Digital Brand Identity

Relevance

brandbug — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:32:11 +0000

“We don’t actually want you to be successful…The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance.” — Google CEO Eric Schmidt to the online marketing industry.

Does Eric Schmidt scare you?

If you’re an online marketer, these words should scare you. You should be bloody frightened. Why? Because most tactics used by online marketers today have little or nothing to do with relevance. The blogosphere is filled with “easy tricks” to boost traffic in “no time.” Agencies are especially fond of touting their traffic-boosting “solutions.”

But the days of BSing online traffic promises are over. The wool could only be pulled over our eyes for so long. We bought it, we tried it, and now we’re in the hole. So what’s the way forward? Are marketers even necessary? Yes, but it will take a different kind of mind set.

The relevant interactive marketers of the future will understand what comprehensive business strategy really means. In the spirit of Apple and Google, they will become more like product managers–integrating their marketing tactics into the fabric of the website and its products. This means they will need to work ever more closely with all departments in the organization–from sales to design to IT.

This new holistic approach will put the focus on relevance rather than the games interactive marketers are playing now.

I’m confident relevant marketing will prevail. But it’s going to be a bloody ride before we get there. Hold on.

Question to ponder: what does branding have to do with relevance?

garbage in, garbage out

brandbug — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:49:49 +0000

Engineers love applying the above phrase to their own profession. Insecure marketers, on the other hand, would consider it good copy for a competitive ad — but god forbid use it when discussing their latest “strategy.” I have a New Year’s resolution for marketers: make some friends in engineering. They have their own problems, but self-criticism is not one of them. It’s got to work right, or you suck at your job. This has never been true for marketers. But as we try to innovate in the digital space, we will need to think more like engineers.

What if we applied the same critical thinking to our work that scientists do? How about actually taking a step back to analyze our work objectively? The problem is that many marketers were trained by reading their marketing text book as a kind of bible. This worked in the old media world where a system of rules guided us, but it’s not working in the wild west digital world. We desperately need more free, self-critical thinkers.

Long tail media buy and your ROI

brandbug — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:44:04 +0000

Ask a stranger about the websites he frequents. “Is that so,” you say. “I visit YouTube, Facebook and CNN.com all the time too!,” you exclaim, excited that a kindred interactive spirit exists. Online today, we have millions of kindred spirits, all floating around the same sites. Yes they change every year or two, but there seems to be a law of online human behavior—a sort of herd mentality—that causes us to gravitate to the same spots. The head/long tail graph below illustrates this phenomenon.

From entrepreneurs-journey.com

This means that traffic to the millions of second tear long tail sites is very minimal. For advertisers, this makes things especially difficult. Maybe you’ve just found a great community where your target demographic—let’s say stay-at-home mothers—is concentrated. In fact, the site is called At Home Moms – what could be better!? All ready to make a media buy, you go to compete.com and learn that traffic is hovering around 10,000 UMV. Shame upon shame, this will not drive the sales you’re looking for. And in fact, you can reach many more stay-at-home moms by buying an efficient short-term banner ad on behemoth Amazon.com. What’s more, the ROI is far better! Forget the long tail?

No, we should not discount the long tail just yet; unlike the behemoths, it holds the topic-based enthusiasts that can be key to your brand’s success. So instead of immediately plugging and chugging UMVs into your ROI formula, also factor in the unique audience you may be reaching. Consider the behavior patterns on the website that may generate greater brand engagement than an Amazon.com media buy. Of course, many if not most long tail sites will make no sense, so careful research is needed. I will write more on this topic, but there is much more to consider than UMVs when making a media buy and calulating ROI.

Forget about Facebook?

brandbug — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:00:22 +0000

“I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads in Facebook.” The words of Ted McConnell, Proctor and Gamble interactive marketing manager, at a conference last month according to a recent NY Times article on the pitfalls of social media advertising.

While a company spokeswoman said P & G is “committed to our strong relationship with Facebook,” I bet the manager’s statement probably more accurately reflects the true corporate sentiment. With numerous failed social media campaigns under their belts, interactive brand advertisers have got to be wondering: where do we go from here?

What is particularly frustrating to me is this cognitive dissonance between thought and action—and it’s not just P & G. On one hand everyone knows that their interactive brand marketing failing, yet they continue to blindly cling to 5 year old ideas about user engagement strategies.

If anything, brand advertisers’ recent experience in social media has taught them they actually are pretty clueless when it comes to consumer understanding. A great new starting point would be some basic analysis of online behavior. Why don’t companies fund research that helps them understand where and how their brands might resonate? Splashing stuff up to see what sticks is fun, but it’s going to get you fired in this economic climate.

You suck!

brandbug — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:22:33 +0000

According to a somewhat dated survey by Microsoft Research, a majority of online users reported that bad behavior has caused them to leave social media environments. The study posits that technological solutions are needed to solve this “massive” problem.

While MySpace was brokering a $500 Million deal with an old media company, they were probably too busy to pay attention to this report. A few web monkeys at Harvard seemed picked up on it though. Now eclipsed by the more user friendly Facebook, MySpace struggles to retain its once market-leading cohort of the hip and well connected. A large part of Facebook’s success can be attributed to the mitigation of bad behavior with a friend friendly strategy. Look at Microsoft’s survey responses to why bad behavior exists:

Anonymity is reason number one for naughtiness. What did Facebook do right? They eliminated this factor by requiring early users to use an authentic college email address. Now the community is more open, but the authentic ethos has not changed.

Brands should take notice of the move towards Facebook. Whereas MySpace continues to host flashy page-consuming ads that scream at you like an angry marketing executive trying to get numbers up for his yearly bonus, Facebook’s monetization strategy focuses more strongly on relevance and unobtrusiveness. In essence, they are friendly!

Online brand marketers should focus on developing a presence where good behavior is fostered. If you market where people are happy, they should have more positive associations with your brand. Those annoyingly splashy branded pages on you-suck-MySpace are not the future of digital brand building.

I’m with it, I’m hip.

brandbug — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:09:26 +0000

Ever log onto YouTube and see the sponsored video in the upper right corner? What a great way to engage your brand with hip younger demos! Right?! I have an awesome idea: make a contest where users can submit videos, rate the best ones, and win fantastic prizes. Yes?! Too bad these brilliant tactics were already used today on YouTube by a company called Embarq. And from what I can tell, it failed. See for yourself:

Thanks to interaction, brands are getting a lot more than they bargained for. Old ways of thinking are meeting the new consumer — and they are not connecting. Remember that episode in Austin Powers where Dr. Evil says to his son “I’m with it, I’m hip.”? The Dr. Evils of the marketing world are making a laughing stock of themselves in social media. Perhaps instead of paying that 51-year old consultant “ONE MILLION DOLLARS,” they might hire that 15-year old who just wrote “epic fail” in the video comments. I guarantee he’ll give you more insight. But no guarantee he won’t look at you like you’re “a fricking Frankenstein.”

Connecting

brandbug — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 15:10:47 +0000

The internet is a segmented place. Like a Victorian house, it has no dearth of walls. On one hand, this is a boon for brand marketers; they can target closed communities with precision. One the other hand, we must look at the natural trends and ask: are marketers fighting against a tide towards openness they can’t control? And is this really a bad thing? A new start-up from Brazil, Power.com, is aiming to connect the desperate social networking sites: “All your friends in just one place” they claim.

So what if the internet starts to open up, consolidate, and become more like one meta community? We are already seeing a trend away the many disparate online forums to more open blogs. And sites like BlogHer are connecting blogs into networks. I think this is only the beginning. As the web becomes more connected, brand marketers have an opportunity. They can facilitate these connections by bridging borders that consumers want to break. Brands that tap into people’s natural desire to be more connected across a segmented internet should find strong resonance.

Brand Three Point 0

brandbug — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:21:04 +0000

YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter—just to name a few of them—offer companies an important footing in the Wild West that is Social Media/Web 2.0. But as thousands of brands clamor to get the most Facebook friends, highest YouTube video views, and the most Twitter followers, are they getting lost in the crowd? I see the current brand footings as baby steps towards a larger strategy – one that will competely revolutionize how we interact with companies.

Such a future is hard to envision — and the possibilies seem limitless. That’s why we need new conceptual thinkers. Art is not a bad place to start for motivation:

But it is much more than a logo refresh that’s needed. Successful brands of the future will engineer interactive destinations that communicate with a depth of identity that goes far deeper than static logos. Not just a website, a Facebook fan page, or a viral video — but a blended system of media that interacts with consumers where and when they want it most.

Traditional brands are at cross-roads. They can continue to follow the trends—uploading their old logos onto Facebook fan pages, TV ads to YouTube— or, they can invest in bold and innovative strategies that are already incubating in yet unborn brands of the future. New insightful marketers are needed to envision these possibilities and work closely technical teams to realize them. The traditional brands that succeed will change their marketing department culture, developing creative ways to break free of the confines currently hindering the expression of an authenticity consumers increasingly crave.

Did the Internet Kill Harry & David?

brandbug — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:37:48 +0000

In Blog Schmog, Robert Bly writes “branding is dead or dying on the Internet, being replaced by (what else?) ROI-producing direct marketing driven by Google” (189). He goes on to quote fellow direct marketer Don Libey: “Shopping is a matter of word description. In other words, I will no longer associate buying pears with Harry & David” (189).

Are we really going brand-blind online? In one word, here’s why I think the answer is no: TRUST.

Trust is not going away. And the online world–even more so than print and TV–is founded on trust. Just notice all the “certified consumer safe” logos decorating online stores across the web. They are desperately clamoring for your belief in their legitimacy.

For fun, I put on my brand-blind and did a Google search for “order pears.” In the organic results, Harry & David did not show up first! What did? A few scraggly sites including:

Not very confidence inspiring. Apparently there are “no sales of pears in 2007!” Brand-blind still intact, I venture down to the next link:

Ah, much better! But why? My blunt brand-blind intuitive reasoning: the company has money to pay web programmers a lot of money to make things look nice. This means their revenue is high. Why is their revenue so high? Ok, brand-blind off….because they have build a reputable image that inspires people to buy.

This is all quite basic. But it is a starting point for what I hope will be a unique and informative exploration into the future of brand identity online. If Harry & David want to remain the go-to brand for pears, their brand strategy will need to increasingly reflect the new online platforms. The competition is just not quite up to 2008 yet, but they will be.

So here’s my answer to the original question: not yet.

Hello world!

brandbug — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 01:55:32 +0000

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