Sometime last week, the Coca-cola company, the world’s largest beverage company unveiled their new corporate website - coca-colacompany.com. Instead of the standard and tired “Brochure Style” website, the new site is more like an online magazine or news publication.
This fresh approach to a large corporate website may just be the trend that continues for years to come as companies look for ways to reconnect and revamp a tired brand story. Despite the obvious advantages of heightened brand interaction, the focus on engaging content is encouraging. Too often, companies get tunnel vision and speak only from the inside out about their stale philosophies, corporate structure and marketing hyperbole. The Coca-Cola company has broken the mold by adding humanistic feature stories, video, opinion pieces, and blog articles that often deal with topics that are beyond just stuffy corporate brochure speak.
This new approach to “content marketing” provides an engaging way to get an inside look at the company’s core, people and brands. It is a shift to a product and company brand becoming a “publisher” as a way to connect with new and existing customers.
While the content marketing approach is certainly exciting, it wouldn’t be a comprehensive solution if the site’s foundation was not tuned for the future as well. As far as the site’s code responsiveness... well, while the site is not TOTALLY responsive, it does recognize and adjust to various monitor sizes, but mostly appears to be optimized for a 1024 x 768 resolution that has a break point for tablets as well. It also has a unique “mobile” experience that is tailored specifically to iphone and other smart phone resolutions. While it would be nice if the site did adapt to desktop browsing experience larger than 1024 wide, the programmers have done a good job of providing the best possible experience for the most number of viewers.
Overall, the new and fresh “content marketing” approach to Coca-Cola’s corporate site is definitely as refreshing as a nice coca-cola on a hot day. Time will tell to see if more companies will jump on the bandwagon and follow step with a renewed emphasis on content as the center to digital communications.
