HP : Benefiting from a comfort zone

An excellent piece of indirect online customer support and marketing on four counts.

The Site

HP, the computer products and services company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, publishes a Safety & Comfort Guide on its main website that offers practical advice on the ergonomics of a work station and home office.

The guide sits in a discrete area of the website with a menu based on aspects of ergonomics such as “finding your comfort zone” and “arranging your work area”, each with its own sub-menu and highlighted tips panels. The guide can also be searched separately from the rest of the site. Only the English-language version is available as web pages, but ‘interactive’ editions are available in PDF format for download in any of 30 languages.

Similar information in summary form is offered as a single page in the main site’s Home & Home Office section.

The Takeaway

HP’s Safety & Comfort Guide scores as an excellent piece of indirect online customer support and marketing on four counts. First, it is entirely appropriate in the context of the company’s business, without being tied to its own products.

Second, it provides practical support on an issue that all computer users are either affected by or are aware of, thus ensuring maximum interest in the feature. Third, and as a consequence, it sends out the message that HP is a caring company whose interest extends beyond technical back-up to the personal well-being of its customers (evidence of this may also carry a more pragmatic benefit to HP in warding off potential personal injury claims).

Finally, the universality of the issue and general lack of easy-to-follow advice ensures a high word-of-mouth promotion for an eminently useful and useable resource. Its one weakness is that this may be the only way people find it. While the site search gives it in the top two results for ‘comfort’ and ‘ergonomics’, there is no obvious sign of it in site or section menus.

First published on 21 April, 2005