Centrica puts brand value into practice

Company: CentricaTrend: The SimplicitySubject: Branding

What do you see?

Centrica, a British company, launched a very appealing and effective new corporate website last year. A short analysis:

Look & feel
When entering the website, the design looks fresh and open. Centrica uses a substantial amount of white spacing, a clear font, a large font size for headers and clearly distinguishable content blocks.

Content
Centrica is eminently transparent and concrete about its strategy and its efforts to be socially responsible. Moreover, the tone of voice is very understandable.

Navigation
The main navigation menu provides an entrance to all stakeholders, while the sub-navigation contains short and clear terms. The website contains bread crumbs, showing the visitor’s location. Visitors are unlikely to get lost.

Functionalities
The website has interesting features, such as:

A personalized homepage, which enables visitors to determine which items they want to see on the homepage
Employee videos, about working at Centrica and about social responsibility
A complete menu of corporate RSS feeds
Lots of relevant tools for the purpose of financial and sustainability reporting

Why is it effective?

Centrica has been able to strike an effective balance between its own goals and objectives, on the one hand, and the needs and expectations of stakeholders on the other hand. The website is appealing, personal, transparent and provides useful tools. These dovetail well with Centrica’s brand promises. Mission accomplished for now. Maintaining it will require a prolonged effort.

What’s next?

Many companies promise to be open and transparent. In practice, however, websites are frequently unable to meet several basic requirements, in terms of look & feel, content, navigation and tone of voice. In the upcoming years, companies should make a decided effort to realize their promise of being transparent and open. Centrica has already paved the way.