The Olympic Games and million-dollar marketing campaigns go hand in hand.
Official sponsors like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s pay mega bucks for the privilege of plastering their logos all over athletes and official Olympics merchandise.
The top 10 list of storytelling brands in the UK usually includes Apple, Cadbury, IKEA and Walkers.
But looking at the annual list from AESOP, it’s Virgin Media that jumps out at me as a storytelling brand that breaks the mould.
Here I round up some of its activity that falls into my nebulous understanding of storytelling.
Let me know if you agree.
With BSkyB publishing its Q1 results today, and Sky’s recent rap on the knuckles after wrongly criticising Virgin Media over its traffic management policies, now seems an appropriate time to put their respective websites to the user experience test.
Similar to my previous post comparing luxury travel sites, here I’ll take a look at the respective media giants’ customer-facing websites in terms of ease of use, functionality, availability of service and how easy is it to find the TV and broadband package you’re looking for.
In the past, it was quite common for people to remain loyal to the first bank they ever opened an account with, opting to stick with it through the bad times and good.
Nowadays however unwavering customer loyalty is seen as rather a quaint relic of yesteryear and we have become a far more savvy lot of consumers. More aware of where better deals lie, we grit our teeth and overcome the administrative challenges that switching any sort of service or utility provider can require.
This switching strategy now includes our once simple TV. Increasingly linked to our communications and Internet, this centrepiece of our living rooms and our Saturday evenings is something that can’t be messed with.
We decided to look at how easy it is to switch between the main providers of paid for TV services – Sky and Virgin Media and asked four customers of each to test the other’s site using whatusersdo.com.