The Retail Marketing team at Whitford Corporation strongly believes that information, especially the right information, is a powerful tool. The people at Dynamic Digital Advertising (DDA) couldn’t agree more. To help retail employees, corporate executives, and consumers understand more about the safety of nonstick coatings, this Retail Marketing team wanted to build a free online portal and DDA was more than happy to assist. Although the portal would be sponsored by Whitford, the challenge was to dispense technical knowledge about nonstick-coated products in a nonbiased manner. Rather than promotional, the portal was to be strictly informational.
User-friendly navigation was a primary objective set forth for the portal, as was the ability for the portal to be scaled over time and flexible enough to allow new courses and topics to be added on a regular basis. The design of the portal needed to have its own brand identity—one that is distinctly different from the Whitford brand. Consequently, a new design, logo, and tagline would be in order. The idea was that there would be three categories of information—coating information, general product data, and miscellaneous content. The goal was to present these categories in a clean, easily identifiable way.
DDA developed the Product Knowledge Network (PKN), a free, online information portal with everything you need to know from methods to myths about nonstick-coated houseware products. DDA designed the portal to be easy to use and distinctly different where information is presented in a user-friendly format. All information is divided into three groups—coating curriculum, product knowledge and miscellaneous information—all of which contain another list of subject categories and drop-down menus. Each category of information provides users with clear instructions on how they can navigate the curriculum to find exactly what they are looking for. DDA programmed a “Contact Us” form to enable users to ask questions and post comments. Users are encouraged to complete these forms, so that portal managers can incorporate content based on the feedback provided. Additionally, DDA programmed a blog system for the Retail Marketing team at Whitford to share and talk about what is going on in the market with portal users.
Whether used by consumers to better understand nonstick-coated products, or by retail employees to learn about the manufacturing process behind a variety of substrate options, the Product Knowledge Network is effective in providing the information users need. Even though content is added on a regular basis, it still remains nonbiased, purely educational, and completely valuable to the end user. If you’re in the market for nonstick-coated houseware products, the Product Knowledge Network is a highly trafficked portal not to be missed.