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Archives for 2011

Toyota Takes Title as Biggest Carmaker in 2010

Despite a series of Toyota recalls in the United States in 2009 and 2010 that damaged the Toyota brand (a brand which had long been associated with quality and reliability), Toyota hung on to take the top spot as the world’s largest auto manufacturer of 2010.

However, Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco claims in an article published on the BBC website that selling the most cars in the world is not as important to the company as boosting profits and being number one in customers’ minds in terms of service and satisfaction.

Quality, service and satisfaction have certainly been Toyota brand promises around the world, and despite the Toyota recalls, the brand still owns the word quality in consumers’ minds.  There is simply so much trust and belief in the brand from its loyal followers that even recalls couldn’t keep this brand down.  You can’t buy that kind of brand equity — the kind that can keep a brand at the top despite problems that would destroy another brand.

However, as the BBC reports, Toyota sales are still down in the United States in comparison to previous years, and General Motors is pushing hard in the United States and around the world to regain the title of biggest car maker, which it held for 80 years before relinquishing it to Toyota in 2008.  All eyes are on Asia, specifically China, where General Motors is having great success.  2010 marked the first year that General Motors sold more cars in China than in the United States.

There is a saying that tells us, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”  I can’t help but think of that phrase as I watch the players in the auto manufacturers’ game of chess move around the board.  Who will be the short-term winner?  Who will be the long-term winner?  Only time will tell.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and share your predictions for these brands.

Image: Flickr

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 35: Acquisitions and Divestitures

When you attend a baseball game in the United States, one of the ritualistic sounds that greets you as you enter the ballpark is something along the lines of: “Scorecards! Get your scorecards here! You can’t tell the players without a scorecard!” When you succumb to the vendor’s pitch and get your scorecard, you find that you can understand and follow the game better. The reason I bring this up is that for some companies, you really do need a scorecard to understand the current composition and operations of the company. This is because the operating units that comprise the business today may not be the same as they were two or three years ago.

I am speaking here of companies that regularly engage in the acquisition and divestiture of businesses. Not all companies fall into this category, as many companies grow primarily through organic growth. However if you have ever tried to understand the income and balance sheets of companies that frequently buy and sell parts of their businesses, you know that it is very helpful to have a cheat sheet detailing what occurred when. Otherwise you can find yourself looking at a year when revenues rose 25%, assets grew by 15% and debt took an exponential jump with no clear explanation at hand. It can be a very frustrating experience. For such companies, a listing by year of the major acquisitions and divestitures engaged in by the company can go a long way towards helping the diligent investor understand the company’s past performance. Such a listing can also offer other insights, as it can show the astute investor where the company is choosing to expand and cut back.

There doesn’t seem to be a standard spot for listing companies bought and sold. ENI, the Italian energy company, places their listing within the strategy section, while Tyco chooses to discuss the topic in its history section. Both approaches are set out below. As long as an intelligent investor can find the information, I think that is all we can reasonably ask for.

click images to enlarge

In this series:
Previous post: Video
Next post: First Impressions

Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby Marries Interactive with Ambient Media

For the second time in a week, I’m writing about creative ambient advertising, because I stumbled on another great example.  Like Caribou Coffee, Yahoo! has some unique outdoor advertising going on at bus stops.  Instead of warming people waiting for buses in Minnesota like Caribou Coffee, Yahoo! is pitting 20 bus stops in San Fransisco against each other in a series of interactive games called the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby.

Check out the image below (taken by a team member from PSFK last month) to see what the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby looks like in person.  People are encouraged to upload their own photos to Flickr and tag them with “Bus Stop Derby.”  Tagged photos are displayed on the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby web page.

yaho-bus-stop-derby

You can also view the Yahoo! Bus Derby video below:

Yahoo! installed its Bus Stop Derby touch-screen interactive games on 20 bus shelters around San Fransisco, California.  Players begin by identifying which of those 20 neighborhoods they want to play for.  There are four games to choose from and players can choose to play in head-to-head live matches against players at other bus shelters, or they can play independently.  The Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby launched in November 2010 and is coming to the end of its two-month cycle soon.

The Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby has gotten a lot of publicity during its short two-month life with publications such as Fast Company, Gizmodo, AdWeek’s AdFreak blog, and more writing about it.

The winning neighborhood will get a free concert from the band OK Go who shot to fame thanks to a clever music video which became a viral Web sensation. Below is the video that started it all for OK Go.

Kudos to Yahoo! for coming up with a creative, interactive, and entertaining marketing initiative that is surely just the beginning of this type of interactive outdoor advertising and ambient media.  Hopefully, this marketing campaign will help you think creatively about your own brand advertising and promotions.

Social Media Engagement: 4 Ways to Launch an Effective Campaign

Effective corporate media relations is a multi-step process for any online business who wants to enjoy success and productivity. A successful branding campaign takes time, effort, diligence and careful planning. Corporations don’t build their brands overnight, and nor should social media be expected to sprout in a small matter of time. Many heads of corporate media relations spend the bulk of their time solely on building their brand online and creating a presence. A lot of thought is placed into this effort because they want to maximize their exposure.

How can social media benefit your organization? The main answer you will always hear in response to this question is exposure. The one way that you can drive interest to your product, cause or service is through exposure. With online activities of many organizations becoming the standard, exposure in its basic, pure form is ideal for the corporation to embrace and maximize its usage. Using and maintaining social media is just the beginning of what corporations can use to enhance their online presence.

Ways to Campaign in Social Media

To launch an effective social media campaign, there are four key components that should be implemented for total effectiveness. Try incorporating these into your business model for maximum results and client attraction and retention.

1. Target

Your corporation should identify the target market that they wish to attract. Whether they will attract their audience by using standard marketing efforts or social media engagement must first be decided before any action is taken. Decide which of the many social networking tools works best for what your corporation offers. Is the organization a proponent of education and enlightenment? Or, do they have a hard product that they want to sell direct to customers? Knowing to whom you are selling and marketing can make your target attempts more valuable and more precise.

2. Strategic Placements

What works best for your product or service? How can you better cater to your audience? Developing a systematical, methodical plan of approach is what works best here. Nothing should be done as an aside; careful strategic planning is necessary. Some of the biggest, most productive corporations on the planet have teams of strategists that work especially with target markets and analyzing trends. Although these types of resources may not be available to the average online corporate business, the same principle does apply. Research thoroughly and see what areas are conducive for your product or service. Develop a succinct marketing plan targeting that group and engage them through the most effective acts of social networking.

3. Engage

Use every available avenue of engagement to work with your audience. This includes social networking on standard sites like Facebook and Twitter. A very good article at steinarknutsen.com thoroughly discusses the ways to use corporate social media to drive traffic to your company’s website.

4. Maintain

It is just as important to maintain all forms of social networking once you have implemented the preceding steps. To neglect maintenance essentially undoes everything that has been put into action. Maintenance doesn’t have to be involved or complicated. Simple dedicated attention to the systems that have been put into place should be sufficient.

It may be necessary to tweak those areas that may or may not apply to your organization. Your marketing department director or staff can certainly identify any areas where changes can be made but yet keep the basic principles of the marketing effort. Another excellently written article at The Globe and Mail talks about how to build up and maintain your standing in any social media environment. Involving these basic criteria can have a positive effect on any marketing campaign.

Three tips for communicating CSR on your website

Just before Christmas the Harvard Business Review (HBR) published a quick glance at three companies which had implemented “Better Corporate Philanthropy” and highlighted why these in particular were trailblazers in a new way of doing things.

Intrigued, I wondered how well these companies had communicated their trailblazing attributes through their websites.

Nike : leveraging strategic focus

Too often companies seem to just give money to the nearest, most deserving charity.  One which has always puzzled me has been a certain international airline which picked a South American tribe.  Why?  Well, because they’re an international company you see and this tribe is, well, overseas from corporate HQ; international, foreign.

Five years ago Nike launched The Girl Effect project which aims at introducing and improving living standards and opportunities for adolescent girls worldwide.  Nike looked at their “core competencies in consumer insights and market segmentation” and this is where it led them.

Adam Day, Nike’s Senior Portfolio Manager, explains this in the HBR article: “The focus on adolescent girls is truly authentic to our fundamental belief in the power of human potential”.

And that’s the best explanation I’ve been able to find.

Undoubtedly the strategy of using something you already know about to drive your CSR efforts is darned sensible and if you think about it Nike will know a lot about adolescent girls and releasing their potential (“Just Do It”).

But nowhere is there an explanation of why girls are important to Nike from the strategic point of view, meaning many people will assume they’ve picked the issue out of a hat (well, it’s not that obvious).  A shame if the HBR is right and they really are trailblazers in this regard.

Goldman Sachs: building to scale

It probably goes without saying that the larger the business you are the greater the impact you’re able to have.  However not all businesses are willing to take advantage of their size, preferring instead to do a minimal amount in order to satisfy an obligation they are either irritated by or don’t fully understand

Not so Goldman Sachs, it would appear.  In 2008 they shifted from the usual round of annual grants to (dare I say it?) a more sustainable model of corporate giving and CSR.  This was done by committing $100m over 5 years to a single programme designed to turn promising women entrepreneurs around the world into economic powerhouses within their communities.

The programme is called “10,000 Women” and it delivers a variety of courses to these entrepreneurs from short week-long affairs to more in-depth six-month programmes.

Now $100m isn’t a particularly large amount of money (the company is throwing around over $1bn on other CSR projects).  However what caught the eye of the HBR was the support structure the company had put together in order to deliver this money on the ground, including 43 universities and 30 NGOs in 20 countries.

This is a truly impressive network the company has thrown together, especially as it’s happened in less than two years and has already trained 2,000 aspiring entrepreneurs.

How would you communicate this achievement on your website?  That’s a rather tricky one, but as this is a trailblazer perhaps in the company’s thought leadership section?  It’s not mentioned there and (to be picky for a moment) the whole “Ideas” section of their website seems a little disorganised.

What would be really great to see is this programme published as a Case Study.  It must have taken a lot of hard graft to get the network up and running, especially in such a short amount of time.  I’m sure there are a good set of lessons learned and best practice tips companies of all sizes can use to improve their own CSR programmes.

Intel: measuring outcomes

It is perhaps no surprise that a technology company should be a little more obsessive about statistics than most other companies, or “rigorously numerical” as the executive director of Intel Foundation, Wendy Hawkins, would have it.

So it is that in one of Intel‘s flagship CSR programmes, Intel Teach, the company doesn’t just measure outcomes, but the outcomes of those outcomes: the true impact of their efforts.

Intel Teach is about training teachers in the US and around the world about how to use technology in the classroom.  However they don’t just sling the teachers and equipment out of the door once the training has completed, they go back every year to find out how effectively the training is being implemented in the classroom and whether there are any local conditions which may be impacting its delivery.

In this way Intel is measuring not just how effectively it is delivering these professional development programmes, but also what impact those programmes are having further down the line and whether there are any further obstacles they can use the programmes to overcome within the wider society.

There is an impressive list of case studies, reports and white papers on the Intel Teach webpage, stretching back to 2003.  However, the latest annual survey available appears to be from 2005, which is a little disappointing.

Top Tips

So, taking a lead from these three institutions, here are some top tips for website content you ought to include in your sustainability section:

  • explain how your chosen strategy reflects your company’s core strengths and competencies and isn’t just a charity picked out of a hat
  • show how your strategy uses the resources at your disposal to their very best effect and isn’t just throwing money out of a passing car
  • understand and measure the true impact of your strategy, publish those results and feed them back into the strategy as appropriate
  • This will help both your CSR strategy and your website to be ranked as among of the best in your industry, and perhaps even the world.

Picture Credit: Armstrong 03 courtesy of Nike.

Caribou Coffee Offers Something Extra in Ambient Advertising

Displaying print ads at bus stops isn’t a new form of marketing, but turning those print ads into a complete experience is.  Caribou Coffee did exactly that with the help of Colley+McVoy who turned a Minneapolis bus stop into a toasty oven complete with a ceiling mounted heating element.  Check out the image below.

The campaign’s objective was to spread the word about Caribou Coffee’s new menu items.  By making clever use of the environment to not only raise awareness of new products but also to differentiate them from the competition (by showing an oven heating the menu items rather than a microwave), Colley+McVoy and Caribou Coffee succeeded.  Not only that but people who warmed up in that bus shelter while waiting in the cold Minnesota weather surely appreciated the working heating element!

All in all, this ambient advertising effort is an example of clever and meaningful creative and messaging that works.  I love finding great ambient media examples that enhance the environment and consumers’ experiences with the ad creative and messaging — and ultimately, with the brand.  You can read about a few other ambient media campaigns that I’ve written about here on the Corporate Eye blog by following the links below:

What are your opinions on ambient media?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: AdRants