Love to Lead with Toshiba
Tom pointed me towards a new contest by Toshiba which is an interesting combination of UGC, voting and hustling and debate.
Under the slogan Love to Lead, Toshiba invite bloggers to contribute to a debate on a set topic every week. Write a post on your own blog giving either the for or against argument, submit it to the site and then try and get people to vote for you. The latter step means that this is probably less as assessment of how well you write the argument and more about how many readers you have and whether you can encourage them to vote for you.
The idea appears to derive from the design of the new Toshiba Portégé R400, which is available in Black or White, and asks you if your thinking is black and white or somewhere in between. This week, it’s third, it is asking whether people are born evil.
It’s an interesting idea, get bloggers to debate about the topic, the one with the most active readers win, the blogger gets a new PC and then, hopefully, writes about it sharing the news to reasonably large audience. Creates buzz both about the contest and about the new machine. A different mechanism to the in recently employed by Edelman and Microsoft which just sent out pre-loaded machines for people to test Vista; you need to do work to earn these toys so less of an ethical challenge.
The product site itself is a gloriously shiny piece of flash, all back, white and grey with smooth transitions, floating movements and a serenity about it which obviously reflects some brand value. But I have no idea whether I want to buy the machine or not, as the specs are only available by downloading a pdf. Why would I want to do that? What is wrong with giving me the information on screen or at least a link to your main product site? The reason I went with my Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook tablet instead of the far more common Toshiba version a couple of years ago was because it had an optical drive. I have no idea whether the new Toshiba version fixes this shortcoming or not because looking it up is 2 steps too many. I
The blogging idea is fresh and clever, getting the brand out there and linking it to intelligent debate and providing the opportunity for free reviews by popular bloggers. The product site is pretty but useless. I know about your brand values but I don’t buy a computer on values, (the Mac has this market pretty much sewn up) so make it easy for me to find the features.
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POSTED IN: Branding, Engaging the Customer
1 opinion for Love to Lead with Toshiba
Toshiba Blogger Trials
Aug 16, 2007 at 7:12 pm
[…] written about Toshiba before, with their Love to Lead campaign. I was quite pleased recently to be offered a Tecra A8 Notebook to trial as part of the talkToshiba […]
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