Kimberly-Clark : Fluffing a follow up line

Poorly-worded linking ruins the use of ‘factlets’ to draw browsers into a site.

The Site

Kimberly-Clark, the US-based personal care and hygiene products group, has a ‘did you KNOW?’ company fact feature on its main home page and the introduction pages of its About us, Our brands and Newsroom sections. Each page has a different fact (for example, Our brands says “K-C’s yellow Labrador puppy seen on tissue products around the world was the first brand icon to be inducted into Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London”). The fact is followed by a ‘Learn more’ button, but this leads in each case to an ‘innovations’ page in About us rather than the full story behind the fact. None of the stories is apparent on the innovations page nor on the three sub-section pages linked from it.

The Takeaway

Sprinkling a site with interesting factlets from company or product history is a simple but effective way of engaging browsers’ attention. Kimberly-Clark is not alone among consumer-oriented companies in exploiting this potential, but its attempt to draw visitors further into the content on the back of it is marred by poorly-worded linking.

Most visitors will assume from the positioning of the ‘Learn more’ prompt directly after the fact that the link will lead to a fuller version of the story. (Ironically, the more intriguing and ‘teasing’ the fact is the more this is likely to be the case.) Finding themselves on a general innovations page will be both disappointing and disorientating, especially as there are no obvious signposts on the page to fact-related content such as the product histories under Product evolution.

Kimberly-Clark’s tactic of using the ‘did you KNOW?’ feature to lead people to its innovation content is not in itself misguided. But it would work much better and be less misleading if the wording of the link were more explicit; for example, ‘Learn more about our innovations’.

First published on 13 March, 2007