Does the Scotch website demonstrate brand stick-to-it-iveness, or is it as frustrating as trying to peel off a piece of tape when the end is stuck to the rest of the roll?

3mscotchtape.com Is Still Available
Immediately in the brand’s favor is its accessibility by more than one URL. In case you can’t remember the catchy http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/scotch?WT.mc_id=www.scotchtape.com, you can always get there via scotchtape.com or scotchbrand.com (but not scotch.com—that belongs to Johnnie Walker).

The homepage images change, but the Scotch brand message remains the same by promising “quality, high-performance products for the assurance and satisfaction of a job well done.”

The site breaks down Scotch products into four categories, each with its own landing page identified by a different color of the brand’s familiar plaid: Home & Office (green), Painting & Masking (blue), Industrial (red), and Electrical (yellow).

Yet here is where it gets a little, uh, sticky. The landing pages for the Scotch Industrial and Electrical sections lead to broader 3M sections for those applications. The Scotch Electrical section leads to 3M’s Electrical Products page, where “Scotch”-ish brands like Scotchcast wire coating powder resins and Scotchlock terminals appear with nearly two dozen other 3M items. Worse, the Industrial section leads to 3M’s Tapes for Industry page, where the word “Scotch” doesn’t even appear.

It’s understandable that 3M’s non-Scotch brands overlap with the Scotch brands for the same application, but the way the products are presented online could be jarring because the user might initially think (if not for the little 3M logo on the upper left of every page) that he was transported to a completely different brand’s website.

A few products have short videos accompanying their descriptions. Two videos in particular—for Scotch’s Packing Noodles and Paper Cutter—are especially useful because these products are intended to replace longstanding household items (packing peanuts and scissors). The videos cheerfully demonstrate the products’ convenience and go further in convincing the skeptic than a static image.

Painting a Pretty Picture
Scotch’s Painting & Masking section targets the do-it-yourself painter. When it’s time to slap a new coat of color on the living room walls, people likely spend lots of time selecting the right paint; yet very little thought goes into choosing the best masking tape to use on the job. Most amateur home painters simply grab the nearest roll of Scotch Blue painter’s tape for their projects. But there are actually more than three dozen factors to consider—at least according to Scotch’s masking tape selector, which assists painters in choosing from the brand’s five different tapes.

PDFs and a video show how the Scotch products can assist in practically any painting project, from a basic one-color-and-keep-paint-off-the-ceilings job to more advanced designs like stripes or checkerboards. One comes away with the impression that the Scotch brand is just as important in the painting process as Sherwin-Williams or Benjamin Moore.

3M = Maybe Muddled Messages?
Multi-brand conglomerates are challenged when it comes to creating an online presence for its stable of brands. Johnson & Johnson, to name one, has a corporate website but maintains separate sites for several of its brands, including Band-Aid and Desitin. Each site is unique, with its own identity, but they all tie back to the parent through text or a link at the bottom of the pages.

3M’s decision to keep its brands’ websites under the 3M site framework creates a kind of overall brand unity, but at the expense of each brand’s individual identity. Scotch’s pages—as well as the pages for other major 3M brands like Post-it and Nexcare—look as if they’ve been pasted in the middle of a 3M site template. And, in a way, they have.

It’s as if 3M, also a manufacturer of products ranging from animal care to traffic safety, is afraid to let some of their more popular brands thrive on their own online. One could argue that Scotch Tape doesn’t really need any branding help, but a separate Scotch site for crafts and gift-wrapping—maybe with a fun spin like the Fisk-A-Teers site developed for Fiskars—would focus on its core customer base and deliver better coverage for products like those groovy Packing Noodles and that sleek Paper Cutter. (A similar argument can be made for a separate Scotch site for painting.)

And 3M shouldn’t worry: It could still plop its logo somewhere on the site pages.