Case Study: Textron

The Challenge

It may be one of the biggest companies you’ve never heard of. Consistently among the Fortune 200, Textron Inc. is a $13b, multi-industry manufacturing company with the distinction of having pioneered the conglomerate model in the 1950s. Today, better known for its portfolio of companies than for the parent company name, Textron owns banner brands like Cessna Aircraft, Bell Helicopter, E-Z-GO golf cars, Greenlee tools, Jacobsen turf care equipment and more.

Still sporting a circa-1996 website well into the 21st century, Textron knew it needed a dramatic online overhaul, but wrestled with the right way to present itself beyond just the stale, brochure-ware-style site. Though Textron, Inc. sells nothing but its stock, its varied companies operate in diverse markets like aerospace & defense, golf and recreation, commercial finance and industrial manufacturing. Each business offered its own distinct web presence designed to serve a particular market, and the corporate brand lacked a unifying theme to tie them together. With such a diverse and complex collection of brands and products – and therefore audiences – portraying the breadth and depth of the company in a simple, clear and compelling way was a formidable challenge.

The Approach

Helping Textron leapfrog from brochure ware straight to best practice required us to apply our keenest processes and sharpest analytical skills. This wasn’t an e-commerce site with sales to demonstrate its success, but neither was it an ordinary “corporate” site.

Crucial to success was finding just the right balance for Textron. In such a vast and complex organization, it would have been easy to fall into the trap of merely “pushing out” information and messages in a way insiders found familiar and comfortable. But some strategic research and testing revealed just how different a user’s perspective could be. The winning formula would have to balance the needs of the company with the needs of the user to create an experience that delivered on both fronts.

The lynchpin was helping Textron define a clear set of objectives – to understand what its online presence was – and wasn’t – able to achieve. After analyzing a dizzying array of brand and audience research, business objectives, search and traffic pattern data, industry best practices and benchmark sites, clarity began to emerge from the chaos.

The Solution

Not surprisingly, selling business jets online was a non-starter. But it turned out that helping customers and prospects connect online with the right people at Cessna and the other Textron businesses was spot on. In addition, the company had an opportunity to communicate the mounting success of an ongoing business metamorphosis as it transformed from its old operating model into something entirely new. And finally, as Textron worked to establish and evolve an employer brand, the site was an ideal way to recruit talent across a dynamic collection of well-known companies that together offered some compelling career paths.

Textron’s new corporate website was a visually vibrant and content-rich resource that quickly grew to be an important destination for myriad audiences. Not only was it an efficient and effective means of presenting the “big picture” that was Textron, but it also succeeded in delivering important customer eyeballs through to the business unit websites. And for the first time, the site integrated powerful new recruiting tools that helped connect the right candidates with the right job opportunities in the right locations across the entire Textron family of companies.

The Results

Traffic to Textron.com began to grow almost immediately, confirming pent-up demand and untapped opportunities to connect with a multiplicity of interested people. To nearly everyone’s surprise, traffic coming from inside the organization ballooned, as employees from across the entire enterprise turned to the external corporate website to keep up with the latest news. (This curious trend would soon come to confirm the need for more comprehensive internal information resources as the company moved along its transformational path, but more on that later!)

Today, as a dynamic, news-driven destination, the site is a central location for myriad millions of visitors, from customers to investors, media to job candidates. At each step along its evolution, through new markets and new geographies, new features and new objectives, ExNihilo continues to be a trusted Textron partner as the company’s online presence grows to meet its newest and most pressing business needs.

Faces of Success

Every customer has an important, but distinct, set of needs and expectations. We work hard to understand those and what they mean to you before we define what success looks like for each project.