(An aside: While Dow made bleach for industry in the 19th
century, it wasn’t until the 20th that the product made its way into U.S.
households. The Electro-Alkaline Company, founded in 1913, launched that
process. They’re better known now as The Clorox Company, and we’re honored to
have written the Clorox
history.)
OVERALL GRADE: D
After half an hour on the Dow site, we had the uneasy
feeling that we wouldn’t be able to find our way back to pages we’d already
seen, and might well have missed important material. First problem: the
navigation is incomplete. The drop-down menu under Company offers 12 choices,
ranging from “Solutionism” to “Worldwide Olympic Partner.” Quite by accident,
we stumbled across fascinating pages such as Leadership Insights and a Timeline.
Why are these not accessible from the main menu?
A related issue: page names are deceptive and hierarchy is unpredictable.
Awards are under Innovation. Geographies (which shows Dow
sites worldwide) is under News rather
than Locations. Our Commandment
7 of About Us pages is “Remember to keep navigation easy.” We mean not just
visually clean and easy to read, but efficient at helping us find the
information we want plus great material we didn’t realize we wanted.
Products/Services: C
A web search for “Dow Chemical” turns up stories about the
Bhopal disaster, breast implants, Agent Orange, and the Rocky Flats nuclear weapon
production site. To counteract this, the About Us pages of the Dow’s own site
need to provide a stellar list of the ways Dow products have improved peoples’
lives over the past century – and to acknowledge negative events and perhaps
explain them in the context of lessons learned.
They don’t. We thought there was no history of the company
at all, until we typed “history” in the site’s search box and found a timeline
that runs back to 1897. But its graphics are odd, its display occasionally goes
awry (events of the 1940s march relentlessly across the introductory
paragraph), and the pop-up, decade-by-decade format makes it impossible to get
an overview of highlights.
The Discover Dow page
links to a great archive
of stories that explain Dow’s innovations in laymen’s terms. Good corporate
storytelling—but unfortunately the stories are only accessible by clicking
through the titles one or two at a time. With no indication of how many stories
there are, few visitors will bother to keep clicking and clicking and clicking
and .... Why not have an option for seeing stories by category, or at least for
seeing a dozen or so titles at a time?
Personality: D
Herbert Henry Dow is mentioned only once on the Dow site - a
one-line quote on the Timeline. Talking
about how the founder’s vision drove the company would be a great starting
point for an overview of Dow Chemical’s corporate history and its goals for the
future. The bios of the current Leadership
(buried under Investors / Corporate Governance) don’t give any better sense of
the company’s direction. The Leadership
Insights page features links to Dow’s management talking about important
issues ... but that page isn’t accessible from the Leadership
page.
And then there are the oddities. The Leadership
bios are written as if for a third-party publication, e.g., “Andrew N. Liveris
is President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Dow Chemical Company,
a global specialty chemical, advanced materials, agrosciences and plastics
company based in Midland, Michigan with 2012 annual sales of approximately $57
billion.” This seems to have been pasted in without thought of the context: it
suggests to us that no one really expects visitors to read the bio. In the
midst of the text of the main About
Us page we are warned: “References to ‘Dow’ or the ‘Company’ mean The Dow
Chemical Company and its consolidated subsidiaries unless otherwise expressly
noted.” We understand that Dow Chemical doesn’t want to be confused with, say,
Dow Jones. But is this a website or a binding legal document?
Accessibility: D
The Contact
page is easily available from the foot of the left-hand navigation menu. It
leads to a one-size-fits-all online form: no options for specific topics or for
the major departments of Dow. The only other choice for communicating with Dow
is via telephone or fax.
TAKEAWAY
Make sure that your site plays up the best aspects of your
company, and that visitors can find the great material you put there.
Does your Web site’s “About Us” section
accurately convey your organization’s history and capabilities? Every two weeks
we evaluate one example, grading it in three areas that are key to potential
customers: Personality (Who are you?), Products/Services (What can you do for
us?), and Accessibility (How can we reach you?). To talk about your About Us
page, contact us!
Today’s example was chosen at random;
CorporateHistory.net has no ties to this company.
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