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Archives for 2009

Beer and Comfort Foods Top Consumer Satisfaction Index

hersheysThe quarterly American Customer Satisfaction Index was released this week and the economy is clearly still having a significant effect on consumers’ feelings about products and brands.  Some of the top categories in the study are:

  • Soft drink companies with a score of 85 out of 100.
  • Beer manufacturers with a score of 84 out of 100.
  • Food companies with a score of 83 out of 100 (candy and chocolate companies ranked highest in this category).

It’s not surprising that during difficult economic times, people turn to comfort foods and brands, as well as alcohol.  These are fairly common behaviors, and food, soft drink and beer companies are likely to capitalize on those behaviors.  The question is whether or not the high satisfaction numbers will continue when the economy eventually recovers.

On the flip side, cigarette manufacturers saw a 7.7% drop in satisfaction scores from the previous year to just 72.  It’s suggested that the drop is directly related to higher taxes imposed by the U.S. government on tobacco products, and it’s unlikely those taxes are going to change anytime soon.  Truth be told, I think there are far more factors that caused the satisfaction index to drop for cigarette manufacturers, but this post is neither the time nor place to debate smoking.

Looking at these statistics one might say, “okay, Americans are fat drunks who are mad that cigarettes cost so much — not a big revelation.”  Perhaps there is some truth in that statement, but is that so wrong?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to drink a Diet Coke and eat a candy bar.

Image: Flickr

Billerud: Corporate Message in Clear Packaging

As part of a research project into the websites of packaging companies, I came across Billerud’s corporate website.

billerud-home-page
Click image to enlarge

Billerud is smaller than many of the companies whose sites I usually study, but there are many excellent features nonetheless.

The first thing that I noticed was the copy.

The home page is a fairly typical corporate-style box-based site with teasers to lower level pages, but the main focus of the page is on a particular product, with a focus box highlighting images of the new product, and marketing-type language rather than a more corporate style…

“Think smooth, round and natural shapes.
Think striking and creative.
Think environmentally friendly and sustainable”

This is sufficiently different that it stands out from the norm, and the language used elsewhere on the site is also interesting. For example, on the Environment page, the company has chosen to explain why their industry is both important and responsible in ‘layman’ language:

The Swedish forests are expanding at a record rate. Since 1945, they have increased almost 50 per cent. At the same time, every year it has been possible to extract more and more timber from the Swedish forests. The Swedish forest industry replants more forest than it fells, and for every tree felled, 2-4 new ones are planted. We are thus not running out of wood.

And on the products pages:

Containerboard is one of the world’s most used packaging materials. It is strong, durable, lightweight, environment-friendly and cost-effective, which makes it perfect for everything from strong, stiff and impact-resistant transport packaging to smart-looking consumer packaging featuring advanced printing. It’s a fact that 90% of all consumer goods are packed in containerboard cases at some stage during transportation.

Billerud’s containerboard, both the corrugated middle layer (fluting) and the outer layer (lining), is made of 100% primary fibre. That ensures a clean and very strong paper used in the most demanding applications. When there are extra requirements for strength, purity, hygiene and good printing, Billerud’s liner and fluting make an excellent choice.

This kind of language doesn’t use jargon, will be easily understood by most visitors (12.58 on the Gunning Fog Index for all the Billerud text quoted here), explains the benefits of the product, the significance of the industry and reiterates the environmental benefits as well – an important feature for this industry. And it appears trustworthy and authentic.

Why can’t all corporate sites be written this clearly?

Now, this site is clearly multi-purpose, in that it is targeting purchasers as well as the more corporate visitor, but it isn’t just the product pages that are easy to read. A quick look at the Corporate Governance section (usually the most difficult part of a corporate site to read) shows that the links to the usual Terms of Reference documents are rephrased as ‘Work Instructions’. And in the Careers section:

Our attitude to each other and to our environment is characterised by respect, openness and reliability.

Openness, respect and innovation lie at the heart of all activities performed by Billerud. Everything we do must also be of the best quality, and that applies not only for our products but also for external contacts and the work we do internally, such as training, promoting health and safety and working for the environment.

A clear statement of the corporate expectations of their staff, with no corporate jargon. Did you notice the repeated mention of the environment? It clearly matters to this company – enough to be a significant part of their corporate messaging.

This is a multi-purpose site, so the copy has to serve as sales copy as well as corporate copy; which makes me wonder why we usually expect corporate copy to be different from sales copy. Obviously there are topics on the corporate site that have to convey numeric data, need to be conveyed in an objective manner, and which have to comply and conform to various expectations. But wouldn’t it be nicer to read a corporate site if as much as possible was written in a friendly open fashion, as this is?

I also wonder if the fact that English is the second language for the site (there are a couple of slightly odd phrasings – ‘actors in the industry’ rather than the more usual ‘players’, for example, though perhaps this is intentional) has made it easier for the writer to avoid falling into the corporate language trap.

I’ll be interested to know what you think; do you like the style of the Billerud site? Do you find it easy to read?

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 7: Financial Information

The lifeblood of all good investors is financial information. It is difficult, if not impossible, to make a reasoned judgment about a company’s future prospects unless you have analyzed its past performance. For this reason, it is my opinion that effective investor web sites need easily accessible financial information. Not information that is squirreled away in the press release or the latest regulatory filing, but financial information that stands alone and, at the least, summarizes the company’s key operating numbers. There are a number of ways to approach this data and I will highlight a couple that I think are well done.

EADS Key Financial Data

First, the aerospace company EADS does a good job setting out summary financial information under the heading “Key Figures”. As you can see below, the company has extracted summary information from the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements and some other important data into a single page to provide investors with a quick overview. EADS also does several other interesting things on the page. They provide a link to an interactive chart generator (more about that in another post), they allow you to drill down into quarterly data for each year by clicking on the year at the head of the column, and a link on the side leads you to segment information. All in all, this is a very efficient presentation of key financial information.

ENI financial data

The Italian energy company, ENI takes this approach one step further by providing eight different sets of data for the interested investor to browse through and even provides the ability to download all the data in Excel spreadsheet format. My only objection to the information is that ENI makes it difficult to find, tucking it away in a section they label “Main Data”. But once you’re there, it’s all that a data geek investor could ask for, laid out on a single page.

In this series:
Previous post: Eye candy for stock charts
Next post: Provide context

Obama and the Revitalization of Brand USA

obama_hope_posterIn the fifth annual Country Brand Index report released by FutureBrand, where countries are ranked similarly to how retail brands are ranked, the United States took the top spot for the first time.  The index is determined using survey results from approximately 3,000 business and leisure travelers from nine countries.

According to the results of the study, the United States took the top spot in the following areas:

  • The place most people want to visit whether for the first time or again.
  • The place most people want to do business with.
  • The ideal place for shopping.
  • The ideal place to find quality products.

According to the study, the boost in sentiment toward Brand USA can be attributed largely to President Barack Obama thanks to his inclusive brand strategy, global messages and global popularity.  According to FutureBrand, it’s the ‘Obama Effect’.

The top 10 countries in the 2009 Country Brand Index are:

  1. United States
  2. Canada
  3. Australia
  4. New Zealand
  5. France
  6. Italy
  7. Japan
  8. Britain
  9. Germany
  10. Spain

Another interesting piece of information found in the report tells us that the United Arab Emirates, China, Vietnam, Croatia, South Africa, and India are poised to become major tourist destinations in the next five years.

It’s interesting to look at countries as brands, similar to retail brands.  Not only do the brand images of countries affect industries like travel, but they also affect politics and business. In fact, it could be argued that when it comes to branding, politics and business are extremely similar.

What do you think?

Image: Flickr

Notes from a Disappointing Webinar

I can’t figure this one out.  I attended a webinar featuring a panel of people who ought to have been interesting, talking about a topic that ought to have been interesting.  I came away with nothing.

Couldn’t tell you what it was supposed to be about.  Can’t imagine what they thought they were communicating.  Have to wonder whether I’m just dense, or whether other attendees felt the same way.

Here are some observations prompted by the experience, along with some points of relevance for Careers and the corporate website:

1. The whole webinar concept was really popular for a while, but has somewhat petered out.  That may be because most of them were not very good.

Which is a reminder that executing well is the key to success.  Doing the “latest thing” has little value if you don’t do it well.  (Let’s think Twitter . . . )

2. Speaking of execution, presenters should never read out loud what is on the slides.  NEVER.  Doesn’t everyone know that by now?  (Actually this point isn’t really relevant, but I just had to say it.)

3. People with alluring resumes don’t necessarily make good panelists.  In fact they may be too charmed with themselves to bother about the audience.

Which is a reminder to focus on substance first, style second.  Ideally the two go together, but the order of priority is important.

4. If there’s a purpose for getting panelists together, you shouldn’t need to spend time on ice-breaker questions.  (“How many of you have . . . ?”)  Take off fast with crisp, specific questions that draw out the panel’s expertise!

Which is a reminder that the Careers home page should be sharp and engaging, not just a landscape of illustrated links.

5. Even if the audience is sitting at their desks, probably multi-tasking while you’re talking, they’ve bothered to show up, so they deserve the best show you can put on.  (By golly!)

Which is a reminder that every visitor to the Careers site should go away feeling they got something worthwhile.  Every single one.

6. Although it’s the right strategy to educate rather than sell in a webinar—you still need to provide some kind of value proposition.  Don’t expect the audience to search out their own meaning from an hour of random chat.

Which is a reminder to provide a clear message about the employer brand, not just an aura of implication.  There’s a lot of territory between “heavy-handed” and “terminally vague,” so find a good spot somewhere in the middle.

That’s a wrap!  Thanks for listening.

Recovery: Get Ready for the Wild Ride


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In many countries, cities, and industries, the “economic recovery”—with its inevitable hiring spree—may still seem like a distant notion.  But the fact that some things are hard to imagine is one of the reasons we are sometimes surprised.

So I was fascinated by a group of stories on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition recently.  Let’s start:

In Las Vegas. It’s a busy time at the soon-to-open CityCenter complex, where thousands of hospitality workers are being outfitted for their new positions.  Their jobs are among 12,000 created so far by CityCenter.  The lucky 12,000 were culled from 170,000 applicants—and that kind of hiring offensive must require a small army of people to locate, process, equip and orient the new employees.  To say nothing of an industrial-strength website.  Like everything developed by MGM, CityCenter Careers is a seduction in itself, so drop by—and don’t skip the intro.

From a recovery perspective, however . . . hold on for the whiplash.  Completion of CityCenter means 9,000 construction jobs are ending—and with new building projects still far between in most cities, it won’t be easy to absorb that capacity.  On the other hand:

To Poland! Eastern Europe has had a lot of experience already with economic rebuilding, which was not a simple matter after decades of Communist rule.  Poland is one of the happy stories there, however.  We learn that “Strong internal consumer spending has helped insulate the country from the worst effects of the global financial crisis. Poland remains the only country in Europe with positive growth in the second quarter this year.”

And then there’s huge, complicated . . .

China, where:  “The global recession threw some 20 million migrant laborers out of work.” Many of these workers had migrated from the populous and primarily rural interior of China to the coastal cities, where jobs have been more plentiful.  But now many of those unable to remain employed on the coast are going back to their inland homes.

Here’s the twist.  Some returning migrants are using their experience to open new businesses.  And some coastal companies are following incentives into the interior.  “All this has helped make labor a sellers market,” according to the report. Xiang Wenbo, who recently established an association of labor recruiters in Wanzhou, says “We’re now suffering shortages of workers here.  Even though we’re a big labor-exporting region, economic growth is speeding up and local firms need more new hires. Our fees for introducing employees to companies have gone up steeply.”

So?

The moral is that sudden growth in hiring can come about for a variety of reasons—and they are not necessarily predictable. Or even logical.  Above we have three flavors of surprise:

  • Did it make sense to go ahead with a megaventure like CityCenter during such gloomy times?  No telling yet.  But who knows what plans are afoot in the boardrooms of big companies at this moment.  And it’s not likely that executives will consult with HR before deciding to launch some improbably (yet labor-intensive) initiative.
  • Poland’s prosperity is in many respects the result of decisions made during the 1990s, now bearing fruit.  There are plenty of companies around the world where good ideas and patient planning are spring-loaded in the background–so a relatively slight trigger could produce explosive growth.
  • When labor demand exceeds supply all of a sudden, the cost of hiring goes up—whether in China, Manchester, or Chicago.  Planning ahead can help reduce this effect.

Big takeaway:  Be ready.


(Thanks to ishrona for the colorful carousel.)