Branding

Did all of the marketing professionals hired to build brand names for Internet startup companies really believe that it could be done in Internet time? As we wait for the dot-com dust to settle before seeing who’s left, it’s fair to project that only individuals and companies who have applied solid offline marketing principles to the online world will survive. It’s not enough to blow $50 million on a flashy campaign in hope that revenue will follow. Gone are the days of dot-com overload during the Superbowl as are the jobs and investors that used to support those free-spending days.

A few years ago, Al and Laura Ries wrote down what any marketing person worth their salt already knew and practiced when they published the book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand. Some important lessons are worth repeating. Such as the “Law of Publicity: The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising.” In this chapter, the authors point out that you build a brand with publicity and then maintain it with advertising. Only well established, high-flying brands such as Coca-Cola and McDonalds can afford multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to protect their market share from competitors. For a dot-com startup, there is no brand to maintain and no amount of advertising can substitute for a bad customer experience or failure to deliver on your promise.

Consider the cost of customer acquisition as measured by Boston Consulting Group in their Shop.org study conducted last spring. They found that Internet pure play companies paid an average of $82 for each customer acquired online. Compare that to the groups that had the lowest customer acquisition costs for their online initiatives: bricks and clicks at $31 and catalog marketers at $11. The Internet isn’t something from outer space that can defy gravity; it works the same as other marketing channels and responds to the same principles that have been tried and true over the decades. Focus on the customer, deliver on your product or service promise, and encourage unbiased, third party evaluation of your offering.

Your product may not hit the mark the first time out, so be prepared for negative site reviews from scrutinizing media types or irate mail from unhappy customers. Be thankful for these and respond quickly. Here’s where Internet time counts. Quickly get back to these critics and try to win them back with redesigns, navigation changes, customer service improvements or policy revamping. If you succeed they will become some of your biggest supporters. We all know word of mouth is better than any advertisement and it doesn’t hurt if a satisfied customer happens to be a journalist that then writes a glowing review!

If you happened to catch one of the many Cyberbranding seminars I spoke at a few years ago, you remember the slides that showed the Travelocity.com branding strategy during my tenure as Director of Marketing. Travelocity.com spent more money on PR than on advertising in those days for this very reason; there is no shortcut to building a brand. Today with five years of brand building behind them, Travelocity.com has a much larger advertising budget they use to maintain their status as the number one online travel brand.

Five basic things that you can easily do before you invest in an expensive advertising plan include:

1. Hire a good PR firm and make yourself available for every interview, no matter how small the publication

2. Perform usability tests on your site before launch or redesign

3. Employ extensive use of online research to learn what site visitors like or hate. Continue to monitor this research over time.

4. Listen to your site visitors and make the changes they suggest as soon as possible

5. Let journalists know your site exists via grassroots postings on key sites related to your topic

So the next time you are tempted to base your advertising budget on competitive parity, remember to go back to basics and decide if you want to follow the Lemmings off the side of the cliff or if you should base your decision on what is right for your company and where you are in the product life cycle The Internet is the newest frontier, but the smart marketer will take the best tried and true offline methods for a successful future.

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