Analysis of www.Smirnoff.com
Multimedia-Downloadables
There is a shockwave site, which can be accessed via Planet Smirnoff and pure illusion. The shockware takes about twelve minutes to download but the results are well worth the wait. What happens next is akin to a virtual interactive cartoon where the viewer visits this cool trendy nightclub which is frequented by trendy, good-looking characters. There is the resident DJ's room called 'Funk Parlour' where you have a chance to become 'King of Kewl' where the DJ asks you questions about TV and music associated with the 70s and 80s. There is also the 'Meltdown' room, which is a chilling out area with ambient relaxing colours plus a bright sun, which gradually sets thus give a really calm feeling. There is also the resident raver who comes out with comments like "this reminds me of Ibiza in'92" and "I'm buzzin' like a bee, dancing like a nutter".
Then we have the psychedelic and funky barman (with shades) who offers you Smirnoff. You also get a chance to chat up a 'bloke' or a 'babe' depending on your preferences. I found this site extremely impressive with the colors and graphics cool, beautiful, funky and appealing to the 26-35 year old age group. The interactive chat and vocabulary was very 'FHM-ish' or ' Loaded-ish' with plenty of nightclubbing slang e.g. 'cool man','phone ya mom, tell her your not coming home tonite''or ''do I make you horny'.
Smirnoff are obviously trying to attract this age group as there are references to Ibiza in '92, B.A. Barraccus from the A-Team and The Muppet Show. It is this generation that are into new types of media, the techno-clubbing sophisticated culture and who also would have enough money to buy Smirnoff. The burning question is whether I would buy Smirnoff in a nightclub? Uncertain, but I would definitely think twice about being associated with the brand name as the multi-media interaction made me feel that this product was cool and trendy and would be associated with hip, happy, chique yuppies.
Advertising for Advertising
The HTML source of the web site contains keywords which Smirnoff have included so that if a name is entered into a search engine and is anyway related to Smirnoff, then smirnoff.com will be included on the results table from the search engine. This can be viewed by pressing view and then source. Inside smirnoff.com some interesting words were included. Along with the obvious words like drinks, alcohol, cocktails, vodka, etc. there was 'James Bond, 007, tomorrow never dies, dating, anniversaries, weddings. Therefore if 007 was typed into a search engine Smirnoff would be included somewhere along the results page.
In the 'Pure Illusion' site which is the downloadable flash site where graphics, colours and vocabulary are cool and funky, the source includes keywords like 'city grooves, drum 'n bass, clubbing', excitement. Smirnoff are obviously trying to advertise to key demographic groups by using the Internet to target specific groups. (See bibliography for HTML source) In the ' Message in a Bottle" section you can send a postcard to a friend. When they receive this postcard in the form of an email, two browser windows open. The 1st is the flashy Smirnoff postcard along with the message from the sender. When you close this down the 2nd browser window that opens is the homepage for smirnoff.com. Therefore by sending a postcard to your friend you are effectively pointing him/her directly to smirnoff.com which is an excellent way of direct marketing and direct advertising.
Navigation Structure
The Navigation Structure has good and bad points: The good are that rarely on any on page does one have to scroll down too far, if at all. This is obviously dependent aswell on the size of the browser screen. Also, on every single page there is a frame on the left-hand side. This means that no matter how deep you go into any particular area you can leave it immediately and enter another section. This is a lot easier than just going 'back' all the time. The pop up boxes are extremely useful, as they are small and user friendly. By having the pop up boxes it allows people the choice of clicking on exactly what they want to view thus each page is small and not clogged up with realms and realms of information. The bad points are that by having the frame on the left hand side, it means that to read all the information on the right hand side you must scroll across to the right which to me seems more frustrating than scrolling downwards. In the 'Film and Fashion 'section it is the links to James Bond and the Smirnoff International Fashion awards are tiny and do not seem to be links.
Affinity Groups
The Smirnoff site has no affinity groups or no membership clubs that would help viewers attached to the site and more importantly the product. However it is clear that they are attempting to associate it themselves with three different groups of society.
1) The 25-36 year old yuppie that has loads of money and likes to view themselves as very trendy and very hip.
2) 007/James Bond - Smirnoff vodka has been the chosen drink for all 18 Bond films. No 007 film is complete without the leading actor mentioning those famous words to the barman: "Vodka Martini- Shaken not stirred". James Bond is associated with beautiful looking women, fast cars, saving the world from destruction and similar themes. People who drink Smirnoff will in some way want to be associated with the exploits of Pierce Brosnan, Roger Moore and Sean Connery and will feel that by drinking the product they will in some way be replicating their on screen exploits.
3) Smirnoff have been associated with the fashion world for since 1985 and have sponsored the 'Smirnoff International Fashion Awards' quite successfully. Once again they are targeting the suave and sophisticated amongst us in society and this years design brief is called 'Liberation' where entrants are asked to liberate their minds from all constraints and to look at the inspiration that surrounds them.
Contact Us
Smirnoff employ two tactics on the site to encourage those viewing the web page to contact them. For a company like Smirnoff, i.e. a world famous established brand name the focus is predominantly to get users more involved with the product through a sense of being involved with the Internet site. They utilise a simple Contact us icon (which was incidentally down for the greater part of last week) through viewers can contact Smirnoff with contacts, ideas or suggestions on the site or with the product. The copy reads "(Contact us about)….. the web site the recipes or anything else to improve your enjoyment of our products".
Ideally a company should be responding to each e-mail immediately at least with a thank you or appreciation or confirmation of receipt note. On this area Smirnoff fail miserably and even a tangential contact message to their webmaster in regard to the connection failure was returned with a sending failure notice. It appears that Smirnoff are reliant on other methods of receiving customer information. This particular, most obvious method could be particularly advantageous, however if given a little more priority than it obviously receives at the moment.
Frequently Updated Content
When used as an advertising / information tool for a product such as vodka it is imperative that the web page is not static or unchanging. If the Smirnoff Company wish to attract their customers or potential customers back repeatedly to the site then they need to offer some incentive. The consumer will visit www.smirnoff.com, view it and never return, unless their attention is focused on returning for a particular reason. One of the icons on the homepage and at the side of the other pages is the todays drink logo. This encourages people to revisit the site for new and interesting ideas on how to serve Smirnoff.
Through each day, lies a link to a different drink, 365 in all. On the bottom left of each of these pages lies a link to a theme for that day. On Saturday 4th March 2000, the drink was a "Strawberry Cascade" and the theme was a tennis party with all whites and strawberries and cream and of course Smirnoff cocktails like the Strawberry Cascade. This was the theme due to it being the anniversary of the admission of professional players to Wimbledon for the first time, in 1968, an event, which is also described. This is an interesting ploy, to a point. It may attract previous viewers of the site back at a time when they may be holding a party or simply exploring new ways to drink Smirnoff. It is not however the most brilliantly conceived idea that the Internet has ever produced and falls down on a number of points.
The very concept is a little thin and one dimensional, even a little cheap. Granted they display 365 different cocktail varieties and 365 different themes, but any member of the public could just as easily garner the same information (catalogued as it is in countless tomes) in any library or bookshop or elsewhere on line. The concept is impersonal and does not call for any commitment to relationship or any roll over curiosity on the viewers behalf. In fact it seems merely to serve as an aside or adjunct, with little emphasis paid to its promotional possibilities.
Online Sales
It's all at Planet Smirnoff, though the transactions carried out could not fully be described as a sale in the conventional sense of the word. The drawbacks for the non-US resident Smirnoff drinker are that the web site does not sell them anything. If however you do reside in Uncle Sam country, you can amass points from Smirnoff packaging, which when collected can be exchanged for something from the Smirnoff store such as an ice bucket, a log carrier, a bar-b-Que. set or a set of Smirnoff glasses. One also has an opportunity to win prizes such as a vodka martini set, t-shirts and Smirnoff International Fashion Awards apparel.
This however is little more than a crude exercise in gathering names and e-mail addresses for their database. A fast perusal of the Smirnoff site will tell anyone that they are concentrating on selling vodka only!
Pointers To Other Sites
The general trend in web navigation is for sites to hyperlink, which involves connecting to other web sites. While this can have drawbacks as one is always at the risk of losing customers to another area, and even this can be minimised by careful selection of linkages, if the process is well designed then it can attract even more viewers to the site to begin.
Throughout most of the site, Smirnoff have decided to be a dedicated isolated site rather than a quasi search engine. The current facts available may bear out a semblance or sense in this option. According to the Enterprise Ireland Site www.openup.ie "web users are less and less likely to click from banner advertisements (on another site) through to your web site with a current click through rate of 0.5%". They suggest that this proves online banner advertising to be ineffective unless specifically targeted. Smirnoff only use hyper-linking in one section, though the most impressive section -pure illusion.
As you wander through the excellent graphics and explore the bars and nightclubs of pure illusion, you are presented with an opportunity to chill out and break by clicking on to other sites. The magazines FHM and Vogue as well as Sky max and a specialist D.J. site all are options - these sites obviously having been vetted to ensure compatibility with the online Smirnoff drinker to provide that person with complementary value. The language used in the Illusion section would be especially consistent with the language, phraseology, themes and content type used in the sites that one can enter off it, providing a sense of streamlined, seamless, value added presentation.