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Archives for August 2010

Brand Museums and Factories Become Popular Tourist Destinations

There are few companies in the world that have such powerful brands that the brand and all of the tangible elements of its history can be turned into a museum which people around the world actually want to visit.  Similarly, there are factories that power brands which are strong enough to draw visitors from around the world.  Today’s post highlights several of those branded museums and factories that have become popular tourist destinations.

1. The World of Coca-Cola

At the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, Georgia visitors can taste Coca-Cola products from around the world, see a real bottling line, buy Coke merchandise, and more.

2. Hershey Museum and Chocolate World

Okay, Hershey’s makes chocolate, so there are some perks to visiting the Hershey Museum and factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania, including free chocolate.  And the Hershey’s theme park helps, too.

hersheys-factory-tour

3. Ben & Jerry’s Factory

Again, it’s hard to resist ice cream, but the Ben & Jerry’s Factory tour in Waterbury, Vermont is popular not just for the ice cream.  The unique flavors that make the Ben & Jerry’s brand famous take center stage in this tour and visitors love it.

ben-and-jerrys-factory-tour

4. The Henry Ford Museum and Ford Factory Tour

Visitors to Dearborn, Michigan can tour the Ford Rouge Factory and visit the Henry Ford Museum which is filled with history and pieces of Americana.  The trip can also include a visit to Henry Ford’s hometown, the historic Greenfield Village, as well as the Henry Ford Research Center.

ford-factory-tour

5. Ferrari World Abu Dhabi Theme Park

There is already a Ferrari museum featuring all the cool cars you can imagine in Italy, but coming in October 2010, Abu Dhabi will be the home of the new Ferrari World Theme Park complete with displays, driving experiences in real cars and on a real track, and the world’s fastest roller coaster.

ferrari-theme-park

What do you think?  Have you visited a brand museum or factory?  Is your brand powerful enough to be a museum?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 24: Let Investors See What You’ve Been Talking About

I was recently doing some research on company presentations and so I went out to the Internet to look for good examples of that staple of corporate communications, the PowerPoint slide show. If you go to investor conferences, almost every presenting company will accompany its speech with a slide deck illustrating their main points. As any investor can tell you, the slides are often full of very useful information. So when I wanted to look at how companies approached a particular communications issue, I thought it would be a relatively easy thing to go out and pull up the presentations of the various companies and analyze what I was interested in.

Xstrata Presentations

As so often proves to be the case these days, my initial presumption was incorrect. It’s not quite so easy to go out on the Internet and find a representative sample of corporate investor presentations. In fact, what I found was quite surprising: in a random sample of 20 U. S. companies, only five companies (25%) posted their investor presentations (excluding quarterly presentations).

This seems like a serious oversight. It’s not as if the companies don’t want to make the information public – it’s already been placed in the public domain at a conference. It doesn’t seem rational that company management would wish to limit the dissemination of the information on the slides only to those attending the investor conference where they were originally shown. I prefer to think that it is more likely to be oversight.

So here’s today’s thought for making your investor website more effective: place a history of your most recent investor presentations at investor conferences on your website. Not everyone can attend the conferences that you present at, yet this is information that you clearly think investors should know, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the slide deck. So let everybody see them. And keep them there for a while, as they serve as a good reference point to company operations and thinking at any particular point in time.

Above is a good example of a complete history of presentations placed in their investor section by Xstrata, the mining company.

This is a relatively simple thing to do and it helps investor transparency. It should be part of every well designed investor site.

In this series:
Previous post: Strategy
Next post: Presentations

Branded YouTube Channels to Benchmark

There are a lot of brands on YouTube, and many of the companies behind those brands have created branded YouTube channels where consumers can view video content related to those brands.  Sometimes the content is informative, sometimes it’s entertaining, and sometimes it’s promotional.  The following branded YouTube channels are included in this list of branded YouTube channels to benchmark not for the content of their videos but rather for the design and use of brand identifying elements in that design to make the channel unique and representative of the brand promise.

1. Disney Parks YouTube Channel

The Disney Parks YouTube channel includes the colors and graphics you’d expect from the world’s most popular family vacation destination, but it’s included in this list for the great use of links in the top navigation bar and the design of those links that make it very clear where visitors will go if they click on them.  These are the destinations you’d expect visitors to be most interested in going to after viewing the Disney Parks’ video content.

youtube-channel-disney-parks

2. Kraft Foods YouTube Channel

The Kraft Foods YouTube channel is included on this list because of the two navigation bars of links at the top of the page, which take visitors to a variety of useful information.  Also, the content in the Kraft Foods videos is incredibly useful and includes recipes, cooking demonstrations, and more, all of which are appropriate matches to the Kraft brand promise.

youtube-channel-kraft-foods

3. Old Spice YouTube Channel

The Old Spice YouTube channel is included in this list for one reason — excellent use of a viral and hot marketing campaign to draw viewers, recognition, and conversations.

youtube-channel-old-spice

4. Verizon Wireless

The Verizon Wireless YouTube channel is included in this list for its great use of the brand’s color palette and the fact that the channel highlights a product that is currently very popular — the Droid.  The link in the top right corner of the page gives visitors access to more product details.  Also, visitors can scroll down the page and view videos by category rather than simply browsing through them by date as most YouTube channels are set up.  This is a great way to deliver relevant content to specific segments of Verizon Wireless’ broader audience.

youtube-channel-verizon-wireless

5. Harley Davidson

The Harley Davidson YouTube channel is included in this list for its visually appealing link graphics in the page header as well as for the use of the categorized video slider features that enables visitors to self-select the types of videos they’re interested in before they even scroll down further to see the more traditional YouTube channel layout and features.

youtube-channel-harley-davidson

6. Pepsi Refresh

The Pepsi Refresh campaign is very popular, and the Pepsi Refresh YouTube channel is included in this list for its seamless integration with the overall campaign as well as the great use of color and graphics that are very recognizable for the Pepsi brand.  Also, the YouTube channel is a great example of one that encourages comments, conversations, sharing, and subscriptions as part of Pepsi’s larger social media marketing initiatives.

youtube-channel-pepsi-refresh

What branded YouTube channels do you think are good enough to be benchmarked?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

New Study Shows BP Still the Bad Guys in Consumers’ Minds

bp-signI’ve written about studies related to the BP brand and consumer opinions related to BP since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that happened earlier this year — first about how BP tried to rebuild its reputation in May and then again in June about how BP’s brand image was faring after the spill could not be stopped for weeks and weeks.  Then in July, I wrote about how consumers didn’t trust more brands than just BP, which might have given BP some hope in terms of repairing its tarnished brand (even though the oil spill had yet to be cleaned up — months after it first happened).  Well, it’s August, so I guess it’s time for what has become my monthly post about the BP brand.

This month, results from an August poll conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications revealed that 66% of respondents disapproved (40% disapproved “strongly”), “of the way BP is handling the oil spill that was caused by the rig it was operating in the Gulf of Mexico.”  That’s down from the 83% who disapproved in a June poll, but it’s still far from giving BP any peace of mind that the oil spill is behind them yet even if that oil is no longer gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Other brands have rebounded from similar events (Exxon comes to mind quickly), and it’s likely BP will rise again.  However, the brand clean up will continue indefinitely just like the Gulf of Mexico clean up will.  Fortunately, no one at BP had to die as a result of the event — something that can’t be said for wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico.

The public is fickle and consumers are quick to move on from one event to another.  BP is lucky in that regard.  Of course, only time will tell if BP will actually turn around its practices, launch a new brand promise, and then actually walk the walk of that new brand promise.

What do you think?  Will consumers trust BP again or will they expect smoke and mirrors from the brand and company?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Flickr

Creative Ambient Media for Local Retailer Works

When Romtelecom (the largest telecommunications company in Romania) needed to tell local customers that one of its brick-and-mortar stores moved to a new location, they turned to Graffiti BBDO out of Bucharest, Romania to help them spread the word.  The creative team at Graffiti BBDO decided to make use of a nearby intersection to not just spread the word locally but also cause an online conversation that gave the business a boost from all directions.

Check out the video below which tells the creative story and shows how this clever bit of ambient media grabbed the attention of people on the street and around the world.

The goal for Romtelecom was simply to ensure the local store didn’t lose business after its move, but this creative ambient media got people talking about the brand.  In other words, it achieved far more than its original objective by creating a conversation and word-of-mouth marketing that reached a larger audience via the social web and brought the brand in front of more people than a few signs and local ads ever could achieve on their own.

What do you think?  Are you (or should I say, is your leadership) brave enough to use creative ambient media like Romtelecom?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

4 out of 5 Consumers Verify Product Recommendations Online Before Purchasing

internet-universeA new study of U.S. consumers from Cone LLC called the 2010 Cone Online Influence Trend Tracker reveals some interesting statistics about consumers’ dependence on word-of-mouth marketing and recommendations.  As you might expect from your own purchasing behaviors, four out of five consumers go online to verify product recommendations friends, colleagues, family, and acquaintances give them offline.

The Cone report found that 81% of survey respondents said they go online to verify product recommendations.  The breakdown of what they do when the go online is as follows:

  • Researching product/service information = 61%
  • Reading user reviews = 55%
  • Searching ratings websites = 43%

The Internet gives people more access to information than ever, and having that kind of access at their fingertips has changed the way people make purchase decisions.  The Cone research also found that 77% of respondents claim to be more likely to purchase a product that has been recommended to them if they can find additional recommendations online.

Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the Internet has become a source for product research and recommendation verification not just for high-ticket items but also for lower priced items.  However, as you might expect, the research also found that people are more likely to search for additional recommendations for products they plan to own for a long time.

Following are some more specific results related to the types of products consumers seek additional information and recommendations about online:

  • Low cost: 72% of Americans would go online to do additional research about recommended movies or restaurants
  • Moderate cost: 85% would go online to do additional research about recommended computer equipment
  • High cost: 82% would go online to do additional research about a recommended car

The part of this study that marketers and brand managers need to be aware of is the fact that managing online brand reputation is absolutely critical to business in the 21st century.  Furthermore, consumer product research is no longer limited to comparing products and learning about features and pricing.  Today, consumer product research also encompasses reading opinions from people around the world, which can occur very late in the purchase decision-making process.  Marketers need to make sure the right kind of information is available online to help consumers make final purchase decisions, and marketers need to make sure that information is easy to find amid the cluttered Internet landscape.  As the Cone research shows, consumers are looking.

Image: stock.xchng