SKF, a German engineering company, has launched an image campaign. One-page ads in e.g. BusinessWeek show a young, smiling guy in front of an airplane. The heading is "The sky is the limit", the tagline is "The Power of Knowledge Engineering". The accompanying text talks about SKF's contributions to the Airbus 380, namely a technology for landing gear assemblies plus structural reinforcement that reduced weight by 40% compared to conventional solutions.

"So far, so good," you might think. But now they have also designed a landing website that goes with these ads: www.skf.com/knowledge, and what they have there is a classic case of how to not use online marketing tools. For each of their six chosen information areas you can click on a person (they wanted to make it personal), after which you need to scroll in a very small window for basically zero additional information. I doubt anyone will really bother. In fact any conventional brochure would be much more user friendly. A simple website with a list of more in-depth information sources would be more suitable and have more impact. What's obvious is that they started from the wrong end. They had the technology (online marketing tools) in mind and then tried to squeeze in some information. I hope SKF's engineering team does not work that way, i.e. fitting customer requirements to the technology solutions they already have. That's a classical engineering and not market/customer-driven approach, exactly opposite to the one I assume the ad campaign had in mind!