How To Promote Online Branding

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In its simplest definition, branding means owning the image you, your company and its products set forth. Unfortunately, the task of branding is not as simple as its definition. And it can be especially troublesome in the hurly-burly environment of the Internet. In this seminar, excerpted from a presentation he made at the Xplor Marketspace '99 conference earlier this year, Ken Morris returns to the issue of designing an "e-marketspace" and presents the dos and don'ts of good branding strategies for the Web. -- Editor.

A Web site has to be consistent with the brand. Branding is really two things:

* Graphic and visual identity

* The values of the brand

One of the things that happens on the Web is that brands collide with other brands. Think of America Online as an example. How does your brand stand out when you're on the same desktop or the same screen as 15 or 20 other brands and there are ads flashing? Creating a visual identity that stands out from the clutter becomes really important in this kind of marketspace where identities just get lost if you're not careful. The other thing you're trying to do is create a feel. If you put your hand over the name of the site and click to drill down, do you still feel you are at that site or could you be anywhere? This idea of creating a visual identity down so that you're creating a feeling about the site is really quite important.

One thing that happened in the early days was that people thought, "This is the Web, something new. Let's get out there. Let's do something exciting." And what they did was jettison all the identity that was on their signage, on their letterhead, and on their products after they had spent millions of dollars building that identity. But actually, when you think about it, the Web is just another channel. The way you see the brand in the real world is the way you should see the brand in the virtual world. That's the reinforcement.

The whole key is to deliver whatever that brand value is in a novel way. A good example here is Dell. Dell has built its brand on direct personal service. At the Dell site you can literally go onto the factory floor and configure your whole computer. That to me is the way you evoke brand value. When you let people live the brand or work with the brand, what you're doing is manifesting the brand. And when they have the experience you want them to have, you're reinforcing the values of the brand at that Web site.

That's how the Web has become such a powerful vehicle for brand reinforcement. The good sites are the ones that are creating those applications -- sites such as Dell and Federal Express -- that are reinforcing brand value. It's really important to provide a consistent message with your collateral materials and your advertising. The fact is you're trying to create a sort of unique voice that breaks through the whole marketplace, and the consistency across all the media is what's important.

In fact, you would think one of the things that would really help a company would be its brand. But look at Barnes and Noble versus Amazon.Com. There's a company that had a tremendous brand, but it jumped into the game a little late and it still really can't catch up. But it's not leveraging the stores. If you look at the Barnes and Noble and the Amazon.Com Web site displays, they're exactly the same. What Barnes and Noble didn't do was say, if you pick out something, you can go down to the local store and provide extra services. It didn't link up with the leverage it had. It just did a copy-cat thing. But where's the advantage in going there if you can go to Amazon? You can't overlook the importance of branding and brand value.

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This tutorial is excerpted from a session given at the Xplor Marketspace '99 conference and exhibition, sponsored by by Xplor International in Atlanta earlier this year. The Marketspace conference focuses on the management of documents that support the transactions of business, primarily the generation and collection of money in cyberspace.

Xplor International is a worldwide, not-for-profit professional association representing 2,900 organizations that develop and use the technology of the U.S. $124-billion document systems industry. For more information, please visit the Xplor International web site by clicking on this link or call (310) 791-9521.