See Impossible

On October last year, Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging solutions, is proud to announce “Canon See Impossible” – a branding effort aimed to inspire customers to see impossible with Canon products. As part of the multi-year campaign, Canon added its logo and new tagline, shifting the marketing focus to customer feelings from products through storytelling form. This campaign narrated the stories of those people who used Canon’s products (not just cameras) and eventually  overcame obstacles and accomplished their dreams that sounded impossible.

There are three 45-second video of See Impossible series broadcasted mainly on YouTube: Author, Director and Dad.

Except making sure that the ads can be seeing everywhere with takeover ads on YouTube, Canon also put those videos on CNNgo, CNN’s new time shifted platform, as well. As for social media platforms, Canon is trying to engage with audience through Twitter and Facebook, announcing this multi-year event. Its new See Impossible Microsite houses a series of digital videos that highlight how customers us a range of products.

“We’re going to use it as a messaging vehicle, but we’re also going to use it internally to organize and marshal our resources in a way that’s much more customer-centric than just strictly approaching everything from a product viewpoint that we’ve done over the years. Our current Web properties do a great job of talking about the specific product, but nowhere do we have a really good place to say a particular company or a particular photographer are using our solutions.”

—- Michael Duffett, VP and general manager of marketing at Canon USA.

But most of audience didn’t buy it with lots of negative comments like “Who cares?” “Such a disappointment”. The site is slow to load; the technology falls behind the advertisement; devoid of informational content….all these reasons make up to why this campaign failed to be accepted and aroused disappointment after the countdown reached zero.

I have to say these series of advertisement are similar to one of Apple’s famous “Think Different” commercial in 1997.

For Canon, it’s more than a good idea that Canon is away product-centric and starts customer-centric, but its technological advancements that far behind makes the whole campaign upset and superficial.

Ready To Explore The World!

It’ll be a pity if you don’t have an action camera recording your adventure activities when you explore and navigate the world, so here comes Garmin. Founded in 1989, Garmin is a corporation providing superior products for automotive, aviation, marine, outdoor, and sports that are an essential part of our customers’ lives.

I didn’t know Garmin until I did the marketing research for our group project. As the strongest competitor of Gopro, Garmin seems to have a wider range of products, not only limited in action camera, but includes automobile navigation, GPS watch, flight stream and other outdoor equipment. When I search it on Google, all of the ads, official website and social media platforms come out, and also on the right side, it shows a brief introduction of Garmin Corp, information including customer service number, stock price, headquarters and so on, which gives me a basic overview of this corporation.

Then I started exploring their official website and overall the design is oriented and easy to operate. We can readily find out that Garmin’s target audience are those adventure people who are extremely manic about outdoor activities at the first glance. Some scrolling pictures that display the recent products, and underneath are some other information just like other websites, including company information, Garmin sites and partnerships. When you click “Explore” bottom on the top of page, you’ll easily get a general view of the six categories Garmin has, which covers on the road, into sports, on the trail, on the water, in the air, and wearable technology.

 I randomly chose a “on the trail” page. There’s a menu bar of different products in this category under the scrolling pictures that links to the shop site. Also we can watch some feature videos which offer you more introduction and directions of using the products. For the shop site, we can arrange the products from name, price or best sellers and display them either vertical or fourfold.

A very practical function that the website offers us is that once we click the “compare” button, we’re allowed to compare two products of their price, functions or performance in a simple and direct way.

Garmin does well in its social media platforms. It collects 297,250 likes on Facebook, 79.5K followers on Twitter, sharing products information and other news. On Youtube, Garmin receives 34,933 subscriptions, gaining 2,738,063 views on its most popular video.

           

As for the tablet and mobile page, there’s only a slight difference in typesetting comparing with the official website. Associate to the previous Fascination Advantage study, all I feel is that Garmin is a innovation, passion and mystique brand, leading us to explore and navigate the outside world and joint every moments!