Giant corporations and smaller companies always strive to be innovative to boost their business and continue success. Since each of the market leaders does a great job in this field, measuring and comparing their ‘innovative’ achievements can be rather tough, still Information Week, the technology magazine, studied their activity and published a list of the American companies, which use innovations in their strategies in the most effective way. While a multinational technology company, PACCAR, which manufactures premium commercial vehicles, tops the 2011 InformationWeek 500 list, the second position is taken by Levi Strauss, followed by other consumer companies including Procter & Gamble, Walgreen Co. and Colgate-Palmolive Co, which take the 8th, 29th and 50th place correspondingly. The companies were ranked based on how they use technologies and fresh approaches to engage consumers in the most meaningful and entertaining way.
Photo: Information Week 500 logo
The apparel brand, which earned the No. 2 spot in the ranking, was applauded for its smart use of social media channels. “Levi Strauss was the first major retailer to add Facebook’s ‘Like’ button to its commerce site, and it created the first Facebook-oriented social shopping experience, the Levi’s Friends Store. There, customers can share ‘Likes’ and purchases through their Facebook networks, possibly influencing friends’ buying decisions. Over the past Thanksgiving holiday weekend, more than half of all visitor traffic to levi.com came from the company’s Facebook page, which now gets more than 1 million visits every month. Today, it has more than 6.2 million ‘Likes’ or followers on its Facebook page,” reports www.informationweek.com.
The most successful digital projects of the company include promotional activity dedicated to the launch of Levi’s Curve ID, the jeans line which is focused on shape rather than on size, the Shape What’s To Come global online community for young women and a range of charitable initiatives. The company also drew consumers’ attention to another brand in its portfolio, Dockers, with the launched of ‘Men Without Pants’ TV commercial during the 2010 Super Bowl broadcast, which helped boost the popularity of its dockers.com website—the online destination was visited by more people in the nine days after the Super Bowl ad was released than in six months the previous year.
“We try to be as agnostic as possible to brands and technologies so that we can go anywhere. But we want to be careful, too, that we don’t get too aggressive, dilute our brand, and cannibalize our other channels. There’s no prize out there for the person who has the most deals or the most social experiences,” comments Tom Peck, CIO at Levi Strauss.
The next internationally acclaimed consumer goods company is Procter & Gamble, which is resting 6 lines below Levi Strauss. The giant, which also introduces innovative techniques into its business and makes value of its social media activity (recently, the company has launched several new online stores on its Facebook page), was included into the list primarily for its digitalization projects related to analytics and data visualization based on sales, shipment, market share, consumption, pricing data and related information. According to the Information Week’s article, “the first project, launched 18 months ago, is the Business Sufficiency program, which gives executives predictions about P&G market share and other performance stats six to 12 months into the future. At its core is a series of analytic models designed to reveal what’s happening in the business now, why it’s happening, and what actions P&G can take.”
To see other companies featured on the list, visit the dedicated page (here you can read more about the five top companies in the ranking).