Wal-Mart Revamping PR Tools
Last updated Thursday, April 27, 2006 6:31 PM CDT in Business
By Anita French
The Morning News
CORRECTION: Rockfish Interactive, which is handling the design of walmartfacts.com, is based in Northwest Arkansas. Its name and location were incorrect in this story.
Executives with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. kept stressing during the company's recent media conference that the world's largest retailer is always changing.
As if to prove the point, Wal-Mart made much of the revamping of its information Web site, walmartfacts.com, during the conference.
Less fanfare was given to the company's demotion of a more familiar figure, the yellow Smiley face Wal-Mart has been using in its ads for 10 years.
But contrary to some reports, Wal-Mart is not dropping Smiley, said company spokeswoman Gail Lavielle. Smiley just won't be as "dominant as he used to be," she said.
"We don't intend to drop it. We're just using many other things at the same time. We've broadened our message somewhat," she said.
Wal-Mart has been using Smiley in its price-rollback campaign since 1996, company spokeswoman Sharon Weber said last year. Wal-Mart became so identified with the smiley face that several businesses sold a Pez candy dispenser with the face on top as the "Wal-Mart Pez."
But Wal-Mart critics also seized on the image for their anti-Wal-Mart campaigns, often giving Smiley a frown in their ads.
Several people have claimed to have invented the original smiley face, but most reliable sources say Harvey R. Ball of Worcester, Mass., is the true inventor. According to smileycollector.com, a Web site devoted to the icon, Ball, co-owner of an advertising and public relations firm, designed the happy smiley face in 1963 to boost the morale of workers in two recently merged insurance companies.
Wal-Mart's marketing chief John Fleming told the Wall Street Journal that Smiley was a "character that we dressed up, and we have tried to move from that to an emotion, a feeling. We'll see how it goes and evaluate it."
Meanwhile, the company will debut its new walmartfacts.com Web site in late summer, said spokesman Kevin Thornton. Set up a year ago to counter what the company said was false information circulated about Wal-Mart, this is the Web site's first complete makeover.
"The feedback we received indicated users wanted to quickly find information about our company. With Wal-Mart becoming a more transparent company, a vast amount of information was made available on walmartfacts.com," Thornton said. "Thus, the challenge for us is to find an even better way to present this information, and that will be the main focus of the new design."
Kenny Tomlin of Rockfish Group, the Maine consulting firm handling the Web site redesign, said at Wal-Mart's media conference that journalists had complained that the site was "seven to eight clicks deep" when it came to finding information. Tomlin's group hopes to change that to "one or two clicks," he said.
"We want to take walmartfacts.com to the next level," Thornton said. "This means having a Web site that is designed well and does an outstanding job of presenting information. We want people to see walmartfacts.com and say, 'That's the way it should be done.'"
Neilsen Norman Group is an online service that offers tips on how companies can improve their Web sites. It said a recent survey it did on the usability of 18 corporate Web sites with 32 journalists showed that Wal-Mart's was among those that could use improvement.
"While all sites had some good traits, such as interesting content or some good interface designs, every site also had significant usability problems," the group said.
Ranking.com, which publishes rankings of Web sites by users, said walmartfacts.com placed No. 30,451 out of 215,000 Web rankings and had a "trust gauge" of 2, with 10 being the highest.
Thornton said walmartfacts.com has had more than 4.3 million visits since its 2005 launch. Although the site has been improved since, the company decided it was time for a complete overhaul, he said.
"Walmartfacts.com has been around for over a year now, and, in Internet time, that's a long while," Thornton said.
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