I admit it. I am a demanding consumer. But, aren't we all? We want everything better, faster, easier, and more personalized than ever before. We want to feel like we're important to the companies we do business with. But why is it that despite every marketing milestone and breakthrough many web experiences often fail to meet our expectations?

Blame company structure or budget or legacy systems or leadership or the weather. But the more you excuse it, the worse it gets.

I've made a career out of studying, advocating for, and creating customer experiences and sharing them with clients, in columns, speeches, a book, and now this blog.

So, forget the excuses. Here you'll find a consumer perspective on what works, what doesn't, who's getting it right, and who's still in the dark.

Straight-forward. Unfiltered. Customer fanaticism.




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March 02, 2009

Skittles Tastes the Social Web

Skittles Skittles rainbow candies (owned by Mars) has given marketers a little more to chew on with its new web site--er, web experiment. Skittles has taken a very bold, very OPEN approach to digital by pretty much swapping its web site for a tidy nav bar that serves as a guidepost to Skittles on the social web.

If you haven't already, you'll see that when you type in Skittles.com the company's homepage is now a Twitter landing. Want to see Skittles' "media" page? It's split between Flickr and YouTube. And if you click on Skittles "friends" it takes you right to the brand's Facebook fan page.

Spend 5 seconds on the Twitter page and you'll see a range of responses from "props to skittles marketing" to things I don't want my kids to read there or on this blog. Sure, they ask you to type in your legit age, but do teens and tweens really abide by that anymore? Is that their demo? I think you'll agree that some people might have Twittered, not because they love the candy (I'll take Starburst any day), but to see their commentary front and center on the homepage. With the speed of Twitter, that might just be their 1/15 of a second of fame.



March 2, 2009 | Permalink | Bookmark

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Comments

Modernista, an ad agency, used a similar approach not too long ago. Check it out:
http://modernista.com/7/index.php

Posted by: Michael | Mar 3, 2009 7:52:02 AM

thanks, michael. i had seen that some time ago...should have referenced it. thanks for the reminder!

Posted by: kelly | Mar 3, 2009 1:24:26 PM

I agree with your assessment of the Twitter page. It makes you wonder what the thought process was at that marketing meeting. "If only there was some way we could associate Skittles with obscene messages and people who regularly use the word 'sucks'."

Posted by: Cris Cohen | Mar 3, 2009 4:20:18 PM

yahoo! thanks guys! we're in the lead...this is amazing...they are tracking all the sales and where they are coming from...it's wild to see social networks in (rapid) action.

Posted by: kelly | Mar 11, 2009 7:38:47 PM

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