Business Games : Underpreparing for action
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Poor set up lets down a simple integrated marketing site.
The Site
Business Games, the Luxembourg-based organiser of the annual European Business Games, drives prospective participants to its site for information not obviously there.
Business Games issued a news release today (23 September) announcing details of the 2009 European Business Games which was quickly picked up by news and business-oriented sites. A URL for the company team event’s website is included ‘for further information’. The website itself is a single page with links to two PDF files: a two-page subscription form and an eight-page illustrated leaflet.
The leaflet, however, contains circular references to the website for more detail (for example, “See the final dates for enrollment [sic] on our Internet site”). The subscription form cannot be submitted online and states that supplementary information – such as rules and equipment for each game – will be sent out after registration closes. The closing date is given as 60 days before the initial round of national tournaments, which are listed only in the leaflet.
The Takeaway
Business Games has chosen a limited role for its website in the promotion of its 2009 event. Nothing inherently wrong with such a modest level of integration, but the failure to fit it even for that purpose is hardly great promotion for an event that has to be coordinated across feeder tournaments in 10 countries. Company HR officers and other potential entrants enticed to the site are unlikely to be impressed by the challenge of having to piece together the promised information from PDF documents – or wait to another day for it – rather than it being immediately locatable.
Without going for the big budget approach Business Games could so easily have geared the site to create a ‘fun event’ buzz around the coverage it is getting – where’s the reporting of this year’s competition, for example? As it is, failure to get even the fundamentals of an online information service right (organisation, directions, navigation) suggest an antiquated attitude to integrated marketing that of itself will make heavier weather of promoting the event simply because of the amateurish and ‘out of touch’ perception it creates.
http://www.europeanbusinessgames.com/First published on 23 September, 2008