Corporate Eye

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Archives for 2011

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 39: What Makes You Unique?

company profileWhen most people are children, they want to be someone special when they grow up; nobody ever wants to be just another anonymous person. So growing up and even later in life, we all foster a belief in our unique combination of talents and characteristics that make us a special person (at least to our spouses, children and dogs).

And so it is with companies as well. Every company strives to be unique. In business school they give it the fancy name of differentiation, but the concept is clear: your product or service offering needs to stand out from the competition. Even if your product is simply a ‘me too’ offering, there needs to be something that makes it more attractive in some aspect, whether that be price, delivery mechanism or simplicity of use, that will cause the customer to part with their money.

To take this analogy one step further and apply it to investing, if investors can be shown that a company occupies a unique position in the marketplace, they are more likely to understand the underlying investment thesis of the company and buy the stock.

Burberry's Company Profile
click the image to enlarge

Take for example Burberry, the British apparel company. The firm has traditionally been thought of as a manufacturer of traditional trench coats, but more recently has pushed into fashion. How is an investor supposed to think of this?

Burberry addresses this in their corporate profile page, which I’ve set out here. After reading the page, an investor has a pretty good idea of why Burberry thinks of themselves as unique, and how they plan to use that attribute to grow the company.

So the takeaway here is clear: by telling investors why your company is special, you can help them focus on the reasons to own your stock.

In this series:
Previous post: Investment Case
Next post: Key Performance Indicators

Would Your Employees Nominate Your Company for a Best Place to Work Award?

I’ve written about the importance of internal brand advocates and branding from within your organization before on the Corporate Eye blog, and today, I’m going to revisit the topic by asking a question.

Would your employees nominate your company for a best place to work award?

Each year, various organizations hold “best companies to work for” awards programs.  Advertising Age published a call for nominees for its own Best Places to Work award earlier this month.  Do your employees believe in your company and your brand promise enough to nominate your company for such an award?  If your answer to that question is no, then you need to invest more time into building internal brand advocates.

If your employees don’t feel good about your company and believe your brand promise, then why should customers?  The answer is simple.  Customers won’t believe.

Your employees should be your first source for positive word-of-mouth marketing.  They can be your strongest brand advocates and most vocal brand guardians.

Not sure what internal brand advocates look like?  Spend some time on the Zappos corporate site.  Watch the videos, read about the Zappos culture and core values.  You’ll learn very quickly what people who believe in their company and brand promise look like, sound like, and are capable of in terms of brand advocacy.

The next question is whether or not you can do it in your organization, too.  Remember, internal brand advocacy comes from the top.  Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh walks the walk and talks the talk when it comes to the Zappos brand promise, and Zappos employees believe.  If your leaders don’t buy it, then your employees won’t buy it.  And that means customers won’t buy it either.

Image: stock.xchng

Eni : A Leader in CSR Websites

It’s not often I look at websites outside the UK … partially because it’s always difficult to mash CSR language through a translator, and partially because Corporate Eye’s core market is UK based.

However the Italian oil and gas supplier Eni has caught my eye several times.  Their online reputation is, quite simply, massive.

Other Corporate Eye bloggers have written enthusiastically about their Corporate Governance and Investor Relations and the company’s CSR site regularly wins plaudits from Lundquist, an Italian website benchmark consultancy along the same lines as Corporate Eye.

Now the website has also come second in Lundquist’s online branding analysis for Italian companies (Pirelli came first).

So what is it about the six-legged, fire-breathing dog which makes them such a colossus in the online world, and why is their CSR site in particular such a hit?

[Read more…] about Eni : A Leader in CSR Websites

Social Networking Accounts for 20% of Australians’ Time Online

Last week, I wrote a post on Corporate Eye about the increasing use of social networking among consumers in China.  This week, I’ll take a look at social networking usage rates in Australia where research by comScore reports that 1 in every 5 minutes spent online in Australia is spent on social networking sites.

In fact, social networking is the top online activity among Australian Internet users based on time spent on various online activities as the following data shows us:

  • Social networking: 21.9% of online time
  • Portals: 19.7% of online time
  • Instant messengers: 11.6% of online time
  • Entertainment: 11.1% of online time
  • Email: 5.9% of online time
  • Games: 3.2% of online time
  • News/information: 3.0% of online time
  • Search/navigation: 2.8% of online time
  • Auctions: 2.4% of online time
  • Community: 2.1% of online time

Facebook was the top site in Australia based on the amount of time Internet users spent on the site, but Microsoft and Google took the top two spots, respectively, for the most visits (Facebook came in third for most visits).

Clearly, the popularity of social networks, particularly Facebook, is not isolated to one part of the world.  Internet users around the world are spending a significant amount of time on social networking sites.  It makes sense that your brand should be there, too.  The days of thinking, “my customers aren’t online and don’t use sites like Facebook,” are over.

What do you think?

Image: stock.xchng

Truffling out a Diamond in Better Cotton

Like a diamond in the rough, you only come across those most precious of websites through digging around and having an open mind.

Actually I’ve always preferred the image of a pig digging around for truffles, but a) pigs don’t have a particularly good press, despite being a highly intelligent and social creatures; and b) truffles have nowhere near the kudos diamonds have. Ah, such is the way public perceptions drive our lives!

However, if you want a diamond (or truffle) of a sustainability website, you should have a look at the website for The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI).

It doesn’t matter that this is an NGO’s website rather than a commercial organisation’s.  How it has its information organised and presented is what matters, and BCI excels at this.

For starters, the homepage is wonderfully straightforward.

“The Better Cotton Initiative exists to make global cotton production better for the people who produce it, better for the environment it grows in and better for the sector’s future”.

These are the only words on the homepage, and I doubt any proponent of sustainability could put it any more succinctly. [Read more…] about Truffling out a Diamond in Better Cotton

Old Spice Continues to Entertain and Drive Social Media Buzz

I’ve been thinking about writing a post about the newest Old Spice Guy commercial for several days.  Yesterday, I found an article on Advertising Age about that newest commercial that includes some interesting statistics which support the post I was planning, so here goes my take on it.

The Old Spice Guy commercials have been very successful in making an old brand that many people associated with their grandfathers into a brand that younger generations are actually pausing to consider.  Both male and female audiences are talking about the Old Spice Guy commercials with the newest commercial (and my favorite so far) getting 3.4 million views on YouTube in the first week that it was released.  You can view it below.

One of the things that keeps the Old Spice Guy commercials alive is the company’s willingness to give up control of their content.  When an Old Spice Guy commercial is uploaded to YouTube, people use clips to create their own videos.  They talk about the commercials, share them, and make them their own.  That’s a brand manager’s dream come true.  However, giving up control of a brand isn’t something that most large companies are willing to do yet.  The Old Spice success is a perfect example of how the power of the social web can drive brand buzz, but unless a company is willing to lose control to a certain extent, that buzz potential is very limited.

It’s still unknown whether or not the Old Spice Guy commercials are actually driving sales, but those metrics are more important when it comes to tracking actual advertising performance.  When it comes to tracking social media marketing success, brand conversations and sharing are far more important and indicative of an initiative’s performance in terms of building brand value, creating brand advocates, and generating word-of-mouth marketing.

Based on the number of social web views of the most recent ad (previous ads each generated over 2 million views online within the first week after their releases), Old Spice is definitely benefiting from a strong social media buzz generated by the ads.  The question is whether or not the company can sustain that buzz, deliver on the brand’s promise, and meet consumer expectations for the brand again and again.  Only then will that buzz turn into long-term, sustainable growth for the brand and business.

What do you think?  Will the Old Spice Guy commercials have a long-term positive impact on the Old Spice brand and business?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.