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Superbrands is a guide to some of the best-known brands in the UK, featuring household names from Andrex to Walkers Crisps, and Coca-Cola to Sellotape.
The challenge for digital consultancy BrandNet.co.uk, in compiling the latest in Marketing Week's series of Internet league tables, was to rank 60 brands according to the quality of their Web propositions.
By rating websites on location, navigation, content, brand proposition and effectiveness, BrandNet was able to draw up a league table showing how well some of the best-known brands in the UK and the world have translated their appeal onto the Net. Since the official Superbrands guide lists brands in alphabetical order only, it was also a good way of ranking seemingly-incomparable products.
Nestle was heavily criticised for the poor layout, design and navigation of its KitKat site, which appears near the bottom of the table. The company's other superbrands, Polo and Smarties, were not included in the table at all as they had no websites. Nestle wasn't the only big-name offender - UDV's superbrands, Bell's and Gordon's, were excluded for the same reason.
Spencer Wright, managing director of BrandNet.co.uk, says: "Nestle in general has got it wrong. It might be the UK's favourite chocolate but you'd need a long break to look at the website properly.
"There are games, which you would associate with work breaks, but they're not very imaginative, just things like Space Invaders. Branded games or a link to something like Freeloader.com would be much more innovative and involve the user."
By contrast, the best sites are the ones which are most closely tied in with their offline counterparts. The Sun was top of the league, largely because its site is completely attuned to the newspaper's target audience. It includes features which have proved to be winners with the paper's traditional offline readership, including a direct link to Coral's betting website for horseracing aficionados, and a Page 3 section. BrandNet believes Sun readers would no longer need to buy the paper if they looked at the website every day.
Thesun.co.uk compares very favourably to the BBC's website. Although the latter probably has the most comprehensive news content on the Web, it is let down by difficult navigation and a lack of inspiring or vibrant design...