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When it comes down to it, the underlying goal of any type of advertising is to solidify a company’s brand identity in the minds of consumers. Brands who succeed in doing this become virtually synonymous with goods or services: Starbucks to coffee; Coca-Cola to soft drinks; Nike to athletic equipment.

Sometimes, though, a brand’s identity is so intertwined with a type of product that any attempt to branch out can be, well … really weird. Like, is-this-an-April-Fool’s-Day-joke weird.

Take Colgate, for instance. Long associated with toothpaste, toothbrushes, and all things oral hygiene, it made the unfortunate decision to try its luck in the ready-to-eat dinner market by introducing a line of frozen foods called “Kitchen Entrees.” Needless to say, these products didn’t stay in grocery store freezers for long, as consumers were unable to disassociate the minty fresh taste of Colgate toothpaste from Colgate spaghetti.

But this wasn’t the only instance of a brand launching a disconnected product line. In fact, it’s happened a number of times and surprisingly, not all have failed. Check out this interesting infographic from Plumbworld chronicling the weirdest examples of brands branching out.

This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this,subscribe to Sales.

The important thing to remember about productivity is that it’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon. If you’re super-productive for one hour but slack off the next two, you haven’t been productive. (Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.)

Some people are blessed with the power of concentration. But most of us aren’t. Our willpower is a finite resource and steadily decreases as we make choices. By the time the workday is winding down, our reserve of willpower badly needs replenishing. That’s why it’s so hard to finish the day as strong as you started it — your brain literally can’t handle it.

Luckily, forming habits helps preserve willpower. For example, many executives and leaders wear the same outfits every day so they’re not wasting precious headspace on relatively trivial choices. (Barack Obama, Elizabeth Holmes, and Steve Jobs all do this.)

And while you can’t ensure that the last hour of your day is always going to be the same, by following a specific routine you’ll be able to get the most out of your last hour in the workday without thinking about it too much. The eight strategies below might seem like a lot to master, but in a few days you’ll have it down pat.

Before the Last Hour

About 20-30 minutes before you hit the last hour of your workday, take some time to get your affairs in order so you can spend your remaining time powering through important tasks.

1) Check your email.

Review all your unread messages quickly, then respond to the ones that absolutely need to be addressed before the end of the day.

Move the remaining emails requiring a response into a “Send later” folder, or mark them as unread so you remember to deal with them later. Any messages you don’t need to respond to should be deleted or archived.

2) Check your drafts folder.

During the day, distractions often pull us away from emails that aren’t 100% crucial to finish, and we leave them for later. Now is the time to tackle these messages. Finish them up and send them on their way — and if you’re worried they’ll get lost in your recipients’ inboxes because of the late hour, schedule them for tomorrow morning using a tool like Sidekick.

3) Leave your inbox and other communication channels.

This one’s really important. Closing out of your inbox, removing other distractions as much as you can by setting yourself “Away” on messaging apps, and leaving Facebook and Twitter are crucial to keeping your concentration. Even if you’re one of those people who is completely comfortable with 9,378 unread notifications, they say “ignorance is bliss” for a reason. If you can’t see your notifications, you can’t wonder what they’re about and be distracted. So shut them off!

4) Take a quick break.

Take two to five minutes to get water, grab a healthy snack, go to the bathroom, or do anything that’s not work-related. Just make sure you get out of your chair and stretch your legs, because you’ll want to stay put to ensure your last hour is as productive as possible.

During the Last Hour

After you’ve taken your break, it’s time to get down to business. Follow this four-step process to ensure you’re getting as much done as you can.

5) Reprioritize your to-do list.

We all know them — the colleagues who get in at 9 a.m., whip through their task list, and are out the door by 5 p.m. without breaking a sweat. But most of us aren’t like that. We push to-do items to tomorrow, then the next day, then the day after that …

Use this time to assess your list. Does everything belong there? What’s most important? What can be pushed to tomorrow or next week? Even better, what can be entirely removed from your list? At least once a month I realize that the item I’ve been delaying for weeks just isn’t that important, which is why I never tackled it in the first place.

See if your list could use a similar shuffle, and move items as needed so you know what your true priorities are.

6) Review your schedule tomorrow.

Before you get to work on your last item, make sure there’s nothing you’ve forgotten about. Quickly glance over the next day’s schedule to confirm all internal and external meetings so you have a sense of how busy you’ll be and what priorities you’ll be able to address.

7) Do the thing.

Assume you’ll only complete one more thing today — after all, an hour isn’t that much time.

If you’re juggling several larger priorities, pick the most important thing on your list and leave everything else for later. Spend your hour making as much progress as you can.

If you’re working on a series of smaller tasks, choose one type of task to tackle. Whether it’s calling prospects, writing call recaps, or making slides, you’ll be far more productive if you batch similar tasks together instead of jumping from one type of activity to another.

8) Check your email again before you head out.

You shouldn’t be sitting back down to write more emails — this final check is only to make sure you’re not missing anything urgent. Everything else can be left for tomorrow. You’ve already given an entire workday your attention and focus, so walk out the door without feeling guilty!

And there you have it: a straightforward way to ensure you’re juicing the most out of your last hour at work.

What other productivity tips do you have for your last hour at work? Share with us in the comments.

They say the best things often come in small packages. Think about it: jewelry, Snapchats, books, the keys to a brand new car … all of these things support this notion. 

And with our attention spans shrinking below that of a goldfish, it should come as no surprise that we’re beginning to crave more focused content at a smaller scale, too. 

Enter the rise of microsites. Unlike regular websites, microsites tend to be rather simplistic and easier to navigate. This isn’t to say they won’t make you want to poke around for a while, though. In fact, the really great ones do just that. 

Download our full collection of website design examples here.

Ready to see a few use cases? Check out the list below for some great examples of microsites in action. 

Note: There is profanity in example seven, so scroll on by if that’s not your cup of tea.

What Is a Microsite?

A microsite is an individual web page or small cluster of web pages that act as a separate entity for a brand. A microsite typically lives on its own domain, but some exist as a subdomain. 

Microsites can be used to help brands achieve a number of things. For example, some companies have used them to highlight a specific campaign or target specific buyer personas. Others have used them to tell a short story, or to inspire a specific call-to-action.

11 Examples of Ingenious Microsites

1) YearInMusic.Spotify.com | Spotify

Aside from serving as a painful reminder of how many Justin Bieber song I listened to on repeat last year, Spotify’s Year in Music has proven to be one of the most well executed microsites we’ve ever seen.

Commonly referred to a “celebration” of the music that carried us through the year prior, Spotify’s interactive site is personalized especially for you, based on your listening habits. 

What exactly does that mean? Well, the tool makes it easy for you to create a personalized recap that incorporates details such as your first played song, top artists by season, and how much time you spent listening. The experience is unique to the user, making it fun for them to share and compare their synopsis with their friends. 

And when it comes to sharing, the microsite makes it really easy. Every stat that the site pulls for you can be shared on social media thanks to a handy button at the bottom right of the screen.

2) DangersOfFracking.com | Linda Dong

In an effort to gain support for the FRAC Act (Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act), Interaction and Industrial Designer Linda Dong designed a beautiful microsite that uses parallax design to tell the story about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing.

The story starts with a water droplet falling from a cloud, and as you scroll down through the site, you follow the water droplet as it’s taken from truck to fracturing site, turned into tracking fluid, and sent down a gas well into the ground. Along the way, you encounter floating facts and statistics about the dangers of fracking until you encounter two simple calls-to-action at the very end: “Contact your local officials” and “Join or support your local organization.”

Microsites like this one are heavily focused on using directional cues (in this case, the parallax movement) to drive users to complete a certain call-to-action — so any other distraction or navigation bar is removed entirely. 

If your microsite focuses on one or two calls-to-action, make sure they are concise and actionable like this one is, and that you set them apart visually from the rest of the site by making the font color pop or putting the copy in a button.

3) UrWhatUPost.com | Bolthouse Farms

“Why should junk food get all the glory?”

You’re asked this question when you first arrive to BoltHouse Farms’ microsite, UrWhatUPost.com. BoltHouse Farms created the site to show people how many social media conversations were happening about healthy foods versus unhealthy foods. To do this, they collected #UrWhatUPost hashtags and tracked the kinds of foods we share on social media, then pit the healthy stuff, like #grapes, against the unhealthy stuff, like #icecream. The goal of the website is aligned with their overall company mission: To change the way people think (and post) about healthy food.

Bolthouse Farms proves microsites don’t have to be minimalist. The pages on the site are colorful and animated, with words and moving numbers turning into dangling carrots and swinging pomegranates. Click on a food item and magic happens — every food item is different. Click on a pomegranate and you can “hit” it with your clicker like a piñata. Click on a melon and you’re taken to a “melon meditation” page, kind of akin to the iTunes Visualizer. 

4) Dominosdxp.com | Domino’s Pizza

Last year, Domino’s announced their new Chevy Spark pizza delivery cars, known as DXPs. The cars were purposefully re-engineered for pizza delivery, and as a result, they boast a ton of awesome features — like an oven where the left door should be, space for up to 80 pizzas, custom storage for sauces and drinks.

To show off this awesomeness, they recently launched a dedicated microsite detailing all things DXP.

The site is heavily interactive website enables visitors to zoom in each of the features to gain a better understanding of the purpose and level of thought that went into each addition. The entire site is also skillfully animated, making it really interesting to learn about each feature.

If nothing else, this is a great example of how to take a fairly complex product or idea and promote and explain it in a way that’s both fun and easily digestible. But don’t just take our word for it … visit the website to explore for yourself. 

5) EmojiTracker.com | Matthew Rothenberg

There is no “point” to emojitracker.com — it was created by Matthew Rothenberg, former Head of Product at Flickr and Bitly, as an experiment in real-time tracking of all emojis used on Twitter.

The only calls-to-action on the site are the tweet and follow buttons at the very bottom. Otherwise, it’s just for pure interest. With no navigation bar or way to get to another site, it might actually be confusing to some people.

Technically, it breaks the rules of good user interface design, but it goes to show that microsites don’t need to have complicated designs. Keep it simple to keep people on the page without taking up too much of their time.

6) Fu2016.com | House of Cards

Step aside, Donald Trump. There’s a new presidential candidate taking the internet by storm with this impressive, interactive microsite. 

If you’re not familiar with the Netflix series “House of Cards,” the program follows a man named Francis Underwood, a ruthless politician with a hidden agenda. As the series enters season four, they’re promoted the premiere with a clever microsite that pokes fun at politics. Talk about perfect timing, amirite?

The microsite invites visitors to join Underwood’s movement and rally support for “important” issues such as inequality, dishonesty, and entitlement. But jokes aside, what we love most about this microsite is the design. In fact, you could easily argue that the site functions better than those of actual presidential candidates. From Underwoods attention-grabbing, shifty eyes (visit the website to see for yourself) to the high-quality videos, the microsite draws you in and provides good reasons for you to stick around and engage with the content.

7) WhatTheF*ckShouldIMakeForDinner.com | Zach Golden

Don’t have a big budget? Take a hint from Zach Golden, author of What The F*ck Should I Make For Dinner?, who created a microsite to promote the book.

Earmuffs, kids.

The site has a very simple layout: A rotating “purpose of the recipe” line, a rotating recipe from the book, and three links that let you kind of “choose your own journey.” It has a black-and-white, minimalist theme; uses all caps; and places a small call-to-action in the corner that promotes his book. That’s it. 

Media company Digiday took a cue from Golden and used his microsite template to conduct an experiment of their own. They created the microsite WhatTheF*ckIsMyTwitterBio.com — with zero media budget — to see if the content would go viral and help build their brand.

“Thanks to the open-source WTFEngine by Justin Windle, some cheap Web hosting and a $12 domain registration, WhatTheF*ckIsMyTwitterBio.com was up and running in under two hours,” reads Digiday’s press release. “Step two was populating the site with content, which took [two hours].”

Their biggest takeaway? That good copy works. “We didn’t spend a dime promoting the site, and it reached nearly 100,000 unique users ‘organically.'”

8) ElfYourself.com | OfficeMax

You didn’t think I could write a blog post about microsites and not include ElfYourself, did you? Of course not. The screenshot below shows what the website looks like right now, but come the holiday season, expect your inbox to be rife with ElfYourself animations again this year because ElfYourself isn’t going away.

What made the site so popular? Other than being hilarious, it’s also easily shareable, has a single call-to-action, and makes the users the stars. 

“It brought the brand to life for consumers,” wrote Kenneth Hein in Forbes, “and for the business-to-business crowd it provided a human face for the big box retailer.”

In other words, Office Max used the microsite to be creative and let their freak flag fly, and it worked like a charm. They focused the campaign on the consumers, not the brand — but the sales tie-in came at the end of the ElfYourself videos in the form of coupons and promos. 

9) TasteTheFeeling.Coca-Cola.com | Coca-Cola

Let’s face it: We all love GIFs. And the folks at Coca-Cola have tapped into this inevitable admiration by creating a immersive online experience in the shape of the “Taste the Feeling” microsite. 

Here’s how it works: When users land on the page, they’re met with a two-minute music video set to the sounds of a custom campaign anthem from Avicii and Conrad Sewell. The video is made up of looping, three-second GIFs that depict the many emotions felt by Coca-Cola drinkers. As you watch, you can select an emotion by clicking on one of the 32 emotion-based icons, or enter your own emotion to pull up a corresponding GIF. 

All of the GIFs are easily sharable on social media, which serves as a great way to draw people back to the site to engage with the content. 

This microsite also serves as a great example for those interested in globalizing their campaign assets, as it’s available in more than 20 different languages. 

10) Inside.Chanel.com | Chanel

Inside Chanel is a microsite that “works to inform consumers about the house’s history and heritage through video and multimedia content,” according to Luxury Daily. The site houses a ton of short, social videos that chronicle the people, places, things, and events that have contributed to continued success of this iconic fashion brand.

The purpose? “The strategy behind this microsite is to create some accessibility of Chanel’s history, but more importantly, their success throughout the years,” explains Dalia Strum, president of Dalia Inc.

We love their video-centric approach to visual storytelling. Each of the videos aims to pull back the curtain and give visitors an exclusive look at behind the scenes photos and stories, as they pertain to different aspects of the brand — color, couture, and so on.

It’s important to note that this site isn’t Chanel’s first stab at microsite creation. In fact, the brand has experimented with multiple microsite formats, including the editorial-style site Chanel News:

11) BurgerBff.com | Mellow Mushroom

This microsite from the folks at Mellow Mushroom — a pizzeria franchise established in Atlanta, Georgia — was created to support their recent “Burger BFF” campaign. The campaign was launched to create buzz for their new menu items: Herb (a vegetarian burger) and Carnie (a beef burger). 

The menu items have been adapted into cartoon BFFs for the sake of the campaign … and the result is pretty lovable.

Mellow Mushroom uses the microsite as a way to promote a contest for a chance to win a round trip to Denver or Seattle with their bestie. And it does so in a number of really fun and interesting ways. For example, one section of the site invites visitors to use the hashtag #BurgerBFF to enter the contest and show off their best burger shots on Instagram:

But that’s not all: The site also offers visitors several other engaging, interactive ways to enter the contest, including quizzes and a Mad Libs-style storytelling generator. 

Which memorable microsites have you come across? Share them with us in the comments below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2014 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

Is your ecommerce strategy for 2016 strong enough to deliver on your growth goals? With the rising cost of ecommerce customer acquisition, all too often it can feel like you’re putting more effort into your acquisition strategy but seeing the same results.

That’s why we’ve partnered with ecommerce experts from across the world to take a deep dive into customer acquisition and retention to help you learn how to exceed your goals. With best practices and actionable insights from working with thousands of ecommerce merchants globally, we’re here to help you drive more revenue than ever before.

In the five part on demand series, you’ll learn:

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• Why retention marketing is the frontier opportunity in ecommerce to increase customer lifetime value and how to get started with a retention marketing strategy in Driving Revenue Through Retention Marketing and Brand Advocacy with Sweet Tooth.
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Did you know that 2016 is the year the first college graduates of Generation Z (born between 1994–2010) will enter the workforce?

Crazy, right? Think about the perspective they’re going to bring to the workplace — especially having grown up in an ever-connected, technology-focused world.

Along with Generation Z, there are other workplace trends that will have a significant impact on office life this year. Boomerang employees, which are the folks who leave a company and return at a later stage, will become more acceptable. Workspaces will become more collaborative. Maternity leave will become an even bigger topic than it is already.

To help you stay ahead of the curve, the folks at the Brighton School of of Business and Management created the infographic below. Check it out to learn the biggest workplace trends to look for in 2016.

What other workplace trends do you expect to see this year? Share with us in the comments.