The Brand's The Thing
by Jonathan Jackson
Date: 8/22/02

How do you build a brand online? Of course every company wants an instantly recognizable brand name like Yahoo! or Amazon. At the same time, nobody wants to end up with a dot-bombed turkey like Pets.com or Furniture.com, and therein lays the challenge. Answering that question, and many more, is the aim of Cyberbranding.

To put it bluntly, this is an ambitious book. The author takes as her task not only the definition and study of online brands (a Herculean task in and of itself) but also every form of online communication touching on a brand. There are chapters on site design, market research, online advertising, affiliate marketing and even public relations. Phew.

While each of these topics could easily be a volume in itself, Breakenridge strives valiantly to bring a sense of order to the online branding landscape. Indeed, the subject of building and nurturing brands online has been a hot topic for some time. Hardly a day goes by that someone isn't touting the Internet as the best way to revive a moribund offline brand, or a cost effective way to launch a new brand.

Take, for example, the humble banner ad. Having hawked online advertising as the "ultimate direct response medium" in its early years, the online industry essentially set itself up for a fall. While click-through rates ("CTR") were initially exciting, the newness wore off until we reached the barely perceptible CTR of today. Now we hear nothing but stories about how distracting and even annoying banner ads can be.

Spinning around 180 degrees, the industry then said that online advertising was really about branding. Even if consumers don't click on a banner ad, the mere fact that they've seen the banner ad will have a beneficial impact on brand awareness. Oh, of course. The jury is still out on that one but the new "in your face" jumbo banner sizes seem to clearly indicate that the industry is moving toward branding.

And let's nor forget about e-mail. It is clear that e-mail marketing gets a better response than banner ads. But opt-in e-mail ads and other forms of permission e-mail (corporate and sponsored newsletters, Web site updates, order confirmations, personalized thank-you notes, etc.) can also enhance brand equity in several ways.

As the ultimate "push" technology, e-mail is virtually impossible to ignore. Branding can be achieved merely by having clearly labeled e-mail delivered to a subscribers' inbox on a regular basis. The subject line, too, can be used for branding purposes. Capable of including company logos and other marketing images, HTML-formatted e-mail is often preferred by marketers and publishers for its branding advantages over plain text.

Breakenridge also wisely points out that customer relationships are becoming an integral part, as well as an expression, of the brand. Traditionally, branding messages have been one-way communications, from marketer to mass audience. With e-mail, branding is conducted and reinforced through two-way communications between the marketer and the customer, resulting in an individual branding experience for each customer prospect.

At the end of the day, every company would like its brand to be synonymous with its product in the mind of the consumer. In the same way that people reach for a Kleenex, make a Xerox, or FedEx a package, online companies hope that people will eventually think of their brands and nothing else. We may be seeing the beginning of that as people Google (search for) an ex-beau or put (auction off) something on eBay. Naturally the end game is to catch the hearts and minds of the consumer, and Cyberbranding is an excellent way to begin that effort.