesto.

I will give Scion props for including an online element to the campaign, although that effort leaves much to be desired considering the target audience.  For example, consumers could visit ScionReveal.com where they could reveal 10-pixels of a 1-million pixel image each day until they saw the complete photo of the Scion up for grabs in a sweepstakes.  Or they could visit a second site where, according to Brandweek, they could “turn their own manifestos into videos.”

What do you think?  Is the $18 million investment by Scion in media in 2008 and the $7 million invested through May 2009 working?  What would you do differently?  Leave a comment and help get the conversation going here on Corporate Eye.

Image: Flickr

From A to Z: Will Amazon Zap Zappos?

a-to-z-headline-2

Names say a lot.  “Amazon” is the name of a really big river and “Zappos” (even though it’s actually a derivation of zapatos, the Spanish word for shoes) has the flavor of a comic strip exclamation.  Zap-wow!

Or it could sound like “zippy”–which certainly captures the brand personality of scrappy little Zappos, the company that took a whimsical idea like buying shoes online and turned it into a retail charm offensive.  Zappos has become a marketing star by virtue of its quirky style and wide-open spigot of corporate communications.

For an example of the latter, just see this pages-long memo on the recent acquisition, which promises that the Zappos culture won’t change.  And if you need a refresher on the Zappos culture, just check out their famous Core Values, or visit Fun & A Little Weird!, “The Inside Zappos Blog.”

It’s hard to believe there won’t be some culture effects at Zappos when the river rolls in, but that remains to be seen.  In the meantime, let’s take a look at their respective approaches to recruiting.

Zappos:

zappos-jobs

And Amazon:

amazon-jobs

Let’s look again!

a-and-z-comparison

That may not need much commenting, but just in case . . .

Both use similar color schemes (the always-safe “blue plus bright”) and a grid layout.  But there the similarities end.  The Zappos page is full of energy and playfulness, the Amazon page is full of–well, it’s not full of anything.  In fact it’s rather empty, from a visual standpoint.  (I didn’t show the full screen proportion, but there is even more white space to the right.)  And from a content standpoint, there’s no information (really, none)–just labels.

Okay, there’s a paragraph of text.  But I would describe it as empty of content.  There are 71 words, and 8 of them are “day.”  The 71 words are divided into 8 sentences, all but one containing the word “day.”  Here’s an example:  “And your day to join a company that redefines itself every day.”  And here’s another:  “It’s your day to be a part of something great.”

This dogged repetition might have seemed rhythmic if chanted, but it really doesn’t work well as a passive block of text on a white page.  It actually reminds the reader of something robotic–and while that might connect up with Amazon’s great approach to automation, I don’t think that was the intent.

Back at Zappos, there’s not much text either (56 words in 2 long sentences, plus three exhortatory fragments).  But it’s definitely not robotic.  And it delivers a focused message:  Zappos is not an ordinary company and it’s fun to work here.

Whereas . . . the message I took away from the Amazon page was “No one cares about this message (or this page) very much.”

To be fair, the goal at Amazon may have been to create a pleasant, professional appearance and tone, with a clean look and feel–and there may be reason to think that would work effectively in terms of its target audience and employer brand.   But the Amazon tagline is actually very similar to Zappos (at Zappos it’s “Work Hard. Play Hard. All the time!” and at Amazon, it’s “Work hard. Have fun. Make history.”), so we have to ask:  Which site delivers that message more successfully?

And two final points:  The Zappos page has social media links, the Amazon page does not.  The Zappos page has a video, the Amazon page does not.  Inevitable impression?  Zappos is on top of the times, while Amazon is lingering a bit behind.

Let’s see what happens when the waters rise.


Websites Offering Business Management Tools

Maybe you landed a new job or got transferred to another unit in your company and you need to “”bone up” on management tools. You could read some books but you don’t have the time. Once again websites come to your aid.   My first suggestions are websites offered by two of the largest management consulting companies — Bain & Company, and Booz & Co.

Bain

Let’s say you need to learn more about such items as the Balanced Scorecard or Customer segmentation. Go to Bain’s Management Tools to find an overview of these tools and more —

Note the menu of tools and articles. You don’t have to register, Bain makes the tools freely available. OK maybe this is a promotional technique, but it does develop good will. Thanks Bain.

(As always, click on the images to expand them.)

Next Booz & Co. offers some interactive tools. Not as many as Bain but more comprehensive —

Booz

Note the topics are on target for the current business environment. These tools are well done, something you would expect from Booz. They are easy and fun to use. The Working Capital Profiler allows you to test various scenarios and immediately portrays the results. As with Bain, no registration needed and no ads. Kudos to both firms for offering useful tools.

Need to understand the three primary financial reports: income statement, balance sheet and cash flow? Go to New York based Baruch College’s “Guide To Financial Statements” for a 45 minute tutorial. OK, this will not make you a CPA but you will at least understand the basics.

SkyMark

Back to comprehensive. A vey comprehensive offering of management methods is offered by SkyMark, a software and consulting firm.

A bit more designed to get you to use their products and services but still well done. Note the wide menu of references. Good job SkyMark.

Need more? Try UK based BusinessBalls. Be careful, this one is loaded with information.

Now go to that new job or assignment with confidence.

Does It Matter Who Gets to the Future First?

you-are-here

To put the title question another way–if the tools and skills (and website) you have now are getting the job done, do you need to be panting after the “next new thing”?

Back in 2003, Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media coined the term “Web 2.0” to distinguish the interactive, social-media-driven Internet we have all become familiar with from the static, document-driven Internet now known as “Web 1.0.”  And soon after, “Web 3.0” began to be described as an evolution that would be:

  • Artificially intelligent (that is, able to “think” meaningfully, rather than just shuffle facts)
  • Semantic (with data organized so well that machines don’t need much human intervention to figure things out)
  • Virtual (looking more like a “real” world rather than the familiar text-and-graphics version we see now)
  • Ubiquitous (with lots of integrated devices, platforms and media that operate together seamlessly)

But subsequent developments have complicated that early projection of a smarter, sleeker web.  For one thing, it appears that most people don’t particularly care about entering a visually virtualized world online.  Once the new wears off, the experience is just not worth the cost of development and the overhead placed on desktop processing.  For another thing, there’s now so much useless and redundant data choking the web that organizing it has evolved into an entirely different kind of problem.  And beyond that–we’re already awash in ubiquity.  Think iPhone.  Think wifi.  Think Twitter . . .

Does anyone really want more??

So Web 3.0 has become more of a marketing label than a technology vision, used to hype concepts like cloud computing, products like bing and twine, and an array of start-ups, expos, conferences, etc.   Meanwhile, the cognoscenti have moved on to other ways of talking about the future of computing and the role of the Internet.  (You can get a feel for this sort of speculation at sites like Tetherless World and The Singularity Institute.)

In more practical terms, however . . . what’s really crucial for the near future is a shift from working with key “words” to key “relationships.”  And that brings us back to recruiting and the next new thing.

As a recent commenter (on the KSAs post) pointed out here, the whole process of online recruiting today is disproportionately driven by keywords.  Here’s a true (and truly absurd) example:  When my resume–which includes experience in data warehousing–was public, I regularly received job offers for warehouse jobs.  The forklift kind, not the business intelligence kind.  And I’m sure that if recruiters were looking on LinkedIn for dock workers, I’d probably still be getting notified of such “opportunities.”

So the answer to today’s title question is:  You bet.

Whoever first gets hold of a tool that will find and read resumes in context for meaningful relationships will get to the best employees fastest and make the best hires in their industry.  That tool–at least in my fantasy–will:

  • Scour the web for passive candidates and sift through gazillions of applicant submissions in a twinkling
  • Create “candidate portfolios” that include profiles of their social media presence; summaries of past positions and employers in terms of relevance; evaluations of writing and organization in the resume/cover letter; plus much more
  • Bring to your desktop the cream of the prospect crop, with all the tools your need for personalized candidate communications, and
  • Provide a big-picture presentation of the entire candidate pool (with source breakout), as well as a statistical analysis of all the candidates and their rankings, flagging outliers (candidates with potential value that might not be recognized on the basis of standard parameters) and recommending improvements for future searches

Vendors: Write in if you have this tool.

(Thanks to chokola for the evocative photo.  FYI, the particular “here” in the photo is Williamsburg, NY.)


Twittering Investor Relations

Twitter keeps tweeting, should IR be listening?

The business community has been intuitively skeptical of Twitter’s possible utility to companies since it’s inception.  The list of reasons that Twitter would be useless to most businesses isn’t short.

The allowable message size is too small.  What could anyone possibly say in just 140 characters that would be of any value?  Users are primarily younger, technologically savvy teens, and twenty-somethings who don’t like to be “harassed” by the corporate world, and who wouldn’t have any money anyway except for movies, music, and cars. There is no way to monitor and manage the inevitable replies to any message posted by the company.

And, then there is that terminology.  Can a serious company really be expected to care if its tweets are re-tweeted on Twitter?  The list goes on.

This post is Part 2 in our series.  Get Part 1 here: Investor Relations Twitter Difficulties

For Investor Relations groups, the list is even longer.  There is no ability to include any form of disclosure in a message that is just 140 characters.  Regulatory agencies haven’t given any clear guidance on what is or is not permissible to be discussed on an open forum like Twitter.  People using Twitter aren’t the kind of people who invest in stocks anyway.  Do Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Miller, or Bill Gross tweet on Twitter?  Of course, not.

With a compelling list of business reasons stacked against any serious company using Twitter, why would any Investor Relations department even consider making Twitter part of their communications arsenal?

Perhaps it is because of the media’s incessant coverage of all things Twitter such as the breathless headline where AdAge claims Twitter’s news coverage is worth $48 million each month.  Perhaps it is because of attention grabbing publicity stunts like Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN for 1 million Twitter followers (Kutcher won), or Oprah Winfrey’s arrival as a celebrity Twitter tweeter.  Perhaps the idea of a full-fledged company blog seems like too much, but surely, anyone could handle 140 characters at a time.  Or, perhaps, the official corporate blog has proven itself to be a wide ranging success and something like Twitter seems like a good way to expand on that success.  Of all the possible reasons, perhaps none is more true than simply being worried about falling behind while competitors with a head start race off to good fortunes.

Whatever the reason, IR is coming under increasing pressure both internally and externally to address the runaway train that is Twitter.  Senior executives want to know what the Twitter strategy is.  Investor advocates are vocal about getting vital information to the “little guy” on Twitter and not just to high-floor number Wall Street analysts at industry events and on conference calls. Formally developing a solid, fact-based response to these concerns whether positive or negative is fast becoming a top priority for IR departments.  If you haven’t been asked about what you and the company plan to do about Twitter yet, you will soon.

Is That Tweet Official?

One of the biggest difficulties in understanding just what companies are actively involved in Twitter is getting a handle on just who is and isn’t running an official corporate Twitter profile.  Just because there is a Twitter account at twitter.com/BigCoolCompany doesn’t mean that it is related to Big Cool Company at all. It may be someone who has no connection to the company and just likes to talk about it, for better or worse.

Often, official looking Twitter accounts are actually just the personal accounts of a company’s employees.   The catch is that it can be somewhat less than clear under what circumstances these employees are tweeting under.

All the same, just because a Twitter account isn’t twitter.com/BigCoolCompany doesn’t mean it is NOT the official company Twitter account, like ebayinkblog (more below). Or, do you see where the Corporate Eye Twitter account goes?

corporate-eye-twitter-account

Some Twitters have the company’s explicit permission to post on Twitter, but are not endorsed by the company, meaning any postings are the employee’s opinion and responsibility and not the company’s.  Meanwhile, some twitter users have either no permission from their employer, or that permission is implicit, meaning that not only are their tweets not the official position of the company, they aren’t even acknowledged by the company.

Corporations Tweeting on Twitter

learning-studying-together One of the high profile Twittering companies lately is eBay.  The online auctioneer started a corporate blog in April 2008 and within a couple of months, corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay was tweeting on Twitter as well.  The Twitter profile is called ebayinkblog, which at first blush may make it seem to be an unofficial Twitter account.  However, the “Bio” section of the account clearly states its position as, “The Twitter feed for the official eBay corporate blog…” which is called eBay Ink.

A recent Wall Street Journal article notes how once tweets containing information about quarterly earnings and other financial info began appearing, eBay’s attorney’s showed up and required regulatory disclaimers on some of the tweets.  If even a technology savvy Internet based corporation like eBay seems nervous about what goes up on Twitter, what does that say about the chances of a useful IR Twitter account at other companies?

Actually, it turns out the answer isn’t as clear as it might appear.  While eBay does have an official, active Twitter account, other technology giants do not.  Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Oracle, Google, EMC, Texas Instruments, and Amazon all have corporate Twitter accounts.  There are dozens of IBMers who have Twitter accounts, though there is no official IBM account.  Likewise, there is no official Intel Twitter profile, despite how close twitter.com/Intel comes to looking like it is.

Just because a company has a Twitter account doesn’t mean that they do anything with it other than sending out customer offers, responding to customer complaints (usually from other Twitter users), and promoting marketing events.  Indeed, EMC VP Chuck Hollis notes in his social media blog (as opposed to his “day job” blog, both hosted at emc.com) that many companies do nothing more with their Twitter accounts than re-post a one-line with links to press releases.

However, Mr. Hollis goes on to note the vast potential of social media sites like Twitter.  If this company bigwig gets it, maybe that fear about your competitors taking off and leaving you in the dust isn’t so far fetched after all.

Investor Relations Twitter Beginning Strategy Steps

Without a clear cut path to point to, what should the savvy IR Department group do?

First, make a list of your direct competitors.  Twitter is not a zero sum game.  Your competitors do not have to lose for you to win and vice versa.  However, the world of Twitter is just too big to try and monitor everyone, so start with a short list of your closest competitors.

Monitor what they do with the official Twitter accounts if they have one.  Pay particular attention to what they do and do not tweet regarding things like financials, analyst meetings, conference calls, regulatory findings and so on.

Next, start Tweeting; not as a company official, but as a private citizen.  Use your name or a pseudonym, but leave out your connection to your employer.  You want to be able to practice your tweets.  There is a whole world of etiquette and terminology to learn.  It’s best to do that as Joe Public instead of as the official spokesperson of Big Cool Company.

Search out friends, family, and coworkers, then follow them.  Read their tweets.  Pay particular attention to what they “re-tweet.”  Also, watch what, if anything, they blast from other Twitter users.  What is considered spam, or rude, or newbie mistakes.  Then, start making your own tweets and see what the response is like.

Once you have your feet wet, it is time to make a more in depth analysis about Twitter’s possible future at your company, particularly on the IR Website.

Next up: How To Use Twitter Power for Investor Relations

Grab the Investor Relations RSS Feed to keep up with our whole Twitter analysis.

Rebranding a Landmark — Chicago’s Sears Tower is No More

sears_tower_chicagoIt’s not everyday that a national landmark is rebranded, but in the U.S. where everything and anything has a price tag, that’s exactly what happened last week when the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois became the Willis Tower.  The new name comes from Willis Group Holdings, an insurance company headquartered in London that is leasing space in the Sears Tower (according to the BBC, Sears vacated the building in 1992 but the name has remained until now).

It’s always difficult for people to accept the rebranding of a landmark.  Even sports stadiums that are rebranded when a new company becomes the primary sponsor can be a difficult transition for consumers to accept.  However, in time, most of the rebranding backlash typically subsides as consumers lose their attachment to the previous brand name.  Truth be told, as far as venue branding goes, the brand name usually has very little to do with the experiences that happen inside of the building.  When it comes to stadiums and arenas, the same teams still play inside and the same types of music and entertainment groups still visit for performances.  The only thing that really changes is the name outside the building.  In other words, companies try to brand well-known buildings, stadiums, etc. to keep their brands top of mind, but the branding efforts typically lose their effectiveness over time.

My guess is that the rebranding of the Sears Tower in Chicago will leave many people upset and longing for better times in general — and better times in the past included the Sears Tower, not the Willis Tower.  Ultimately though, this too shall pass, and the Willis Tower will continue to exist.  Will people start referring to the Sears Tower as the Willis Tower anytime soon?  It’s unlikely because the building is ingrained in our lives as the Sears Tower.  It’s a habit that Willis Group Holdings needs to try to break if they want to benefit from the rebranding in the short term, and consumer habits are hard to break.

I also think that the transition would be easier and would happen faster if a well-known, popular brand had purchased naming rights to the Sears Tower.  When an unknown brand enters the picture and takes over, consumers are highly likely to resist.  Again, it goes back to the comfort and security issues that are innate for most consumers.

What do you think?

Image: Flickr