UPS delivers its brand online in 21 different languages across more than 100 countries, overcoming communications challenges all the way.
Robert Manning is director of interactive communications at UPS, where he manages the online component of its truly global branding process. iMedia Connection spoke with Manning about how online plays a role in branding Big Brown.
iMedia Connection: What are the most significant roles online plays in building and expanding your brand?
Manning: For us it’s about our brand tenets: reliability, efficiency and operational excellence. The Web site, UPS.com, is a very functional, transactional site, and I think it plays very well into those tenets. There’s over 7 million tracking decisions through the UPS tracking tool, so those are things that add significant equity to the overall brand statement.
iMedia Connection: What can’t online do, despite what everyone would like to believe?
Manning: Our biggest struggle right now is that our Web site was conceived and delivered not exactly in accordance with our brand in the marketplace. We’re more than a shipping company; we’re about synchronized commerce and supply-chain management solutions and those sorts of things. We have an online presence for those things, but they’re not really married together in any type of holistic fashion at UPS.com, and that’s really our flagship entity. It delivers a tremendous functional experience in terms of printing shipping labels and tracking packages and so forth. But we have a lot of work to do to catch up the Web site to what the brand is promising in the marketplace. So I think that’s one area where we have room for improvement.
In general, companies have different needs—a consumer products company probably can go faster to market in the online space; it depends on the complexity of your back-end systems and your applications. For UPS, we’re sort of different. I think companies are doing a good job of delivering value online, and rather than just marketing fluff or brochureware. The medium has grown up a lot in the last few years. Companies are paying more attention to their return on investment for the channel and are requiring people to be really strategic and clear about what direction they’re heading online, and I think that’s helped from a business standpoint. Companies deliver a better online experience overall. I still think we have some work to do in terms of delivering the overall promise of the channel in terms of customer relationships, CRM, one-on-one marketing and those sorts of things. From my point of view, those success stories are few and far between, so that may be the ultimate promise of the channel, and there’s still a lot of work to be done overall.
iMedia Connection: How does online fit in with the rest of your marketing efforts? Does it stand-alone or do you take an integrated approach?
Manning: We are pretty integrated. The interesting thing about my department, Interactive Communications, is that we report up to Brand Management and Customer Communications. So ultimately we are a development partner with the IS organization, but we report to the Customer Communications group, so we work very closely with them to coordinate marketing initiatives and communication launches and make sure that our online work is on point with the offline work that’s being executed. Overall the company sees a tremendous amount of value in the online channel, so the trend here is that we want to be even more integrated. I think there’s a tremendous momentum towards that type of work.
iMedia Connection: What has been your biggest online success—alone or as part of a larger campaign or promotion?
Manning: Last year we relaunched UPS.com under a new look and feel, a new navigation system with a content management system in place, so that was a tremendous project and a pretty great accomplishment. The redesign and relaunch of UPS.com, in all, is 104 different country sites all together in 21 different languages, so it’s a pretty big cross-functional effort.
iMedia Connection: Does being a multi-country and multi-language site pose particular issues?
Manning: Like a lot of companies, knowledge management. We report to communications, and a challenge that we face is sharing knowledge among communications professionals, both here in the United States and abroad. We have platforms and processes in place to achieve that, but because the organization is so vast and so spread out, that’s an ongoing challenge—sharing pertinent information and research and key messages among the communications professionals worldwide.
iMedia Connection: What’s your biggest online frustration or challenge?
Manning: I guess one area we’d like to improve is speed to market, being able to publish relevant information, marketing content as fast as we can and improving different workflow and processes to make that happen. It’s possible. It’s enabled through the content management system we manage, but sometimes it doesn’t happen as fast as we would like.
iMedia Connection: What do you have to spend time convincing management that online can or can’t do?
Manning: I think, overall, UPS management is very well bought in to the online channel. They don’t need very much convincing. It’s around prioritization of different initiatives, I’d say. For example, how quickly we evolve certain online applications versus maybe looking at integrating things more to the core Web site. From an overall buy-in perspective, senior management at UPS is very much onboard with the value of the channel, but prioritization is sometimes where we have our debates.
iMedia Connection: Are you having to do more or less educating internally about online than last year?
Manning: Because we’re such a large company and we work in a very complicated cross-functional environment, sometimes there’s training on the tenets of user-centered design or the online customer experience, and we’ve seen a lot of progress in that area. We’re very pleased with the fact that people are more fluent with the lingo, so to speak, but there’s still some work to go there because different groups have different backgrounds.
iMedia Connection: What one thing would you like agencies to “get” about your needs and your business? Or, what one thing would make the client/agency relationship better?
Manning: I guess for a company like UPS it’s a very complicated sell. You’ve got different groups—sometimes there’s overlap, sometimes there’s not. Really getting to understand the details around the UPS business proposition, key business drivers, the strategic direction of the company… Some things that make sense for other companies, like doing a far reaching online advertising campaign, don’t make a lot of tactical strategic sense for a company like UPS, and it may make sense for a B2C company very much. If you’re selling automobiles, at the end of the day that type of campaign may make a lot of sense, but our sell is more B2B focused. Especially when we talk about supply chain solutions, it’s much more of a relationship sell, so I would say that it’s really about understanding what our challenges are and our paying points and key business drivers are, and that’s different from company to company. But just because it may be a great strategic fit for one company doesn’t make it so for an organization like UPS.
iMedia Connection: What’s the next big thing online and how will you use it?
Manning: Cross-channel integration is huge, and looking at how customers engage UPS either through sales person, through an IVR system, through retail—we have a huge retail network through the UPS Store now—through the Web channel, through other forms of communications—understanding more of a heuristic evaluation cross-channel of how customers engage us. I think what we use in terms of heuristic understanding—the best practices around user-centered design for the Web channel—it sort of migrates to the other channels as well and you get that holistic view of the customer that everyone’s been talking about for a number of years. I think that’s really the holy grail or the end game here, and once companies can do a better job at that, they’re going to have a tighter integration between channels so it’s more consistent.