Online Branding, Kids Branding and Brand Building - MartinLindstrom.com http://martinlindstrom.com Brand extension Brand extension Brand extension Brand extension Brand vision Brand vision Brand vision Brand vision Brand vision Brand vision Brand vision Brand vision Contextual branding


As more and more media players surface, fewer and fewer consumer dollars are available to share among them. The result? Marketers make branding compromises in a desperate attempt to hit revenue targets.
It's wise at such times to recall the well-worn clichi and ask yourself: "Am I not seeing the forest for the trees?" It might be time to go on alert. I've written this article, and next week's, to help you see the forest -- and to help you avoid committing brand suicide.

A lot of the things I'm about to say are obvious -- you might even claim they're naove. But the fact is that I'm seeing more and more examples of brands whose builders appear to be systematically forgetting some fundamental brand-health issues and diluting their brands' position as a result.

In today's and next week's online-brand test, you'll have the chance to check out how well you've been concentrating on your brand. Today's test will ask you to check your site in five ways. Next week, the test adds five more. Be prepared. The questions are simple, but they are far from easy to solve.

1. Key message

According to all your stakeholders, your brand needs to communicate a host of things via its site. But tell me, is your core message clear to your Web site's audience? What three key messages should your site's visitors take away with them after having spent 10 minutes on your site?

2. Consistency

Consistency is especially important when it comes to navigation. You should ensure that your brand's core message is reflected consistently in your site's navigation, that consumers can rely on your communications consistency to navigate their way from page to page, from your real-world store to your site, from your cell phone strategies to your site, from your catalog to your site, and so on. In short, ensure that your consumer, at any point on your brand's communications continuum, knows without any doubt where to go and why to go there.

Another point: consistency is a fundamental branding requirement in every facet of your interactions with the consumer. Consistency ensures synergy between the brand's message across all media channels. How consistent is your brand's Web site message (its voice and utterances) with the message it promulgates in the stores? How consistent is your television message with its radio exposure? With its coverage in catalogs? Can you claim that at least 50 percent of the message -- its tone and its content -- is consistent across media channels? If yes, you're on the right track.

3. Synergy among media

Are the many media channels you deploy in your branding strategy coalescing and co-operating harmoniously? How successfully does your strategy refer customers from your stores to the Web, from the Web to the cell phone, from the cell phone to the stores... Can you claim that at least 70 percent of your media channels are working consistently with each other in exposing your brand to the consumer -- and vice versa?

4. Listening, learning, and reacting

A priority very close to my heart is that a brand not only "talks" but also "listens," "learns," and "reacts." Brands that are able to listen to consumer information, learn from the data, and react with the consumer intelligently will be winners (as I explain in Clicks, Bricks and Brands). Test your own brand. Assess how good you, as the brand-builder, are at listening to your consumers, capturing relevant information about them, learning from the data by mining the tons of information you gather and analyzing it -- and by reflecting your findings in intelligent one-to-one dialogue with the consumer. If you assess your ability to build your brand in this responsive fashion at around 5 out of 10, your brand is well on track.

5. Tone of voice

The tone of voice your brand adopts reflects two things: your ability to convey your brand's spirit and personality in written and verbal communication; and your ability to pitch your communication style appropriately for your audience. Too much information can complicate the language, destroying its ability to define the brand and defusing its core message. Pick five of your site's pages at random. Now ask an independent person in your audience to read them. His task will be to tell you whether the five pages manage, individually, to target his consumer needs and whether he believes the five pages are consistent with each other. In this part of the test, I'm afraid you'll need a score of 100 percent -- five out of five -- to pass.


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Last week, I discussed five aspects of your brand's online presence with the objective of ensuring that you're not on the way to committing online brand suicide. This week, I offer you five more questions for this online self-analysis. If you manage to answer yes to all the questions, your brand is well on its way to being able to sustain, and hopefully increase, its level of health.
But don't feel too desperate if you can't respond affirmatively to all five of these questions. Most companies are likely to fail this test, even though, as was the case last time, the questions are really very simple.

1. Match Consumer Expectations

What do your users expect from your site when they visit? Do they expect to gain more knowledge? To be able to purchase your product at a discount? To gain access to a wider range of products or certain information? To be entertained? You might know what you would expect from the site, but I would bet that your expectation is different from your audience's. My question is two-fold: Have you investigated what your consumer actually wants from your site, and, if you have, was your site at least 75 percent on point in meeting those expectations?

2. Give Them a Reason to Return

Amazon.com expects its customers to stay with it for at least 10 years. What is your expectation of your consumer lifespan? Are you delivering enough to re-attract your visitors time after time? Are you offering enough exceptional offers? Enough news? Enough exclusive data? Enough? Yes, it's important to attract new customers. But it's even more important to retain them, especially since retention costs about one-tenth of acquisition. What is your customer retention rate? Is it about 80 percent? If so, you pass.

3. Surprise Customers Positively

Imagine you were able to predict everything you saw on television today, everything you read in the paper, every movie's denouement. Would that not be boring? Now, after visiting your site once, would I be able to predict what it would offer me on my next visit? Or would I be positively surprised not only during my first visit but also on each subsequent visit? Surprising your customers in a positive way builds your brand by creating excitement and loyalty. Would you be able to surprise 50 percent of your audience every time they visit your site?

4. Keep Your Brand's Promise -- and Add a Bit More

If you promise to deliver within 48 hours, deliver within 47 hours. If you promise to accept product returns without any questions asked, return the money without asking a single question. If you promise to update your news section every day, update it every day. If you promise to answer any email inquiries within 24 hours, do it in 20 hours. Now, do you keep your promises at least 95 percent of the time?

5. Remove the Logo

In my latest book, "Clicks, Bricks and Brands," I discuss one of Coca-Cola's great marketing legends: its bottle. That famous bottle was designed so that no matter how many pieces it might be smashed into, each piece would be recognizable as having once been part of a Coca-Cola bottle. Keeping this principle in mind, remove all your logos from your site, remove all brand names, and then ask the consumer to visit your site and guess to which brand it belongs. If 70 percent of your visitors mention your brand, your Web site is on track. It means that you have managed to involve every communications element in your brand message, that you've translated every design detail, text inclusion, color scheme, and so on as meaningful contributors to your brand's consistent message. In theory, your logo should no longer be necessary to identify the brand.

So, how did you fare with the two-part test? If you've been able to respond affirmatively to all 10 questions, yours is among the 5 percent of Web sites that demonstrate a clear knowledge of branding. If you fared poorly in the test, my advice is that you urgently adjust your strategy -- restore your brand to health by getting your site on track. Why? Because your competitor is likely to have completed this self-examination, too.


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Now and then, I love to try to imagine where the Internet is going to take us next. So let's consider how the web might look a year or two from now. Of course, I wouldn't dream of peering further into the future; after all, just the year before it came into being, I would never have been able to imagine the World Wide Web. So with this disclaimer in place, let me try to sketch out what my crystal ball is showing me...

First, let's get used to the idea that every consumer will soon have his or her own web site. And when I say every, I mean every. In Europe and the U.S., we all have a personal identity number . every one of us. This will soon be the same on the Net. But it doesn't stop there. I also believe that every product, everything we buy, is bound to have its own web site. It follows that my next guess is that the 2.5 billion web pages that currently exist will easily increase to more than seven billion pages very quickly.

Let's take one product as an example: cars. Every car will some day soon have its own web site. I mean every vehicle, not just every make or model . every single car in the world.

Some years ago, I developed this site concept for Mercedes-Benz, but it never became a reality because of a lack of financial support. The idea was that each car's entire history would be stored for its lifetime on the web site. The car's license plate would stay the same and would become the key for anyone wishing to examine the car's past . investigate any damage it had sustained, note its previous owners, discover whether it had been stolen at some point . and gain access to an ordering service to purchase the car directly from the dealer.

To take the concept to its pragmatic extreme, you would be able, by using the license plate reference, to use the web to check out any car you'd seen on the street. So if you spotted some vehicle you just loved, you could track down the owner and make him an offer he couldn't resist.

Every web site would have layers of information allowing various levels of access to the vehicle's most intimate details.

The police might have access to all layers; the dealer and auto repair vendors might have access to another layer; the insurance company to another; the owner to yet another; and the general public to the most superficial layer of information. Such a system would spell the end of stolen cars being sold, debt-encumbered vehicles being passed on to unwitting buyers, and cars with engines subjected to unusual wear and tear being sold to the unwary.

Such sites would also allow you direct access to manufacturers and the facility from which to order vehicles manufactured to your specifications.

It's rumored that Volvo.com will soon release the world's first car to have been built and configured via the Internet. The site offers buyers the opportunity to choose their car's color . from 1,304,000 combinations . and of setting up specific options. Imagine lending your car to your son and being able to set the vehicle's maximum speed, one which Junior couldn't exceed while he was behind the wheel. You could also limit the distance the car is able to drive from a given point, say home.

Next week we'll continue our examination of the future as we consider what the picture will look like for us as human beings. If you were spooked by "1984," you might want to proceed with care. Stay tuned.


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The link between my fellow Dane Hans Christian Andersen and the Internet might be difficult to see at first, so let me explain the parallel between his work and e-commerce.

The works of the world-renowned author, who died over 125 years ago, exemplify the keys that need to click to create an e-commerce fairy tale today. Yet the basic principles of communication practiced as a matter of course by such classic storytellers are usually ignored by today's dot-com builders. Consequently, the conclusion to many a dot-com's tale of struggle has been tragic.

It's time to close the book on those unhappy endings. So let's examine how to redirect your endeavors and achieve the happy version of fairy-tale endings.

Hans Christian Andersen's more than 150 fairy tales featured three elements that are necessary for successful communication: consistency, access to intuition, and added value.

Consistency

Consistency develops brand literacy in the minds of your customers. Define and develop your brand's image and communication formula, and air it consistently. Your brand's identity is dependent on how recognizable it is, so make sure the verbal and visual languages through which it communicates are firmly controlled by the image formula you develop.

Let's think about good old Hans. You'd never be in doubt about the authorship of his fairy tales: His linguistic style is often obscured by translation, but I'm sure you'd agree with me that the plots and the characters and the moral premises that drive the tales are recognizable to you as Hans-Christian-Andersenesque.

Your exposure to such tales builds within you a literacy that allows you to recognize a fairy tale as such. Even though his fairy tales are different from one another, the ingredients that constitute them are the same, so you can identify them intuitively.

We could say that Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales stand as superb examples of consistent branding.

Intuition

I've already alluded to this invaluable brand-building ingredient. It's up to brand-builders to harness this human trait, and the way to do it is through consistency.

Once your brand's identity is recognizable to the consumer, you're on your way to enjoying the benefits of that consumer's intuitive understanding of where your products fit into his or her life. Customers don't need instruction manuals to comprehend your brand's message, just as they intuitively understand Andersen's fairy tales because they are tuned into and shaped by their culture's universal conditioning.

This access to collective response, which transcends class, economic, and educational distinctions, is available to brand-builders. In today's e-commerce, we call this "intuitive navigation," a concept that most e-commerce sites have never embraced.

Added Value

Every Hans Christian Andersen story offers a well-crafted moral message. The story's entertaining plot and familiar character types are the glue that holds fast the reader's attention to the page. The added value is in the message, cleverly wrought within an identifiable formula.

In e-commerce terms, the capacity to intrigue and compel the reader is called "stickiness." Your brand's site needs stickiness -- content that compels, holds the reader's attention, and wins it back during repeat visits.

Give your readers something to take home every time they visit. Most e-commerce sites could learn a lot from this principle. They often seem to forget that the consumer invests both time and money in surfing the Web, mostly with little or no gain in return.

So, has your brand's strategy achieved intuitive understanding among consumers? And what does the consumer gain from visiting your site? Not many sites have really got what it takes to be as sticky as one of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales.


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A recent AC Nielsen report shows that fewer Internet companies advertised in 1999 than in 1998, yet the money spent on web advertising in 1999 outstripped ad spending for 1998. This interesting study clearly indicates that the Internet isn't for everyone.

Many of the brands that thought the Internet represented their path to future prosperity in 1997 and 1998 evidently changed their minds, realizing that the Internet is best suited to brands with true interactive capabilities.

So what role should brands like Pepsi, MandM's and Palmolive have on the Internet? You can't buy, sample or play with the product online. Who would think of visiting their web sites, anyway? What would you expect to get out of visiting these sites?

Not every brand is suited to life on the Internet. In fact most FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) brands face huge challenges just finding an online niche for their products.

Perhaps one solution to easing FCMGs into online life might be found in old-world marketing. It's a marketing trick we've all encountered, and many of us have used: the promotional coupon!

Every year in the U.S., more than 100 billion coupons are handed out in supermarkets, via catalogs, through the mail, or on the street. The figure indicates that this trend, far from dying, is still going strong. In fact, the tactic has been thriving since the thirties, when it first saw daylight.

So what is it about coupons that appeals to consumers? How do they manage to hook the passerby with almost addictive power?

Some years ago, I was conducting a behavioral study in Copenhagen. My research brought me to the door of one housewife who had collected more than two hundred coupons, for all sorts of things, which she kept on her fridge. I had to ask her why she had several coupons for Pampers diaper samples. Her answer was "You never know." The lady was fifty-six years old!

Just as coupons made life easier for many marketeers around the globe in the past, it looks as if the concept might be offering brands like Pepsi, MandM's and Palmolive a new presence on the Net. The coupon is reborn, online.

Brightstreet.com is probably one of the first companies in the world to develop an online version of the coupon idea and the first to develop patented technology (currently pending) making the coupons trackable. Brightstreet.com's new service fills the traditional homepage with offers and coupons, each carrying the consumer's unique user identification within its bar code, all over each brand's web site.

One of brightstreet's first success stories involved PETsMART. The site experienced 9,000 coupon downloads in just one day! Interestingly, most of the coupons didn't promote the service itself. Yet more than 80 percent of the people activating the link to the PETsMART catalog downloaded the 250K file required to print a coupon.

The bar-coded coupons bearing each registered user's unique user identification are completely trackable, so marketing managers can retrieve data and analyze the relationship between the page view on the Internet and the real-life reaction out in the store. The marketer can ascertain what coupon works best, which offers are the most effective, and what product combination motivates a consumer to drive four miles farther for a $2 discount. All of this is valuable data that we have never before been able to gather with such specific application to individuals and their location.

And it's this intelligence-gathering potential that the coupon activates that makes this old-fashioned tool so relevant to online branding. Traditional FMCGs could soon have a serious and relevant role to play on the Internet as vehicles for coupon offers. They no longer have to just be there because their competitors are too.


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Just as the whole world was thinking that wireless application protocol (WAP) was "it," the honor has gone to short messaging service (SMS), or "texting" as some call it. Durlacher Research Ltd. predicts that by 2003 Europeans will be dispatching more than a trillion SMS messages a year, generating $12 billion in revenue for carriers annually.
What's more, as many as 8 percent of those messages might carry paid content in the form of either ads, which could cost marketers 3 to 5 cents each, or infograms, such as stock-price alerts, paid for by subscribers. Forrester Research contends that commissions and fees from such value-adding messages will contribute another $2 billion a year to carriers' coffers by 2003.

Aside from the interesting fact that consumers have demonstrated a preference for communicating using SMS, the really interesting issue for the world's marketers is the building and controlling of brands in the SMS medium. MTICKET, the world's first mobile ticketing system, has also been the first to signal future directions for mobile phone marketing use.

In partnership with nightclubs, such as the Ministry of Sound, MTICKET makes it possible to have electronic tickets delivered directly to the purchaser's mobile phone. Clubbers can visit ClubConnexion, the U.K.'s online dance community site, and buy discounted guest-list tickets. Once you've submitted your details to the site, including your mobile phone number, the booking confirmation and ticket numbers are sent directly to your phone as a text message. Then, at the nightclub's door, instead of waiting for ages while staff wade through mountains of paperwork to see if you're on the club's guest list, you simply show the attendants the MTICKET message on your mobile phone and head on in.

And this is just the beginning. Imagine the convenience of being able to carry your train or airline tickets as MTICKETs. You avoid the hassle of losing your ticket for a start -- unless, of course, you lose your mobile phone. Or imagine having just seen your favorite band in concert after having used an MTICKET to attend, and receiving a special CD offer, sent by SMS, just as you're on the way home.

The possibilities are endless, and so are the challenges for brands. Yet again, brands need to find a way of reflecting their core values on a limited canvas: the monochrome, text-only, tiny mobile display, an even more limited arena than that offered by the pre-World Wide Web, sans-graphics Internet of 10 years ago.

The big advantage and, simultaneously, the potential risk of the SMS channel lies in the intimacy of the handset. Every consumer has his or her own, and the marketing opportunities and dangers rest on this fact. The mobile phone could be an instrument for personalized, highly relevant marketing. But how will marketers achieve this ideal? The medium will test their ability to integrate their brands' message across all media, ensuring that the mobile phone emerges as another element in the chain reaction of one-to-one targeted messages.

Brands will need to transmit relevant messages at relevant moments; consumers will need to be in the mood to receive unsolicited information on their mobiles. For instance, they're more likely to be receptive to the CD offer within half an hour of exiting the concert than when they're running late for work the next day. You might be quite happy to be reminded about the latest Star Wars movie on DVD just as you're passing the video store on the way home. And you'd be pleased to receive a Red Bull offer as you enter the nightclub -- just show the message to the bartender for your free drink. You see, the brand's challenge isn't limited to the art of sending short, precise messages. The broader challenge is ensuring that the right message is received in the right context so that the brand communicates relevantly.

And the potential risk I mentioned? Many companies will see SMS as yet another medium for uncontrolled spamming, just as many have used email. SMS spamming will be regulated. Australia, for example, is close to establishing guidelines for such regulation. But regulatory controls will take time to evolve, and brands can do a lot of damage to themselves in the meantime. How would you feel about receiving the same beer brand's message six times a day for two weeks? I'm quite sure you'd boycott the brand for life!

So, as in any other direct-marketing medium, the balance between creativity, message, timing, and media context is the key to branding success. The mobile phone is yet another example of the enormous brand-building potential that's opened up to marketers over the past six months. Another channel certainly -- and definitely another challenge.


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Did you know that more than 600 million people are projected to have mobile or cell phones within three years? Most will have WAP (wireless application protocol) access. Most will be in Asia. And once these forecasts see fruition, the days of Internet dominance will be over because there will be more wireless Internet users than fixed-line users.

I remember when the Berlin Wall came down over a decade ago; that event ushered in some golden days for advertising agencies and other businesses. They all raced into eastern Europe to capture the untouched market, a market with no brand clutter, no brand preferences, and a big desire for brands. A marketer's dream!

And I was one of those who raced east. But when I introduced my computer to some of the local manufacturers in order to reveal what the web was all about, I couldn't connect. Not because they didn't have a phone line, but because all their phone lines were digital! They were miles ahead of the rest of Europe because they didn't have to establish an old-fashioned copper-cable infrastructure.

There's a parallel here between the eastern European market then and the emerging Asian markets now, especially if you consider China. The only difference between the Eastern Bloc and China is one billion people, all of them with a wireless web connection.

But in a market where no marketing rules have been created (these are the preserve of China's major cities and special economic zones), where branding still is virgin territory, and where a wireless web is just as natural for its users as a web with wire is for us, new ways of thinking are bound to surface.

Just as the advertising and consulting industries have struggled in the past few years to establish new business platforms to cope with the interactive age, the old world (meaning the United States and the rest of the Western world) generally will struggle to keep up with the innovative thinking that will feed the new wireless generation and that will inform the building of wireless brands.

An illustration of this issue can be seen in the Europe versus the United States m-commerce affair. While the United States was focused on establishing the dot-com culture, Europe was busy moving to the next stage and becoming the mobile dot-com experts.

Besides indicating that the center of excellence is likely to move from the United States to Europe, I am also suggesting that a third party will soon surprise the current players. And that third party is Asia. As well as being more advanced in certain m-disciplines, Asian technocrats are likely to be forced into advancing the handling of wireless communications and into creating and understanding wireless branding and the opportunities it creates.

Just remember: The values you are born and raised with are 10 times easier to understand than those you have to adapt to. With m-commerce likely to be born in Asia, that market is bound to lead wireless marketing with fluency and adeptness.

The rest of the world is already years behind do-co-mo (Do Communications Over the Mobile Network). Yes, some of you might know the technology behind WAP because it is HTML-based. But, hello! What does that mean when six million Japanese users adopt the new system? More than one million written messages are sent every hour.

The latest interface in the iMode series is a video camera, so you finally can see to whom you are talking on your mobile phone. Oops! I mean the do-co-mo phone. And guess what? You can now even download or stream your favorite karaoke songs along with vision via the phone . in stereo!

Most impressive of all, it took the Japanese people only nine months to get where they are today! And Japan is not the only player: Korea is already well on its way, introducing electronic m-payments that enable you to pay for your bus and train rides using your mobile phone without even having your phone switched on! And, of course, you can use it to check timetables as well.

Asia is well on its way to being the new wireless m-generation. And I think the likelihood that it will become the first m-branding generation is just a phone call away.


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E-commerce is growing exponentially, and e-tailing sites are mushrooming around the globe. The consumer is faced with an infinitely swelling array of choices and, in the process, is becoming confused by it all.

One outcome of this proliferation is the growing need for shopping assistance tools. As more classic e-commerce sites appear on the Internet, the need for tools to help consumers navigate their way through the maze of choices is growing.

Many people might think online auction sites would be the answer to this shopping dilemma. The auction at least defines market price according to consumer demand.

But the fact that more than 200 new auction sites appear daily on the Net makes it tough for most of these sites to generate the traffic and, consequently, the auction activity needed to ensure attractive offers. Because the race to capture consumers is spread among so many competitors, there is not enough interest on every site to stimulate the market and establish price. Moreover, with more than 20,000 auction sites available on the Net, comparing price and assessing each site's selection and range have become baffling tasks for the individual.

While auction sites have garnered a lot of attention, a range of new online shopping concepts has quietly been born. The emergence of these tools indicates consumer confusion with the plethora of choices now available on the Net, and it signals that auction sites are not necessarily the only means of making shopping on the Net easier.

The new shopping agents assist with personal shopping. They are tools that virtually and continually roam aisles and riffle through racks, looking for items to fit the individual shopper's tastes, needs and budget.

These always-online shopping browsers float on screen while shoppers surf from e-tailer to e-tailer. Examples of such sites are entrypoint.com, NeoPlanet, and RUSure. They advise individual shoppers on the best brands, and they compare products and negotiate prices.

Is this our first glimpse of real infomediaries? These sites are able to do all the things we'd expect of them. As independent third parties, they track consumer habits and negotiate on behalf of the shopper.

The real benefit of these shopping agents is that, because they can roam the Net so comprehensively and investigate against consumer criteria so thoroughly, they are able to recommend solutions to the consumer that he or she may never have come up with alone.

These personal shopping tools establish consumer brand loyalty by demonstrating an understanding of the consumers for whom they work. And this is a factor that promises to influence the shopper more strongly than even price or selection.

Most Internet site competition is established on price. But when sites are forced to match prices, when they all claim to be the cheapest, the price competition concept dissolves. Without comparisons to be made, the meaning of "cheapest" disappears.

And that's the stage at which auction sites now find themselves. It's a stage that demands a change in the direction of their marketing principles if they want to avoid finding themselves on the auction block.


]]> General Martin Lindstrom
2-19-2002


Let's discuss a product category that's excruciatingly boring: rolling bearings and seals. I want to look at SKF, one of the world's largest manufacturers of rolling bearings and seals.

I don't know about you, but I couldn't think of a less sexy and uninspiring product line. If you didn't know this business or the brand, you'd think (when you visited SKF's site) you'd arrived at the wrong URL. SKF not only tells you about the company's support of one of the world's largest rock shows and how SKF products help their clients make delicious biscuits, it also has a special postcard section. The SKF postcard facility allows you to download cute love letters or birthday postcards that you can send to your friends. For example, one of the postcards illustrates a couple who have just been married and are now kissing each other. The text reads, "We reduce friction to help you move the world forward." Another postcard bears two hearts created with an assemblage of rolling bearings. The title on this one reads, "You make my heart spin."

Keep in mind: This is a rolling bearings and seals company I'm talking about. Not Lewis, or Diesel, or Nike... but SKF!

Why must business-to-business (B2B) branding be as boring as the companies they represent? Why is B2B considered second-tier branding, requiring cursory, dubious management?

Companies are recognizing that their value doesn't lie only in turnover, assets, and new products, but also on the strength of their brands. They're responding to this realization by dedicating energy to annual reports and press releases. Hey, hang on. Are annual reports and press releases the alpha and omega of brand exposure? Far from it, as well you know. For some reason, most companies still favor these over the extensive menu of branding tools that are available.

A pure "business" person no longer exists. We -- you and I -- are all private people with emotions and feelings that allow us to be just as affected by branding when we're at home as when we're at work. If you have a bad experience with a company at home or hear something negative about it when talking to your neighbor, would you forget the information as soon as you got to work? I doubt it. We're all subject to information intake across a range of social strata and within countless emotional contexts. This human factor opens the door for B2B branding.

Know what? I'm not in the market for rolling bearings, but if I were to become a decision maker in this area, I'd choose SKF products. Why? Because the company engages in human communication. It doesn't treat me like a boring businessman. It treats me like a person, using personal and relevant communications with twists of humor. I don't need to ask you to consider how boring SKF's site could be (you'd fall asleep before finishing this column). Just visit SKF's competitors (or 90 percent of the rest of B2B brands on the Internet, for that matter), and you'll fall asleep before you've scrolled past the pictures of their factories, CEO mug shots, and archives of their last 400 press releases.

That's not brand building. SKF's tactics are. SKF's communication not only reaches my brain, it touches my heart. That's what branding's all about, even if you're communicating with consumers who are wearing suits.


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Let's discuss a product category that's excruciatingly boring: rolling bearings and seals. I want to look at SKF, one of the world's largest manufacturers of rolling bearings and seals.

I don't know about you, but I couldn't think of a less sexy and uninspiring product line. If you didn't know this business or the brand, you'd think (when you visited SKF's site) you'd arrived at the wrong URL. SKF not only tells you about the company's support of one of the world's largest rock shows and how SKF products help their clients make delicious biscuits, it also has a special postcard section. The SKF postcard facility allows you to download cute love letters or birthday postcards that you can send to your friends. For example, one of the postcards illustrates a couple who have just been married and are now kissing each other. The text reads, "We reduce friction to help you move the world forward." Another postcard bears two hearts created with an assemblage of rolling bearings. The title on this one reads, "You make my heart spin."

Keep in mind: This is a rolling bearings and seals company I'm talking about. Not Lewis, or Diesel, or Nike... but SKF!

Why must business-to-business (B2B) branding be as boring as the companies they represent? Why is B2B considered second-tier branding, requiring cursory, dubious management?

Companies are recognizing that their value doesn't lie only in turnover, assets, and new products, but also on the strength of their brands. They're responding to this realization by dedicating energy to annual reports and press releases. Hey, hang on. Are annual reports and press releases the alpha and omega of brand exposure? Far from it, as well you know. For some reason, most companies still favor these over the extensive menu of branding tools that are available.

A pure "business" person no longer exists. We -- you and I -- are all private people with emotions and feelings that allow us to be just as affected by branding when we're at home as when we're at work. If you have a bad experience with a company at home or hear something negative about it when talking to your neighbor, would you forget the information as soon as you got to work? I doubt it. We're all subject to information intake across a range of social strata and within countless emotional contexts. This human factor opens the door for B2B branding.

Know what? I'm not in the market for rolling bearings, but if I were to become a decision maker in this area, I'd choose SKF products. Why? Because the company engages in human communication. It doesn't treat me like a boring businessman. It treats me like a person, using personal and relevant communications with twists of humor. I don't need to ask you to consider how boring SKF's site could be (you'd fall asleep before finishing this column). Just visit SKF's competitors (or 90 percent of the rest of B2B brands on the Internet, for that matter), and you'll fall asleep before you've scrolled past the pictures of their factories, CEO mug shots, and archives of their last 400 press releases.

That's not brand building. SKF's tactics are. SKF's communication not only reaches my brain, it touches my heart. That's what branding's all about, even if you're communicating with consumers who are wearing suits.


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There's a misconception in some quarters about B2B branding. It contends that the principles of brand building suddenly don't apply or aren't needed once B2B communications replace B2C messages.

It seems that B2B communications are governed by a "Why should I bother?" mentality. Businesses aren't emotionally driven, they're not brand-conscious, they buy on price.

Because of this erroneous assumption, most B2B web sites look alike. In fact, differences between them hardly exist.

Now ask yourself this. When we go to work, do we hang our emotions and quality awareness on the coat hanger with our jackets? Of course we don't. So why is brand building forgotten the very minute the teams behind these B2B company web sites begin to develop them?

Recently, I was invited to judge an international web competition. Just for fun, I conducted a little survey when visiting the 100 B2B web site entrants. In 23 percent of the cases, the home page included a photo of the company headquarters: 19 percent included a handsome portrait of the CEO; 29 percent of all sites used a "hand shake" photo, and 32 percent used a photo of two suit-clad figures engaged in serious conversation. How much more clichid can you get? Just about the only characteristic distinguishing these sites from one another were the brand names that owned them.

We have to remember that we are still human beings even though we are acting on behalf of our companies. We still seek confidence, trust, consistency and professionalism in the partners we want to work with. So why do we forget the things we would normally do instinctively to establish confidence? You can't tell me that a stock photo of two hand-shaking business people establishes your trust.

Brand building on the Net has to be handled in exactly the same way as traditional brand building. And the principles we know so well from B2C branding will also work, in most cases. These include: graphic design, navigation, the copy's tone of voice, downloading time, feedback quality, picture quality, consistency and integration with other off/online activities.

All these parameters build a brand. A logo doesn't do the trick alone. Companies with personality prove themselves to be winners time after time. Personality displays a difference, distinguishing a company from others. In addition, personality and individual thinking should be reflected on the site. The company personality should be apparent in the copy; it should add the human touch we all respond to, no matter what hat we are wearing when purchasing a solution.

The situation I'm describing is similar to that in 1995, when the quality of branding on a B2C web site was similar to that faced by B2B sites today. The excuse in 1995 was that it wasn't possible to replicate the branding identity you could achieve in brochures and television commercials. Well, it was possible. We just hadn't figured out how to translate branding identity to the web medium at the time.

So forget the clichis. And forget about using the excuse we heard five years ago. You know branding is more than a logo. Just, remember one thing... We are all human beings.


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U.S. companies have been dumping the ".com" from their names since the suffix became a liability rather than an asset.

Remember the good old days (not so long ago!) when everything was ".com"?


The advertising during last year's Super Bowl didn't include a single promotion without a URL.


There was a time when if you didn't have a ".com inc." somewhere in your advertising copy, your company would have been perceived as out-of-date, behind the times, not with it.


And, of course, every company with a purely dot-com background added the ".com" suffix to its name to make sure it was gaining maximum leverage from its attractive heritage.
I'm not proposing that the ".com" suffix is dead. What I'm observing is that although once a seemingly necessary part of company nomenclature, it is far from being "in" today.

What's in a Name?

Over the past months a number of dot-coms have started deleting the ".com" from their names. InfoSpace, Yahoo!, and Excite have all, during the past half year, dropped the ".com" endings in favor of brick-and-mortar names.

So has this decision by various companies been purely coincidental, or has it been part of a larger strategy?


You might argue that by eliminating the ".com" ending from your company name, you avoid some of the bad will that's currently being reflected in press commentary.


Perhaps discarding the ".com" allows your company to be taken more seriously.


You might also observe that the ".com" ending is now superfluous, since consumers take its presence for granted and are able to guess a company's URL by following their assumptions.


Yet another possibility is that because the ".com" is perceived by many consumers and businesspeople as representing a business-to-consumer (B2C) priority, rather than a business-to-business (B2B) one, it confuses a potentially large target group.
The reality is that many companies are desperately trying to rid themselves of their pasts by deleting the ".com" from their names. But will that change anything?

Here's another argument to consider, one I find more relevant for you to take into account when deciding whether to keep or drop your ".com" tag.

The ".com" in your name generally no longer adds any value to your company image. There's nothing novel, special, extra, or especially desirable inherent in the term. Boasting ".com" is like advertising "color television" with a motel room or "stereo radio" with a car. In the first place most televisions are color, and all radios are in stereo; in the second place everybody already has one.

Time to Get Over It

So where does this leave us?

Well, it brings me back to an issue I discussed some articles ago. Having a ".com" or other URL is a must. Consumers are brainwashed with the ".com" ending. Actually, research by ACNielsen shows that more than 70 percent of users remember URLs whether the address suffix is ".com," ".net," or ".org."

The trend is obvious. Sound-equipment manufacturers forgot all about the big deal of stereo some years ago. We've expected television to be the color variety for some time now. And the time has come for dot-com companies to forget about their ".com" infancy.

Goodbye, Baby.com. You're welcome to enter the world of adult companies.


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Over the past three months, the list of brands that have either disappeared completely or exhibited their weaknesses in the marketplace (by firing employees and reducing marketing activity) is a lengthy one. With stock prices falling, jobs being cut, and salaries being renegotiated, even some of the world's most-recognized brands are struggling.
In this atmosphere of insecurity, we need to see secure values expressed. Just two years ago, values such as innovation and progress were mandatory parts of every brand platform. Old-fashioned values -- tradition, solidity, being classic -- were abandoned in favor of pioneering originality.

Now the brand-building picture has flipped 180 degrees. Brands need to communicate every possible signal of solidity. Brands must be here to stay; they must be able to offer consumers familiarity and permanence. In a world where everything changes minute by minute, often monstrously, humans need to be able to identify solid reference points. For the consumer, the more solidity the better.

And it's clear that more and more companies are recognizing this fact and are in the midst of reconsidering their brands' existing platforms. So how will we see brand builders filling the security vacuum that consumers need to see filled?

Well, first, it's interesting to note that media plans have been slowly changing direction, away from a more-and-more online approach toward a more-and-more offline approach. Why? Because, instinctively, consumers trust older, traditional media more than they trust new media channels. A recent survey conducted by ACNielsen shows that consumers trust the newspaper as a medium four times more than they trust the Web. The Web, according to a CNN/Time survey, is the least-trusted medium of all.

In addition to the qualities of solidity and permanence, consistency is going to be an important trend in all marketing activities. When brand builders use the same well-known signals, symbols, terms, and illustrations to communicate their brands' values, year after year, consumer trust in brands is built. Most of us don't have the patience for careful attention to consistency -- and this, unfortunately, partly explains why campaigns and brand images change more frequently than they should.

Consistency and the reflection of solid values, solid opinions, and solid views on life are qualities that help brands establish trust. In short, it's time for brand builders to get back to basics. Just as we had to force ourselves to be innovative a year ago, we now have to force the quality of patience into brand building. In many ways, you could say, the trend marks the resurgence of bricks and mortar -- the solid side of brands, the side that's here to stay.

So how is this trend going to affect your brand? You'll find the answer by asking your customers. Ask them whether they feel your brand stands for something solid, something that can survive crises. Their responses are likely to give you some serious food for thought. And their responses should trigger discussion about what direction you believe your brand should take over the next couple of years. Your brand may well have difficult times to weather.


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Tell me: How come most content on most Web sites is written the same way on every page? Visit Yahoo!, and you'll see that there's absolutely no difference between the tone of voice of Yahoo! Finance and that of Yahoo! Personals. The writing style, the graphics, and the icons are the same.
Yes, you might say, we need to see Yahoo!'s brand values expressed consistently from page to page and from section to section. But do we really need that sameness?

This sameness was a prerequisite in the "good old days," when you were creating brochures, for example. You needed clear consistency and uniformity from page to page. Today's billboard campaigns need consistency between displays so that all side-of-the-bus ads and all billboards are the same -- and are therefore legible to the masses of passersby.

But the Web is different, and its difference should put question marks on some of our golden rules of advertising.

Now, how would my argument manifest itself in practice? Simple. It would appear as targeted copy. You would target your writing to your specific audience. The vast majority of Web pages, just like the billboards, still try sending uniform messages -- but to nonuniform segments.

So, if Yahoo! were to follow this targeting guideline, a finance expert would write to a finance expert, a person who understands the dad with an interest in finance would write to the dad with an interest in finance, the single woman looking for a husband would write to... Well, you get it. Of course, not everyone has writing skills. But a representative of your target audience certainly has an understanding of that audience, because he or she is the audience. A copywriter can fix the details. We're talking about being direct.

My second question is, How come the icons are the same on all pages? Now, don't tell me about brand consistency again. A brand can have many faces -- and often does -- and still be strong and clear.

Visit MSN, and you'll see there is absolutely no graphical difference between pages. The icons in MSN's WomenCentral section are the same as those used in its sports pages. The graphics are exactly the same in all locations because some brand manager decided to go ahead with a uniform, safe, and easy template. You can't tell me that there's value in a uniform look when it's dealing with such different audiences.

However, the value of a targeted look would be great. If the tone of voice and the graphic style of a brand were informed by the audience being addressed, the contact with that audience would gain relevance and meaning.

What usually happens, though, reflects the habit of sad compromise apparent on the MSN and Yahoo! sites, and on most other sites. Most branding people seem stubbornly incapable of comprehending a crucial fact: Being direct means communicating successfully in a world that no longer offers brand builders a uniform audience.

So here is my suggestion: Walk through your site, and note the different audiences you're currently trying to communicate with. Then start from the audience end and work backwards. Ask your audience segments to supervise your copy rewriting and your graphics redesigning so that you achieve communication tools that each audience finds appealing. Graphic consistency is still possible. But the most visible point of attraction needs to be your target-directed message. That's what the Internet is all about, isn't it?


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I have two simple questions for you. How good is your brand? Is it the best or what?

Well, I guess this leads to those classic immeasurables... When is your brand good enough? When do you decide that your brand has reached the highest possible level? When can you afford to be truly satisfied with your brand?

You might be the best in your industry -- you might even be in the lucky position of having the strongest brand in the world according to some analyses. But the burning question remains: Is "good" good enough?

Benchmarking provides a way to figure out how good your brand can possibly be. Let me take you through a scenario.

First, as discussed in my article "Full 360-Degree Branding," the concept of 180-degree, or superficial, branding -- placing a logo in the right corner of a brochure or on a TV commercial or web site -- is fatal to a brand. "Quick" branding doesn't exist. I likened it to painting the roof of your house in order to repair the holes. On the surface, the roof would appear to be intact, but just beneath lie the holes.

Branding is about integrating a brand's whole philosophy into its every utterance and appearance. The tone of voice, the graphic design, the signage, the downloading time, the music, the staff -- everything. If you agree with this -- if you agree, for example, that a trip to Disney World thrusts the consumer into a stronger branding arena than that offered by a Disney ad (because the Disney spirit and philosophy is infused into every aspect of the trip) -- then you will agree with the philosophy of benchmarking: finding a point of reference from which quality or excellence is measured.

Let's take a brand like Disney World and analyze how benchmarking could be used to ascertain the quality of the consumer experience. The total Disney World experience is made up of lots of small experiences that compose the full brand picture. As far as the consumer is concerned, we could break the total experience into these four introductory interface experiences: the decision to visit Disney World in the first place; traveling to the park; entering the park; and the greeting the consumer receives from Disney.

First comes the decision about where to go on the weekend. For this, a brand needs to have stamped its awareness into the consumer's mind. In terms of awareness, Pepsi and McDonald's are leaders. Awareness comes with an impression of an overriding reputation. What will your brand's dominant reputation be for? Quality, like Barnes and Noble or Hewlett-Packard? Convenience? Family-friendliness?

Second, traveling to the park. Easy access will be the aim. Hertz airport kiosks spring to mind as offering easy access: They're conveniently located and easy to find. McDonald's also provides a well-beaten and easy-to-follow path to its doors.

Third, entering the park. Some of the world's leading airports, like Hong Kong's, Copenhagen's, and Malaysia's, would probably offer examples of a pleasant, crowd-pleasing, well-controlled entry.

Fourth, the greeting. Friendly and casual greetings, inspired by Wal-Mart-type or Club-Med-type personalities might be the comparative measure. Purchasing the ticket may be inspired by Hertz procedure and mien.

Do you get the point? Being a top brand isn't about being the best in one category. It's about being the best in all the details. Together, these create the full brand reputation. Try it yourself. Include all the elements, all the experiences, all the routines that create the full impression of your brand, whether your product is a motor vehicle, a grocery item, or a toy, and then benchmark your brand with the best in the business within each of your brand's consumer-contact categories.

I'm sure it'll raise questions on how good your brand really is. And if, after the exercise, you can still claim that your brand's the best in the world, I'd find more veracity in your conviction.


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I don't blame you if you think there aren't any more startups left -- but there are. Now, more than ever, you can establish the brand you've dreamed of. It's cheap. It's easy to harness communications channels. Consumers are keenly attentive to anything new.

Cheap? How can you establish a dream brand if you're not equipped with a wallet as heavy as Coca-Cola's and a communications network as expansive as AOL Time Warner's?

There are plenty of things you can do that don't cost a fortune.

Too many people think the secret of success lies in the logo. It doesn't. Don't fly into a panic and spend your money on logos, letterheads, and beautiful brochures. You'll only please your printer. Most communications today are digital. If you must spend, spend on digital letterhead. It costs a fraction of what the "real stuff" costs and is just as impressive. Don't tie yourself up in knots developing that logo, either. Some of the most successful companies' logos are hardly logos at all. They merely spell out the entity's name and became powerful signatures for the brands with time -- think Microsoft, Gap, Fox...

Instead of cash, invest financial and intellectual resources in your marketing plan. Develop a unique business concept that makes sense from the beginning. My plumber managed to create an interesting concept around his business by teaming up with competitors. He knows how frustrating it is for customers to be unable to get hold of a plumber in an emergency. He developed a plumber portal that shares 15 plumbers' schedules. All these guys' customers now have online access to a backup plumber, recommended by their usual tradesperson. Did my plumber lose business? On the contrary, his own and his contacts' clientele grew, as word spread that the site was a resource for harassed householders needing plumbers, pronto.

Forget about testing your business concept on friends. Even if they can really offer insight, their acumen will be compromised by a desire to protect and be polite to you. Instead, spend energy approaching people you don't know. People who couldn't care less about telling you your idea's no good. People who are your potential customers.

A marketing plan is essential to success. But eliminate any fantasies of full-page color ads, TV spots, and radio commercials. You can't afford it. My advice varies depending on your industry. In general, I don't believe in traditional ads for startups, unless the company has something really interesting to offer.

Instead, optimize your ways of being found: sign up with the Yellow Pages a year in advance, if possible, so your business is visible the day it launches; optimize your site with all the search engines; make sure there's awareness abroad of your place in the scheme of things. You never know, a story might break in which your role and/or opinion might be relevant. Be discoverable by, accessible to, and familiar with journalists and the public before Day One. These steps are logical and much more critical for startups with no marketing budget than any expensive ad could be.

What works repeatedly is public relations and guerilla marketing. When, for example, most of Electric Artists' promotional work for Christina Aguilera was on the Web (in chat rooms, where new artists are talked up), buzz was created. According to Electric Artists, Internet communities are the best medium for spreading news and building buzz. Users and participants want to discover things on their own. They hate being overmarketed to. Electric Artists started buzzing Christina Aguilera months before her first album went on sale. By the time her album hit stores, teenagers from Seattle to Savannah were talking about her. She soared to number one. Electric Artists isn't a startup, but what it did any startup can do: stir up buzz. Cost? Absolutely nothing.

The rules for starting a new business are simple. Don't spend all your time on the logo and don't spend all your money on expensive marketing. Consider alternatives. Start with a concept so brilliant your business can almost run without marketing. Optimize traffic as early in the process as possible. Then, begin the guerilla work. It's priceless yet nearly free. It will build your brand in a way no ad can, for a much more manageable price.


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Last week, in "Brand + Brand = Success?" I began discussing co-branding and its benefits. This week, I'd like to bring some of last week's theory to life by sharing a couple of co-branding stories with you.

Some years ago, the American Marketing Association produced a study with an interesting result. In a consumer survey on co-branding, 80 percent of respondents said they would be likely to buy a digital-imaging product co-branded by Sony and Eastman Kodak. However, only 20 percent of respondents claimed they would buy the product if it were branded by Kodak alone, and only 20 percent said they would buy the product if it carried only the Sony brand.

The Kodak/Sony example indicates the weakness, or lack of credibility, in each firm's brand when considered separately. What it also illustrates is a brand synergy of potentially staggering dimensions. There's no doubt in my mind that technology sector is where the really enduring and valuable co-brands of the future will develop.

Unfortunately, not all examples are as promising as the Kodak/Sony one. Take ATandT and British Telecom's recent alliance, Concert. Launched on July 26, 1998, it was backed by $10 billion and two of the world's most respected telcos. The alliance failed in less than two years and closed only months ago, leaving everyone doubtful about the value of co-branding and alliance ventures.

But before drawing any drastic conclusions, let's review the three co-branding ground rules I discussed last week: The relationship has to provide equal value for all parties; the values of both brands must match; and your brand relationship has to be easily understood by you and your customers. In fact, your customers need to be able to understand your alliance or co-brand instantly.

Bearing this in mind, let's consider the ATandT/British Telecom alliance. Do you understand what that alliance was all about? I don't. Was it an attempt by ATandT to create a global telco network? Was it British Telecom's way of creating a new global brand? Or was it a way to create new global products, such as global phone numbers? The answers you receive to these questions would depend on whom you asked. Everyone will have a different take on the alliance's purpose. The reality, however, was that only a few products ever appeared on the global scene that would have indicated what the alliance was all about.

By now you probably would agree with me that co-branding has nothing to do with budget, the strength of the brands individually, or the size of the businesses concerned. But it has everything to do with synergy between the brands. A co-branding strategy or an alliance strategy needs to exhibit fundamental shared values at three levels:

The functional value level: What does the brand partnership offer the customer?


The expressive value level: What does the brand partnership says about its customer?


The central value level: What do the brand partnership and the customer share?

If you've been able to forge an alliance for which you can find satisfactory answers to the above questions and if you believe the partnership achieves the three ground rules discussed last week, you're way ahead of most co-branding attempts around the globe.

Co-branding might sound simple, because we're familiar with and understand each of the brands involved in partnerships. But the wedding of successful brands doesn't necessarily guarantee that the partnership will grow as a successful marriage. In many ways, brands are like people: They represent values and viewpoints. You know from the real world how difficult it is for married couples to reconcile their values and viewpoints and to stay together. Half of the world's marriages break down, and all but 10 percent of brands fail to maintain their co-branding partnerships. So, without any doubt, there's space for substantial improvement. And, needless to say, you'll see substantial savings in your marketing budget if you marry the right brand the first time.


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Is co-branding hype, or can it forge a path to brand stardom?

A McKinsey study saying co-branding ventures have grown over 40 percent indicates that co-branding is as much practice as it is theory. Do co-branded ventures really achieve the positive synergy participants seek? Or does only one brand end up the winner in these partnerships? Have any brands been winners at all?

Before sharing my opinion on what I believe works and what doesn't, let's briefly define the topic. This article doesn't presume to make you a co-branding master in five minutes. Its purpose is to signal that there are dozens of co-branding categories, each representing challenges, experiences, and guidelines you should be aware of before developing your own co-branding strategy. "Co-branding" means more than joint promotion. The term covers several areas of branding. It also refers to joint ventures, alliance programs, ingredient co-branding, value endorsement co-branding, and complementary competence co-branding. Without wanting to deter you from reading on, it's important to determine which category your brand promotions belong in. Here's a quick introduction to two of the most popular categories.

In its purest form, co-branding embraces a collaborative venture designed to advance the interests of two or more parties in a considered, strategic fashion. Legally, the parties concerned are independent entities and their intention is to create something new -- a product, a service, or an enterprise -- the scope of which falls outside their individual areas of capability or expertise. The IBM/Intel, Diet Coke/NutraSweet, and BP/Mobil deals are good examples of pure co-branding. Don't confuse alliances with co-branding. British Telecom and ATandT's Concert, Star Alliance, and OneWorld are alliances. These collaborations all create new "master brands."

Over 90 percent of co-branding ventures fail. Half go under because three simple rules were not observed. If you're considering a co-branding relationship, take heed of these three ground rules. Successful co-branding must achieve equal value for all parties in any relationship; partner brands' values need to match each other; and the resulting strategy must be easily understood by consumers.

Equal Value for All Parties

If the potential relationship doesn't represent clear value for both parties, forget it. What's more, forget everything about trying to fashion a better deal out of the arrangement than your partner's deal. No relationship in which one of the two parties has a better deal has survived. This doesn't mean one brand can't be very well known and the other totally unknown. It means the benefit to both parties from the relationship must be equal.

Brand Value Match

The idea of two brands working together might seem perfect at the board meeting, but the reality may be impossible to implement if the participating brands don't share values with each other. A co-branding partnership representing brands that are too different, that have no values in common, or that contradict each others' brand images will be over before it's started.

Easy to Understand

The brand relationship must be easily understood by you and by customers. If you can't explain the value of the relationship in two lines, forget it. How would a customer understand the relationship if you can't explain it simply?

If you believe you and your prospective branding partner can accomplish these three basic criteria, you're on your way to a productive co-branding experience. There's more to the co-branding story than just the beginning. Stay tuned. Next week, I'll share real-world co-branding successes... and failures.


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Some weeks ago I discussed co-branding. Since then hundreds of people have asked me for more information on the topic. So, today, let's talk about brand alliances.

I'll bet that, more than once in your career, you've pondered the risk of teaming up with some other brand in a co-branding deal. The deal probably looked good; the conditions were perfect; but the brand... would it damage your own?

It would be an exaggeration to claim that a number of studies have examined co-branding. But, luckily enough, I've managed to get hold of one study that might help us shed light on the issue.

The study I'm referring to was published by the Journal of Consumer Marketing in 2000. It reveals a lot of interesting data and highlights facts of which we are possibly instinctively aware -- by confirming them empirically. The study was based on potato chips and dips. By offering various combinations, the tests helped the research team determine how human beings value brand alliances.

Now, here's the interesting fact. It turned out that, according to this survey, if you teamed up two high-equity potato chip and dip brands, the prior-to-tasting score was 4.63 out of 7. After trial tasting, the score was 5.06. In other words, approval ratings demonstrated only a slight increase after trial tastings. But when the researchers teamed up two low-equity potato chip and dip brands (in fact, two fictional brands that no one had, of course, ever heard of), the prior-to-tasting score was 3.98 and the post-tasting score was 4.51. The surprise? The products used in both tests -- the high- and low-equity brand tests -- were the same! But, clearly, the subjects not only perceived a difference between the specimens, they comprehended "better value" in the low-equity brand combination.

We learn from this study that high-quality brands that team up with other high-quality brands can expect to gain from the co-branding partnership -- but it will be limited. However, if you happen to represent a low-equity brand, this study indicates it might be a good idea to team up with another low-equity brand.

What about a high-equity brand teaming up with a low-equity brand? Well, according to this and other surveys, such a venture has value and limited risk. If the products in question deliver what they promise, the risks to each of them are minimized further -- even when a high-equity brand teams up with an obscure one.

So, if you happen to represent a high-equity brand, worry not: Teaming up with low-equity brands won't damage your reputation, as long as you keep a constant eye on that brand's product or service quality.

Needless to say, if you represent a low-equity brand and you co-brand with a high-equity brand, not only will you increase sales but the association will help you dramatically improve your brand's image, too.

What I find fascinating from all the surveys I've seen over the years is that consumers actually love brand alliances. People want guidance through the overwhelming plethora of brands out there. Most consumers currently see brand alliances as being beneficial to them. Consumers perceive the strategy as a promotion created for them -- rather than for the marketeers aiming to increase brand sales.

So, the conclusion is clear. Brand alliances have the potential to boost your brand's sales, improve its image, and communicate benefits to consumers. Consumers see brand alliances as being beneficial to them. What more could you ask for? And, by the way, what's holding you back? There are more than enough brands for you to team up with at the moment!


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Last week, I began discussing ways you can measure your return on investment (ROI) and promised that this week I'd look at ways of monitoring your brand's relationship with your consumers. The connection? Understanding your brand's relationship with its consumers gives you a foundation for measuring your ROI.
It is possible to measure the real value of online brand building, as long as you have something to measure against. This is where most marketers fail. They don't establish appropriate performance criteria that over time become the foundation for a measurement matrix. The trick is, of course, determining what these criteria should be. But don't despair: Here are a couple of suggestions.

Brands are driven by values, and values are, surprisingly enough, measurable. So establish a value-measuring process. Start by mapping out your Web site's value centers. Some pages might focus on financial and trust values. Some pages might aim to be engaging and entertaining. Some pages might be provocative, explorative, and innovative. Now, your job is to map out the various values represented by each of these pages. You can do this yourself, but the best and most accurate way to identify these values is to invite a sample group of your target audience to evaluate your site. Ask your sample members to visit every page and describe what values they feel each represents.

I promise you that you'll be shocked by the resulting revelations. Not only because your respondents will seem to miss the intended relevance of your content but also because they'll mention values that have nothing to do with your brand -- they may even be attributable to your key competitor's brand. Such feedback is invaluable. It should inspire you to change your pages or alter entire sections of your site.

But the most valuable part of that exercise is that it creates a foundation for your online brand-building measurement tool. These days, it's easy to establish a system that measures visitors' paths through your site's pages -- to see how long visitors spend on each page and from what page to what page they move. By mapping visitor movements, you'll gain an indication of the values that your site is exposing to its audience. Let me give you an example of how this monitoring can work.

Some years ago, I developed a site for a major international car brand. During their launch of a new model, the media revealed some major safety faults. The interesting thing is that more than 80 percent of the brand's Web site traffic suddenly changed direction, with visitors shifting their concentration from the site's entertainment- and styling-focused areas to its safety-focused areas. This mapped change in direction enabled the brand to determine how it should handle its offline communications: The consumers' concerns were reflected by the values to which site visitors were exposed. The car brand managed to establish an entire communication center within five days, a maneuver based on the detected change in visitor response to brand-value centers on the Web site.

Techniques such as this not only measure brand-building performance but also direct the brand's evolution. Brand builders can see how their brands are evolving over years, weeks, days, and even hours, giving them an insight into the values the consumer is being exposed to, right here and now. What more could you ask for? This much more: How do you convert this data into a measurement of ROI?

Stay tuned for a couple of suggestions next week. And remember: I'm watching you.


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Last week Yahoo.com managed, yet again, to get its name mentioned in most media around the world. But this time, it wasn't positive news that brought public attention to the Yahoo! brand.

The stimulus was from Yahoo! in France where its online auction site included Nazi paraphernalia - Nazi medals, clothing, ephemera, and other artifacts - all available to the highest bidder. The crisis was over the French government's ban on racist representation in all media. The French authorities saw Yahoo!'s auction listings as an infringement of its jurisdictional authority.

This was not a predictable crisis, even for the most experienced brand experts. But it happened to ensnare the well-respected Yahoo! brand, which had to suddenly deal with a problem fraught with negative associations.

Dot-coms haven't been around long enough to have gathered lots of crisis-management experience. But now, it seems, the honeymoon period is over. Everyday life has at last caught up with the Internet which recently seemed to offer its dot-com residents some measure of protection from critical analysis. But admiration for the online phenomenon has given way to realistic appraisal of dot-coms as business entities.

As my father always cautioned me, the higher you fly, the further you fall. And there's no doubt that dot-com brands have been flying high. But the glamour days seem to be over, and this puts new brands under a form of pressure they haven't had to deal with before. It's commonly known as "reality."

Established offline brands around the world have been in crisis situations hundreds of times before and, over time, they've developed crisis-management programs. A good example of this is the Australian biscuit brand Arnott's.

Some years ago, Arnott's, an icon of Australian identity as resonant for Australians as Vegemite, was faced with an extortion threat by a criminal who'd claimed to have poisoned some of the company's product. Experts advised Arnott's that such a threat was indeed capable of being carried out swiftly, the extortionist having given the company just three days to respond to his demands.

What would you do in Arnott's' shoes? Of course, the company was prepared for this unfortunate eventuality. It recalled all its biscuits, destroyed them, produced a new and totally different package design and, within days, was ready to relaunch the brand Australians had known for generations.

In the meantime, the PR department spun a story designed to appeal to the Australian consumer's sense of loyalty and, almost, patriotism: the danger of Australian companies being lost to overseas interests and the undesirability of a well-loved Australian company going under at the hands of international competition. The strategy worked well, garnered plenty of community sympathy and support, and prepared the way for Arnott's hugely successful relaunch.

Would your dot-com have been able to prepare all this in 72 hours?

Brand crisis-management programs predict possibilities and prepare for hypothetical eventualities. Just like regular fire drills, they set out step-by-step instructions for all players. Plans are developed over several years and tested to minimize the ill effects of crises should they occur. Or, let me say, when they occur. Because they do. The only unknown is when they are going to occur.

Crises will affect online brands, too. There's no more hype to hide behind any more. Consumers know just who you are and what you're doing. And they're as skeptical about online commerce as they are about offline commerce.

So, you'll have to think through every possible crisis; create detailed action plans to accompany each hypothetical scenario; and analyze management responsibilities and those of the advertising department, the customer support center and the investor relations team - everyone who's part of your business. Leave no stone unturned. And do it NOW. While you have time.

Crises don't disappear. They are managed with common sense. Are you prepared for your brand's worst nightmare?


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While our attention has been focused on advertising and marketing opportunities on the Internet, a promising new marketing medium has crept up behind us. It's a medium that's likely to become one of the top-five ranked electronic channels, along with mobile communication, interactive TV, Internet advertising, and email marketing.
I'm talking about electronic games, which, over the past five years, have taken off in a big way. Yet their enormous potential as advertising channels has so far been tapped only in a limited way -- until recently.

Did you know that that one of the key reasons for energy drink Red Bull's dramatic success was its appearance in the original PlayStation? After a heavy, intense game, a commercial for Red Bull would appear in almost a product placement context, teasing the player to learn more about this new drink. Needless to say, Red Bull is today the leader in its category, an achievement reached in just three years.

The worldwide games industry, including everything from arcades and game consoles to PC games, set-top box games, and cell phone games, is now a $49.9 billion business. But, hold your horses! It's expected to grow by 71 percent, to $85.7 billion by 2006, according to Informa Media Group in the United Kingdom. Experts predict that worldwide console sales will double in the next five years to a total of 200 million units, thanks to this fall's new products from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. And, perhaps not surprisingly, these sales will be to an audience composed of intensely interested participants, an audience which currently includes 25 percent of the total online U.S. audience. This group spends five or more hours per week playing online games, according to a recent IDG study.

So, a new and attractive marketing channel has been added to the media repertoire. When Nicholas Negroponte predicted some years ago that the revenue model for games would not be a fixed price per game but a flexible price that changed according to the "ammunition" you decided to "purchase" during the game, he was on the right track. We're going to see featured in games not only sponsor awards but also heavy product placement, even product placement strategies that allow players to choose their favorite brands -- to equip themselves with a well-known car brand, select their preferred sports shoes, and consume a favored energy drink before commencing a battle.

But it doesn't stop there. Remember, we're talking about an interactive medium. Passive advertising won't cut the mustard for your brand in this environment. You'll need to harness attention for your brand by leveraging the interactivity of the games: implanting the product in the story, introducing it as part of the action, and generating the synergy between context and brand that's so difficult to achieve via other media channels.

So, before it's too late, tell me how your brand will articulate its message and establish its tone of voice in a marketplace where more than 200 million people are already spending more than five hours a day online -- honing their skills and readying themselves for the challenge of your brand message.


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Imagine you're a marketing director at Mars. What MandM's news could you possibly add to your Web site? Perhaps a great new color has been added to the product palette? Does this justify consumers visiting your Web site and spending 5 or 10 minutes interacting with the brand?

Mars is not alone in its dilemma. Thousands of marketers engage in a daily struggle to develop content for their brands' sites, content that promotes their products and builds loyalty without becoming predictable and hackneyed. It's a tricky job. Around the world, fans of brands such as MandM's, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi have high expectations of their preferred brands' sites. Yet, if you were to probe these customers on the matter, I'm sure they'd have no idea exactly what they expect the sites to offer, apart from fun, innovation, and engagingness.

The answer for many brands is "advertainment." Sites that are only rarely able to promote new lines and feature only one product can offer games. Advertainment is an interactive twist on David Ogilvy's classic adage, "If you have nothing to say, sing it." Now, "If you have nothing to say, play a game."

Does the technique really build brands?

Seven years ago, I launched MandM's first online interactive game. It was very simple. Using Shockwave, you could create a drawing using MandM's, then submit the drawing to participate in a weekly competition. The objective was simply to add another dimension to the colorful chocolate candies by playing with them in a fun way.

Any brand-building exercise, in this case a game, should integrate the brand's core values. The golden rule hasn't changed. If the game can be played without the brand as an integral element, it will probably never build your brand. If the game and the brand are so interlinked they can't work without one another, you're on the right track.

As I surf the Web I see hundreds of advertainment sites with no link whatsoever between the games and the brands they supposedly promote (aside from the brand's logo plastered all over the functionality). One day the game might be accompanied by an HP banner. The next, exactly the same game is used with a Virgin ad. Does that build a brand? Hardly. Imagine reusing other brands' ads to promote your own merely by supplanting their logo with yours.

Although some cleverly crafted "advergames" are likely to work, they aren't the sole answer to filling a Web site's brand-building mission. You should take the concept of customer interaction a step further. Achieve interactivity. Isn't that what the Internet is all about? If you really want to build brand loyalty, try to involve consumers more. Involve them on a long-term basis, not the short term required by advertainment games.

Not many brands dare take this step. It demands ongoing commitment that, for most marketing people, converts quickly into an ongoing item in the marketing budget. Pepsi (a former client) has taken the chance with a concept it calls "Become a Pepsi Advisor."

On this site, Pepsi invites consumers to join its product development team and advise the company on new products. What a clever move! Instead engaging visitors for the short term with games, it's succeeded in turning the site into a profit center (probably saving the company thousands of research dollars). It turns core customers into advocates for its brand by using them as field researchers while generating constant dialogue between the brand and its most important audience.

The challenge in a scenario such as this is one of commitment. You can't expect consumers to provide you with tons of research value without giving something back. It's an innovative concept. Results remain to be seen. Six weeks ago, I signed up as a "Pepsi Advisor" but have yet to hear back. Pepsi is gambling with this game: The potential return is huge, but so is the loss if it doesn't work.

Pepsi has moved a step closer to true, one-to-one communication. If you're prepared to go that far, your courage will pay off.

The gamble? Allowing the consumer to play with your brand.


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Recent reports from the U.K. reveal a significant rise in retail sales during January. What's interesting about this fact is that the retail industry didn't achieve these higher sales by making compromises. The special offers weren't any more special than last year's; there weren't any more clearance sales than at the same time last year; and the weather was no better. Still, shoppers decided to do their thing and buy more.

Australian retailers experienced exactly the same trend, with Christmas and January sales booming. And, not surprisingly, signals indicate that the same trend is happening on the Internet, not just in Europe, but all over the world.

Now, if we didn't have a special association with September 11, I would honestly have no idea why sales, weaker than ever in December, suddenly redoubled in January. But perhaps the reason for this is obvious.

Consumers have started to change their behavior. This behavioral change, reflected in higher spending, demonstrates a shift in the global population's general outlook on life. The values that drove consumers a year ago have undergone a shift that parallels the global community's altered life values.

In the article I prepared three weeks ago, "Instant Gratification," I discussed the observable post-September 11 fact that people desire to live their lives now, while they can. And this paradigm shift has its manifestations in even the most superficial of commercial contexts: reluctance to save up points in frequent flyer accounts, the tendency to use gift vouchers straight away, and so on. The consumer now wants instant gratification. And January sales figures illustrate the fact that the need for instant gratification has taken another step. Saving money may no longer be a personal aim. Its accumulation may no longer be a source of happiness. People wish simply to enjoy their lives.

If this is the case, how will it affect the millions of e-commerce sites desperately vying for customers? Well, first of all, it's my belief that the virtues of the hard sell are now doubtful. Hard selling will recede for a while. On the other hand, consumers will seek a brand's solid values -- such as trustworthiness, reliability, and quality. Consumers want meaning in their lives, and brands will need to contribute to this need by promising and delivering enhancements in the quality of life.

Consumers no longer demand a plethora of reduction coupons, special frequent flyer offers, and the rest of the promotions battery. These techniques don't enhance the quality of life here and now. Consumers want to see instant value from brands.

So next time you take a look at your brand, your site, and your communications, keep all this in mind. Will your consumers feel your brand is adding an instant, positive dimension to their lives? Will they feel your brand is adding value to their lives? If you feel this to be within your brand's capacity, it's likely to appeal to an audience that is currently on the lookout for new values, new meaning in life, and new brands. These are people who are prepared to question everything that's gone before in their lives, including the brands they've patronized over the years. And this questioning has been prompted by world events: once-solid, immutable icons, values and brands have been destroyed or brought into disrepute.

Good luck with your brand's transformation. But remember: Consistency will be the key factor in the success of your branding over the next couple of years. It will go a long way to ensuring your customers come -- and stay. Why? Because consistency fosters trust, and trust is the essence of strong brand building, both off- and online.


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How often do you see a bunch of kids playing on the street? Or in a local park? Or a backyard? Not often, I'll bet. Now tell me how often groups of young friends play indoors on a computer. Too often?
Children's behavior has changed dramatically over the past decade. My evidence is anecdotal, but I'm convinced that not only have children's recreational preferences, social interaction, play, and games changed but so has their facility for fantasy. Stuff that might have entertained a kid a decade ago would be considered boring these days.

Racing Matchbox cars and playing soldier in the woods are recreational relics. And so are products that apply to such play, which requires children's own imaginative involvement, invention, and group cooperation. The reasons for this behavioral change are many; one of them is the emergence of the interactive world.

Just think about it. A Matchbox car doesn't come preprogrammed for action. It only goes when the child decides to make it go. Imagine the same car on a computer screen, part of an interactive animated game that the player has to control by successfully navigating the vehicle through virtual obstacles along a virtual racetrack to avoid crashing.

The big difference between the Matchbox car and the virtual one is that the latter challenges the player constantly, and when the player begins to achieve a level of competence in addressing the game's challenges, the program upgrades the game's level of difficulty.

So what has this to do with branding? Let me explain.

Just as manufacturers change toys and games to satisfy evolving play preferences, brands must also keep pace with social evolution if they are to preserve their relevance in the marketplace. Brands need to reinvent themselves as versions 1.1, 1.2, and so on to ensure their consistent message remains audible and capable of engaging the ever-changing consumer.

The point is that just as kids love stories that continue, that harness their interest and compel their attention, consumers need to understand a brand's story, feel a relationship with it, and see its development over time. Static brands meet the consumer's gaze passively and, because they bore onlookers, lose their attention. Static brand stories don't survive.

So a brand has to evolve over time in response to its users' socially informed preferences, needs, and priorities. A brand needs an inbuilt story that can develop with changing times and maintain dialogue with its consumers as they grow and mature. I'm not referring to constant logo change or variations in the language and voice by which the consumer recognizes a brand. It's vital that these identifiers remain constant, meaningful points of reference for consumers. It's the context into which the brand is placed that needs to evolve.

Kellogg's has managed this strategy for years, providing new stories on the backs of cereal packages and creating ongoing versions of the same product. Here are some other examples: Lucasfilm creating new relevance for "Star Wars" by marketing special toys that parallel whatever film is being re-released, Nintendo engaging in rapid development of Pokimon and supplying a constant flow of new games, and toy stores redecorating on a weekly basis to ensure that something new and exciting is always awaiting kid consumers whenever they revisit the store.

It's not easy, believe me. But contextual change -- the relevance it bestows upon your brand in the consumers' eyes -- is mightily important, especially if you want to capture young audiences. Add life to your brand by basing its identity on an ongoing story. Appeal to children's imaginations and ensure that a surprise is always waiting for them when they honor your brand by returning to it.

Make sure that the consumer feels the brand is alive. Only by doing so will your brand earn the necessary consumer loyalty. And it's loyalty that will win the attention of your brand's audience members when they next pass by your product in two weeks' time.

So, what's your brand's version 1.1?


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Branding is all about creating icons. And icons are all about public familiarity.

When an image becomes intelligible -- when it becomes part of the community's and individual's visual literacy -- it can communicate complex values in a radically abbreviated fashion, condensing the essence of a brand's message into an articulate, instantly comprehended image.

Those white-toothed, always-smiling, perfectly tanned, under-20 boys and girls are recognizably part of Coca-Cola's (and others') iconography. They communicate energetic sociability, peer acceptance, and inclusive activity. Such group-driven values appeal to the desire for acceptance that motivates a major part of the market and locates the brand within consumerism's "cool" hierarchy.

Then there's that most masculine of icons, the Marlboro Man, an image that pithily stands for freedom and virile self-determination. The roll call of such classic marketing icons, established decades ago, is a long one.

But a new generation of icons has appeared on the commercial scene. And their chief characteristic is that they appeal to increasingly younger audiences.

They're Getting Younger and Younger

This new thrust started with New Kids on the Block (NKOTB). You might barely recall them. The world's first "boy band" appeared suddenly, succeeded rapidly, then disappeared with equal speed. Its audience was not a general one, such as male and female consumers over 18. Clearly, its audience was female and composed predominantly of much younger people: those about 12 years old.

Another boy band, Take That, followed quickly on the heels of NKOTB's success, but with two differences: Take That attracted an even younger audience, and it enjoyed a longer life. You've got the picture. They're all coming to mind now, I bet. Boyzone, Westlife, 98 Degrees, Backstreet Boys, and many more followed. And they all attracted younger and younger audiences. Really young girls were swept up in the brand-driven fan rush, with parents succumbing to the trend and taking kids as young as five to their first concerts.

Years ago, marketing experts opined that BARBIE. would never appeal to an audience younger than 10. After all, such innocents were surely too immature and socially naive to perceive and become hooked on the Barbie image, composed as it is of a plethora of social values (including acceptability, desirability, fashion consciousness, and popularity) powerfully abbreviated within, and communicated by, the icon. But Barbie broke through the notional age barrier and cut its audience's lower-age limit to under seven.

So Back to Branding

It's no surprise that our youngsters have been quietly dragged along in the brainwashing wake. After all, this is an age in which the consumer has, through decades of advertising industry activity, developed a challengingly high level of commercial, visual, and iconographic literacy. As a consequence the most prosaic product's message has to be devised with excruciating sophistication if it's to be heeded. Therefore, even two-year-olds will not be insensible to the message of the ubiquitous and eloquent golden arches, even when they spy that icon from a fast-moving vehicle.

That world-famous symbol along with the reportedly second-most famous face in the world (after Santa Claus) speaks volumes to the youngest among us, and the message is McDonald's. Now more than ever, the children of the household dictate what products go into the shopping cart every week and what treats might befall them between shopping trips.

Yep. We're dealing with an up-and-coming generation of icon readers who are blessed, or cursed, with a level of commercial literacy like we've never seen before. These kindergartners will demand even more sophisticated commercial communications than we've been familiar with to date. Without their help, we'll find difficulty in developing commercial communications to meet their expectations, harness their attention, and retain their loyalty.

Outstanding Loyalty

And here's the thing. It's vital to remember the underlying value of a powerful icon: It can engender outstanding loyalty. This loyalty, if taken good care of, can thrive for decades and become the link between a product and its dramatically changing audience.

Even though Boyzone no longer exists, eBay, Yahoo!, and other online auction sites still trade Boyzone merchandising. Strange? You only have to consider grownups' relationships with ABBA, the Beatles, or Elvis Presley to realize that the loyalty those figures earned from us during our tender years lives on in our nostalgia, through force of habit... in all the corners of our memory and mentality that define our self-identities.

Let's not forget the lessons from our own personal experiences. Here's my best advice on how to learn from them: Keep a close eye on the kids. Play with them, observe them, notice their tolerances, values, and motivations. Get in tune with them. You might just discover the secret behind not only true icon development but also the development of loyalty-creating icons.


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A celebrity trend in recent years has been donating lots of money to charity. Madonna devoted part of her concert revenues to victims of September 11; Tom Cruise supported a school in Los Angeles; Bill and Melinda Gates established a fund for a variety of charitable causes. Now celebrity focus is shifting -- to brands! Celebrities are declaring support for brands with relationships to charities.

Before you rush out to team your brand up with a worthy organization, consider the following.

Two-thirds of consumers are more willing to respond to cause-related marketing if they perceive a natural fit between the brand and the cause. This reminds me of a commercial I saw some years ago. It featured John Cleese (so it was incredibly funny, of course). But no way can I remember what the commercial promoted. I only remember John Cleese. Why? The link between the brand and the personality was nonexistent. The marketers (whoever they were) used Cleese to attract attention. Viewers' attention was so captivated by the comedian and the relationship between him and the brand was so tenuous, that the campaign failed to make a statement for the brand.

A logical association between a brand and a worthy cause has to do with the business category to which the brand belongs and with the values the brand represents. Needless to say, you should avoid the "pet cause" impulse. You wouldn't adopt an association with the CEO's favored charity simply because it was her favored charity, would you? You might find a natural fit between many things: between a communications company and a telephone counseling service; between a telco and an association for the deaf; between a computer manufacturer and schools. For some time Microsoft has provided free software and computers to schools around the world.

I'm a huge fan of creativity used to its best advantage. A memorable campaign is always a creative campaign. Part of that creativity can lie in the alliance you establish with a social cause. Opportunistically including a cause partner's logo in your advertising is hardly creative. You must achieve and communicate synergy between your brand and your cause. Synergy is the alpha and omega of a successful brand-building strategy.

In Australia Kelloggs sponsors a round-the-clock kids' help line. The brand has sponsored this association for years. The relationship represents compatibility between brand and cause. The company uses its package design to promote the cause and build the brand. If you buy a Kelloggs product, you'll find a notice about the help line on the package. It's as simple as that.

Cause-related marketing requires planning. More planning than you might imagine. Typically, a campaign takes up to 10 months to develop. It's important such brand building results are studied before, during, and after associations with charitable causes are established. Why? For some reason, companies always want more out of such programs than they believe they get. The risk is your company might decide to terminate its support for its chosen charity. Termination hardly helps a brand's association. Cause-related branding is serious business that reflects serious commitment. The best possible way to ensure your company maintains its commitment is to measure its effect and show its substance. Often, brand building outcomes are more impressive than anyone in your company could have imagined. Most brands' builders forget to establish metrics and controls before they launch the brand in a cause-related campaign. Neglecting this vital step risks not being able to chart your brand's progress.

Be exclusive. Identify a logical relationship, foster it, and ensure you secure your brand's rights to that cause. You don't want your competitor jumping on your bandwagon, leveraging your conscientious work, and running away with the credit.

Cause-related marketing isn't only ABOUT business. It's about passion, belief, and commitment. These energies go hand in hand with business ambition and growth. But if your board couldn't care less about the cause you support, you can be sure the lack of internal support will show.

You can't buy passion. But if your brand's values are clearly and consistently articulated, understood by the consumer, and underscored by the cause you support, your external and internal audiences will appreciate your activities and support them.

One thing's for sure: If you can achieve this synergy between your brand, its sponsored cause, and your consumer, you'll unlock a new and passionate dimension to brand building.


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Most marketing professionals still believe that true branding is based on the logo. But they also know that branding is much more than developing a familiar consumer image.

I realized a couple of years ago, when one of my colleagues was asked by a major U.S. airline to write a standard announcement to be used by the airline's captains, that many operational elements, as well as deliberate promotional strategies, are all integral to branding and the establishment of image and identity.

The speech was carefully composed incorporating the advice of a psychologist and a marketing expert, and the writing of one of the country's best copywriters. The aim was to achieve an announcement that would carry the airline's image message to the passenger, just as the company's logo did. This event made me realize the full potential of branding: the 360 degrees that I briefly discussed last week. And 360-degree branding is everything.

Singapore Airlines is an example of a company cognizant of 360-degree branding. A decade ago, the airline developed what is now the well-known Singapore Airlines smell. The hot towels the flight attendants distribute before and after takeoff all emit a characteristic aroma that, once experienced, is not forgotten.

So, what has a smell got to do with branding? Everything. We have five senses, and for some reason we often think only of using one or two of them. Research conducted a year or so ago showed that aural communication is just as important as oral communication. Testing Intel Inside, the researchers documented the interesting result that the Intel melody was as recognizable and memorable to the consumer as the Intel Inside logo.

What does this have to do with the Internet? The fact is that we have achieved only the management of what I define as the "level one" web site: a web site that sort of handles the graphics but falls short of integrating other sensory stimuli.

The reason why I say "sort of" is because I still, day after day, see web sites that don't exploit visuals well. Do you remember the story about the Coke bottle? It was designed so that if it was smashed, you'd still be able to recognize that the fragments were once part of a Coca-Cola bottle. Now, that's branding!

What if you were to remove your logo and your company name from your web site? Would I still be able to recognize your brand? I bet I couldn't. Everything on your web site has to reflect your core philosophy, the spirit of your brand, just like Singapore Airlines' hot towels and the captains' announcement.

Every single element you employ should be an extension of your logo: The copy should be the voice of your brand; the navigation should reflect the spirit and ethos of your brand in every degree; your site's sounds should be your brand's voice. Think of the identity that AOL's "You've got mail" communicates.

Every element of your site's construction and operation should be fully conveyed by your branding aims and integrated to communicate a seamless and comprehensible story. The integration principle is crucially relevant to all your channels and their intercommunications so that, wherever consumers encounter your business, they are able to recognize it instantly: in your store, on billboards, dealing with your staff, on the radio... even without seeing your logo. That's 360-degree branding: branding without using a brand.


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Last week, I caught a taxi in Tokyo. I was going to the city's domestic airport. But I don't have any taxi-driver wisdom to pass on to you. Instead, I want to tell you a story about a journey your branding should be taking.

The first thing my colleague and I noticed as we slid into the back seat was, along with the taxi's usual array of meters, a screen mounted next to the driver. Not an ordinary screen, but a large color plasma screen that, from the very minute we took up position in the back of the taxi, captivated our attention entirely for the full 45-minute drive.

It wasn't so surprising that the taxi driver asked the screen which was the best way to the airport. What was surprising was that the whole trip, second by second, was replicated in 3D version on the screen. The display told us everything we needed to know and provided a running commentary on everything we passed. Consequently, we knew miles before we spotted it that we would soon pass by a McDonald's. A Mobil gas station was announced to be close by. And the screen communicated information about the design of the airport and explained where our plane would be waiting.

Our attention was so riveted by this screen's indefatigable information supply, that we completely neglected to notice the many brick-and-mortar billboards that we must have passed on the journey. Who knows? Maybe there weren't any to be seen on the way. Maybe by some cataclysmic coincidence, they'd been dismantled. I doubt that was the case, don't you? But it may as well have been the case because the screen was replete with every conceivable mini billboard, all passing by our gaze in succession.

Now, what does this have to do with branding? A whole lot! What does this have to do with targeted brand building? Everything!

Just imagine that the car was aware of the people traveling in it. If children made up the majority of passengers, McDonald's Happy Meals would possibly be featured in the commercials. What if the car were low on fuel? The Mobil advertisement would perhaps make an appropriately timed appearance. What if we were way ahead of time for our flight? Another airline might pick up on the opportunity and offer us a special discount for flying with it earlier rather than sticking with the carrier we'd booked. All this would happen in an intensive 45-minute one-to-one dialogue. Intensive because the passengers would literally form a captive audience with not much choice but to give their unoccupied attention to the screen.

Marketers, do me a favor. Forget all television and print media marketing plans. The days of the strong media plan needing to achieve not much more than securing time and space on all five communication channels - TV, print, outdoor advertising, cinema, and radio - are well and truly over. The competent media plan is becoming ever more subject to the complexities of one-to-one priorities. And not only are individual consumer behavior, circumstances, and needs being profiled and targeted, competent marketing has to keep up with individuals on the move.

I might be online from 7 a.m. until 8 a.m. Then I'll be using my WAP phone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as I commute to the office. While I'm at my desk, I'll be online via the PC. And on my way to meetings, I'll be in that taxi with the screen. What a personalized advertising onslaught I'm potentially facing! Meanwhile, if I were describing a day of contact with old media, I'd probably be exposed to billboards, radio, and newspapers.

Think interactive and the media plan that includes this traditional exposure will also include the Internet, the mobile Internet, the GPS monitor in the taxi, and the PDA in my Palm. Each of these channels knows a piece of information about me, my online consumer profile having provided the brand builders using these channels with some really useful intelligence.

So what's the moral of the story? Every message your brand communicates will need to work within a channel strategy, a strategy that knows minute by minute where to find your brand's target consumers. Consumers aren't static, nor are the brand messages that seek them. And your perception of media planning had better not be either.


]]> General Over the years, I've frequently been asked what the secret formula is for a successful branding strategy. What people are really asking me is how to make their brand a global leader, like Coca-Cola. Well, sorry guys. There's no magic hidden in the process of building a brand or brand management. Successful brand building is all about three simple principles. These form the crucial guidelines that help ensure that you build a successful brand. In today's article I will clarify these principles for you. Branding strategy is all about focus. When I say focus, I mean a lot of things. But the most important points are your focus on a specific audience, on a specific value, and on a specific tone of voice.I know it sounds banal, but defining your unique target group is fundamental. Let me give you a couple of examples. Which Audience Should You Focus On? McDonald's has always been a family restaurant but has never been a burger bar. What's the difference? None. But the family focus is a positioning strategy that's reflected in everything the corporation does. McDonald's knows that by targeting families, it hits one of the most attractive, loyal consumer groups available. It gets into the parents' wallets via the kids' minds. Given the strength of this strategy, it's no wonder that McDonald's has become what it is. And, by the way, the audience focus doesn't mean that McDonald's misses out on attracting teenagers, tweens, or grown-up singles to its restaurants. Obviously, McDonald's restaurants are full of such consumer groups. But by attracting a target audience, McDonald's hasn't scared other consumer groups away. Just imagine if McDonald's targeted teenagers. Do you think any families would show up? A famous vodka brand decided to take targeting to the extreme by focusing on alternative audiences, like the gay community in the U.S. By hitting this community in trendy bars in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, the product became fashionable, and a wider and wider audience was attracted to it. By now, the vodka in question is one of the world's best-known brands, yet it's been raised in an alternative-lifestyle background. What Do You Want Your Brand to Say? Having considered the importance of your brand's audience focus, let's look at its message. What do you want your brand to say? What tracks should it leave in the consumer's mind after exposure? What are its values? If I were to ask you what impressions spring to mind when I mention the word "Lego," you'd probably speak of "a creative construction toy" or, simply, "colorful plastic bricks." If I mention "Rolex," you'd probably respond with something like "high-quality Swiss watch." If I say "Mercedes-Benz," you'd say "a high-quality German car." The principle is simple. What would you like consumers to think when they perceive your brand? Don't be too ambitious. You can't make the consumer say or think everything you want. For example, you probably didn't say, "Just imagine," when I asked you to respond to the concept of Lego, even though that's the product's slogan today. Focus on your brand's values, and communicate these consistently. Be Consistent The third important factor in a healthy branding strategy is communications consistency. Being consistent means delivering your brand's message in a tone of voice that becomes recognizable as the voice of your brand, that communicates the brand's values to its target audience day after day, year after year, anywhere and everywhere! A good rule of thumb to consider is this: When you start feeling sick and tired of your brand's message and voice, its connection with the consumer's recognition is probably just beginning. Remember, you are exposed to your brand thousands of times more frequently than your customers are. So don't let your own frequency of exposure affect your communications decisions. Consistency is applicable in every facet of your brand's consumer communications strategy. Ensure your brand consistently targets its audience, communicates the same message, personifies and transmits the same values, and appears with the same vocabulary, nomenclature, design elements, and graphics. Many companies fail on the consistency prerequisite, even the big ones you'd think would know how to handle this fundamental branding challenge. Take Swissair, for example. I bet you know the name, but do you know that Swissair is also known as Crossair, Flightline, Jumbolino, and Swissair Express? Each of these subidentities is accompanied by a version of the Swissair logo, even though they all fly internationally. I'm sure there's a logical reason behind the airline company's divergent branding strategy. But I wonder if Swissair's customers understand it. What Creates the Brand? So, why didn't I define design consistency as a factor in its own right: the graphic design, the logo, the look that surrounds the brand? Because these elements do not create the brand. They support it and can help accelerate recognition, speeding up the branding process. The "look" is a necessary element in a consistent communications strategy, but it's just an element. If your brand possesses the most beautiful logo and is associated with a perfect identifying design, yet it has no clear audience focus, no value focus, and no tone-of-voice focus with which to deliver its well-honed message, I doubt you'd ever succeed in building your brand. However, by following the guidelines established by these three principles, you're likely to score the brand-building goal, even without a fabulous logo. Strong branding excellence has nothing to do with a beautiful logo. But it has everything to do with your brand's message.
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It seems almost every week a new medium appears -- wireless application protocol (WAP), short messaging service (SMS), AOLTV, personal digital assistants (PDAs) -- and a range of other electronic delivery media that may or may not take off. Some lead to small revolutions; others come and go the way gimmicks usually do. Regardless of the individual and collective fate of those media, the multifarious media environment is ushering in some intricate brand-building responsibilities.

The increasingly complex media picture has resulted in a growing number of consumer touchpoints for brand builders, presenting them with a broader palette than the one upon which television, print, outdoor, radio, and Internet media have been mixed.

The question is no longer, Which magazine should your brand occupy to target its particular market segment? Rather, the question is, Which media niche should you choose for your brand? Should it be offline or online? And when, at what particular hour, should your brand be exposed? You can no longer expect to harness a teen market simply by basing your brand strategy on a magazine's pages. It might be that a combination of an SMS program, some TV exposure, an email campaign, some point-of-sale materials, and a few on-the-spot events might be required to catch your audience's full attention.

But, hang on! What happens with the brand then? Isn't there a risk that it could be overexposed? That its points of contact could become too diverse and its identity and message diluted? Yes, and that's the challenge of broad branding.

Broad branding refers to a 360-degree view -- a total branding plan that should aim to secure links between media channels, promoting positive synergy between each and every communication channel used in your broad-branding strategy.

When a television commercial refers you to www.something.com to check out Something Inc.'s new hot offers, that's a simple example of brand links across media. Or when a leaflet from the supermarket suggests that you look out for a television commercial that offers some extra brand information or customer opportunity. Pretty straightforward, right?

Broad branding is the next generation of this link branding. It's achieved when positive synergy is created between a brand's media tools, messages, and audience. For example, on a day that's 92 degrees Fahrenheit, you might pass by a store selling Coke. An SMS or WAP message would appear on your cell-phone's display: "Check out our 920F Coke offer! 2 for the price of 1." When you respond by entering the participating store, a large Coke "Heat Wave" promotion will be in action offering everyone two cans for the price of one while the temperature is above 90 degrees, and even asking patrons to sign up to receive other Coke Heat Wave offers via their cell phones.

Campaigns like this not only create strong brand links across media channels but they also establish the broad-brand synergy that, having secured a consumer's attention once (and this can happen at any point in the communication chain), is able to carry over this attention to the next point in the chain. This nudging ensures that more communication time is shared between the consumer and the brand and that the consumer is introduced to progressively more of the brand's dimensions.

Sounds easy? Well, there's nothing easy about integrated broad branding. In fact, only a few companies in the world have managed to successfully carry out the strategy.

Broad branding isn't just about maintaining a consistent identity across media. It's about ensuring that every expressed brand value coheres with the context of the host medium, makes meaningful contact with the target group, and reflects the established brand platform to reinforce brand identity and purpose.

In short, broad branding is a three-dimensional brand campaign that covers the breadth, height, and depth of communication possibilities.


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The first Web sites, appearing around 1994, had no privacy statements at all. There were no disclaimers from the legal department stating the company wasn't responsible for anything, even things you thought they were responsible for. There were no "terms of use" sections outlining the legal implications of using the site, either. There was simply... a site.

Legalese fast became a necessity for most commercial Web sites. If Web sites and the companies behind them are different, why should all the legal statements read the same? I'm tempted to believe most companies cut and paste those boilerplate legal statements to cut down their workload.

Herein lies an obvious branding opportunity.

I once had to sign a contract before hiring an advertising company. In the final selection round, I needed to choose between two agencies. To be frank, both were perfectly suited for the assignment. The chemistry and skill sets of each were first rate. The final, determining factor was based on each agency's contract.

The first company's contract consisted of about a ton of paper. The 52-page tome bore text smaller than six points. It was packed with words almost unrecognizable to me. Obviously the company had decided to cover all the bases with its contract. And I mean everything.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive the other agency's people-friendly contract. The language was easy to understand. The legalese was prefaced by "and now to the boring stuff which, of course, we've printed in the smallest type to make sure you can't read it all." The copy even offered subtle and funny comments about lawyers and the need for such a document. All in all, the contract communicated the fact that its authors and the people it represented were human and full of good humor. Interestingly, the contract managed to cover all its material in just 15 pages. It was even fun to read!

Which agency do you think I decided to go with?

Legal stuff, privacy warnings, disclaimers, and all the other necessary accouterments for today's Web site are here to stay, no matter how much we prefer to avoid them. They don't have to be written in a formal legal voice, as if the documents were only going to be read by lawyers. Regardless of whether we're private consumers or businesspeople, we all like to be treated as human beings. If you can convert your legal documents into easy, fun-to-read pieces, you'll break down a barrier between you and prospective business that 99.9 percent of your competitors won't have cracked. The achievement makes your brand more human. It enhances mutual understanding and even empathy between your brand and its customers. Isn't that the essence of good branding?

Would you hire a lawyer to craft your branding campaign? Unlikely. Why allow an attorney to control your brand's all-important tone of voice? Let your brand speak. You can achieve the same legal protection and, at the same time, build that brand.


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Do you remember VHS? Of course you do. But what about Betacam or Beta 2000? Do you recall those formats? Probably, but only vaguely.

Do you realize that all three formats arrived at about the same time? And that Betacam and Beta 2000 were considered to represent equally high-quality video formats? (Betacam later evolved as Betacam SP, used for broadcasting.) VHS was considered to be the low-quality video format, and nobody took it seriously. But for some strange reason VHS became the market leader -- so much so that it's still considered to be the pre-eminent video format. Why? For two reasons.

First, VHS was simple to use. It didn't have any superfluous features that defied the average user's understanding. Second, and most important, VHS distribution was outstanding. The team behind VHS managed to tie up distribution deals with all the right players, making VHS popular even before it was launched. Its popularity, in fact, was formed, to some degree, independently of the format's actual quality.

I probably don't have to remind you of parallel cases, like the Palm versus the Newton from Apple. The Newton was a complex PDA that could do almost anything. You could draw with it, record data with it, store pictures with it -- everything. But the Newton was too complex for the market when it came out. Consumers were simply not ready for it. But they were ready for the Palm, a dramatically simplified Newton, the use of which everyone could understand instantly. And again, the Palm's distribution was over the top.

Now, what does this have to do with Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and i-Mode? A whole lot! WAP allows users to access information instantly via handheld wireless devices. i-Mode is a packet-based service for mobile phones offered by NTT DoCoMo. Both enable web browsing.

WAP sort of won the first round of the competition between the two. Even now, WAP is still confused by consumers as being a synonym for the wireless Internet. But, of course, it's not. And i-Mode is managing to change that perception.

WAP is the more advanced of the two. It's based on a platform that is substantially more complex than the one upon which i-Mode is based. WAP has many more features and is much more flexible than i-Mode, which represents very simple technology.

Ask programmers about i-Mode, and they'll laugh! But consumers understand it because they know how to use it; it's user-friendly. You couldn't say the same about WAP, which, as I write this, is weathering a tough time in most of Europe. On the Continent, consumers are slowly realizing that WAP isn't the answer to everyone's wireless dreams.

But what's most interesting to note is that i-Mode is rapidly overtaking WAP's position. This is not only happening because of WAP's complexity and i-Mode's simplicity but because of -- you guessed it -- distribution.

Lately, NTT has acquired a Dutch telecom company, has been in negotiations with a U.K.-based company, has closed a deal with AOL in the United States, and is reaching the end of negotiations with ATandT in the United States about acquiring a major stake in the market-leading telecom company.

Now, imagine that all these deals reach fruition. Imagine combining this achievement with the fact that 12 million consumers already use i-Mode in Japan. Imagine these things, and you'll probably reach the same conclusion I did.

Bye WAP! Hi-Mode!


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Europe and Australia are already well down the track. The U.S. is still lagging behind, but probably only for a short while. What am I referring to? I am talking about WAP (wireless application protocol), the next generation to follow the Internet.

WAP will probably change everything we thought we knew . yet again! And the new trend is likely to be called c-commerce, standing for "cell commerce."

C-commerce is set to become a new discipline for promoting, communicating, transacting and branding products via a mobile device. One of the biggest challenges c-commerce will face is that of branding via a pure text display. In many ways this situation reflects that of the Internet before its adaptation to the World Wide Web.

So let's try to be a bit visionary and figure out how c-commerce is likely to operate within just two to three years.

Besides the graphic handicap, a range of other challenges and opportunities are likely to appear for c-commerce, adding a new dimension to the word "branding." Imagine, for example, walking down the supermarket aisle and passing by the CD rack. What CD should you buy? Let the cell phone decide. Scan a CD's barcode and the cell phone will match the CD profile with your own consumer profile. Basing its analysis on your own and thousands of other people's profiles, and matching your musical taste to consumer profiles, the system could make a recommendation as to whether you should buy the CD or not.

The next concept would be that every product you pass in the store is available on auction. So any product you choose will have been surveyed on the Net, making it possible for you to verify its price on the Net and ensure you're aware of the lowest possible price.

Now imagine you have just dropped a pack of pasta in your basket. You might then receive a message on your WAP phone informing you of some special offer. (Buy another pasta product and get pasta sauce for half-price, for example.)

C-commerce will be instant commerce. It will give marketers a new means of getting hold of the consumer, right at the most crucial time in the shopping continuum . the very second the consumer is considering whether to buy or not to buy a certain product . rather than long before such a decision or after it's a dead issue.

C-commerce will require more than massive databases. It will need individual digital marketing programs wrapped around each brand and each product under that brand's umbrella, ensuring that the product can learn from and talk, listen, and react to each consumer. This will be like a real-life version of Disney-Pixar's "Toy Story" in which every product has a life of its own.

What will this mean for marketing plans? Well, first of all, it will mean that a marketing plan will need an off- and an online component. If current indicators are to be relied upon and the forecasts for the c-commerce trend see fruition, it is likely that a separate c-commerce strategy will also have to be developed for every product.

The strategy will have to tie every product to a massive consumer database and to information about related products each consumer shares a history with. The key function in the strategy will be to expose the consumer's choices at the very second he or she makes a product purchase.

This strategy will ignite a brand chain reaction that, in the old days, we called "up-selling" or "cross-selling." Cross-selling referred to the strategy required to encourage a consumer to suddenly decide to buy much more that he or she had intended. This marketing discipline was a difficult one to manage in the past, as it required knowledgeable store staff and/or really effective point-of-sale materials. Now, "I just called to say..." may come to signify a new marketing onslaught.

C-commerce will change our shopping experience. It's also likely to be one of the most effective branding tools we will ever have had at our disposal. Why? Because it invites and allows the marketer's response to the consumer's shopping behavior right in the midst of the purchase situation . for better and for worse.

If you are like me and habitually forget to buy half of the groceries you need every time you go to the store, this could be a welcome marketing move. But for the rest of the world, this might well become a challenge. That is, a challenge for both the consumer and the marketer. The mutual challenge lies in what is potentially a dream tool for both the former and the latter: a tool that has unlimited power, as well as unlimited capacity to be ignored.


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Over the past two weeks, I've discussed how superbrands appear to have lost their claim to that prefix and how they have relaxed back into the complacent comfort of being merely traditional brands. The old brand giants seem to have lost the innovative edge, quashed any burgeoning flexibility with the bureaucratic process, and succumbed to the arrogance they'd cultivated during decades of market dominance. Coca-Cola was one of my examples. And Coke has recently announced its fight to get its old fizz back again.

I guess it will be to nobody's surprise to hear that Coke's secret weapon is to be found online, as evidenced by the company's marketing campaign and its recent megadeal with AOL. More than encompassing an exchange of marketing services, the mammoth deal aims to integrate new communication channels, like Mobile Internet, with Coca-Cola's communication portfolio.

Already Coca-Cola has teamed up with NTT DoCoMo in Japan, sending singing icons to millions of Japanese Coke drinkers. And the company is planning to give away 100,000 WAP-enabled mobile phones free of charge to users across Europe. These giveaways will bear branded messages aimed at Coke's core audience.

These developments aren't so surprising. What is remarkable is the fact that Coca-Cola, for the first time in decades, is outsourcing its marketing decisions and responsibilities to individual markets. Its Atlanta headquarters has seen the benefits of the global brand assuming a local voice.

This decentralization strategy is perhaps one of the biggest moves Coke has ever made, bureaucratically and culturally speaking. There's apparently a world beyond the United States, and local-market knowledge has it covered. The new strategy enables individual markets to develop localized products that address market needs and ensure a steady stream of product innovation.

But back to the AOL deal. It's frightening to think that Coca-Cola spent only $1.1 million on online advertising last year. The figure has changed with the AOL deal, which is estimated to be worth $64 million over a two-year period. That's an increase of 3,000 percent over last year. Five percent of the total marketing budget is dedicated to online activities, an impressive figure compared to what was spent in the past. But not so impressive compared to Coca-Cola's television advertising budget for last year was $500 million.

So, the Coke brand is reinventing itself. It's busy dusting itself off, but has the brand left its workout too late? The initiatives I've briefly mentioned are new to Coca-Cola. But they're old as far as any dot-com company is concerned. Decentralization is far from a new strategy. The most unwieldy public departments have been engineering such a policy for years. Teaming up with AOL wasn't unpredictable. And the wireless initiative? Any self-respecting brand would race into the wireless world at 100 miles per hour.

The problem for Coke is that everyone else is doing the same thing. So even though these initiatives may be revolutionary for Coke, they are merely a "follow the leader" strategy. The pity is that the leader is no longer Coke. That role has been usurped by technology companies. My question is: By following the leader, can you possibly be a market-leading brand?


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A lot has happened since the '80s, when American Airlines initiated the first frequent-flyer program. Needless to say, every airline, and most hotels and rental car companies, around the globe have adopted the idea of rewarding loyal customers. And loyalty programs have worked in almost all cases. That is, until now.

This year has become the turning point for loyalty programs. Suddenly, frequent-flyer programs have had to demonstrate their value to the companies that run them, as well as to the customers that patronize them.

Most of us, as consumers, have become locked ever more securely into purchasing patterns dictated by the limitations of our loyalty program memberships. Not only is the consumer conscious of this (albeit voluntary) choice limitation, the consumer is also questioning whether the payoff for this limited freedom (previously understood as loyalty) is worth it.

In a time of recession, like the one the U.S. and, probably, most of the Western world is experiencing, loyalty undergoes significant challenges. Is customer loyalty strong enough to ensure, for example, that passengers will continue to choose American Airlines despite the recent terrorist incidents and the November crash in New York? Will Swissair's loyalty program be effective despite the fact that, on paper, it has only enough money to survive until March and despite its sister company's recent accident in Switzerland, believed to be the result of pilot error?

As occupancy rates in hotels fall worldwide (Disney parks and resorts have suffered a downturn in occupancy of as much as 25 percent this year) and, as a consequence, tariffs drop dramatically, will regular hotel visitors feel loyal to their usual hotel chain? Or will many of those consumers choose better value over accumulating points?

Well, most companies believe consumers will still go for the points. Just last week, Marriott offered its customers double points and double nights as long as they chose to pay for their stay with their Visa cards. Most airlines are following the same trend: using points as discount vouchers to attract customers.

Still, the fact that these companies exhibit a belief in the efficacy of points in attracting and retaining customers doesn't prove that these programs are working. The question remains: Do consumers think reward points are reward enough for loyalty? Or do they think some other type of reward, outside loyalty-card schemes, needs to be developed to attract ongoing customers and secure sales increases?

According to Philip Kotler, a well-known marketing writer and professor of international marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, recession is not about profit. It's about surviving. Keeping 10 happy customers through a recession is more rewarding than trying to make a big profit out of them during an economic downturn and, most likely, losing them in the process.

The answer lies somewhere in-between. Without existing loyalty programs, the travel and hospitality business would have been in deep trouble by now. However, no loyalty program has been built to handle the looming recession. So perhaps what the reward-scheme world needs, to convince consumers that it's worth remaining loyal to a brand, is a combination of toolkits that work outside their existing systems. Who knows? Only time will tell if the wheels on reward schemes have fallen off.


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So you reckon a click-and-mortar strategy is for you? Well ask yourself this question: What do you expect your brand to gain by the move? For dot-coms, establishing consumer and market trust might be a key objective. For brick-and-mortar companies, locking out online competitors might be the objective.

Those objectives can't be compared with each other. Nor can their achievement be easily ascertained or measured. But the goal of both entities is that they derive benefit from the new strategy. And one of several key areas of benefit lies in brand synergy.

Relationships With Customers and Partners

Brand diversity is reflected in your brand's capacity to deploy all its communication channels at optimum points in each consumer's life cycle -- the ability to maintain the brand's relationship with the customer, offline or online, in a timely, customer-sensitive, and intelligent manner.

That doesn't mean overexposure, such as plastering a logo all over the place. It's about developing a strategy that introduces the brand to the consumer meaningfully, in all situations, and in ways appropriate to each customer's level of familiarity with and need for the brand.

This means achieving brand synergy, the compatible marriage between your brand's identity and consumers' preconceptions or understanding of it.

With click-and-mortar partners working on the task, cohesive brand handling can grow this synergy. Competent, cohesive brand handling induces the sum of the benefit to both entities to be greater than the benefit a brand enjoys alone (offline or online).

The Benefit

Here lies a click-and-mortar benefit. On the Net you chiefly use just one sense -- sight -- right? You can use your hearing, too, but the Net mostly communicates visually. This limitation underlies a clear benefit for an online brand assuming an offline partner or operating strategy.

The real-life store can appeal to all the senses. The Starbucks environment, for example, not only appeals to the eye with couches, lamps, and tables but also creates olfactory appeal and taste experiences. You know when you're passing by a Starbucks cafi without looking at it. So the Starbucks brand appeals to all five senses.

The Challenge

And here's the other side of the coin. What's the value to the user of interacting with the brand in partnered offline/online environments? Cohesive brand handling is the customer's minimum expectation. Consumers assume they'll have their preconceptions about a brand satisfied. If they're surprised, they need to be able to process the unexpected within the parameters established by your brand's lexicon and personality. What's a brand's gain in suddenly becoming unrecognizable by defying expectation?

Will, therefore, a click-and-mortar setup make your brand easier to find and acquire from your customers' perspectives? Faster to use? Cheaper? More convenient? More informative? Will it offer a larger selection? Become more relevant and customized?

One or more of these points must be apparent for there to be increased value for your brand in transitioning to a click-and-mortar existence.

Concentrate on the Objective

Your brand's goal should be to add value to your customer's relationship with the brand. And the only way to ensure that this happens is to identify the increased consumer values you want the partnership to achieve, then track their evolution during the transformation process.

Your brand-building efforts need innovation that enhances your customers' relationships with the brand. And the click-and-mortar principle expands your brand's opportunities for exposure, communication, and gain. But concentrate on objectives.

Will your brand click with a click-and-mortar environment?


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We've all done it: popped into the delicatessen for a couple of necessities and emerged with more ham than we really needed, some irresistible pâté, and eight fabulously herbed sausages that weren't on the shopping list. This phenomenon is called cross- or upselling. Others call it impulse buying. Whatever it is, it's been happening in brick-and-mortar stores for eons. It's a critical retail factor.

Only a few attempts have been made to translate this essential purchasing behavior into online buying. When writing my book, I was constantly struck by the fact e-tailing failed, time and time again, because it had to forfeit the sensory appeals that make retail purchasing enjoyable. Search functions, product lists, and pop-up boxes never managed to inspire the impulse phenomenon from the real world.

Until now.

The first serious signal indicating e-tailing had become more than just online cataloging was Amazon.com's "Look Inside" function, introduced last year. It invites customers to get as close as conceivably possible to books on offer without actually being able to touch them. Customers can look inside books, flip through pages, inspect the indices, and get a feel for a book's conclusions before purchase. At last, the cover and the often-biased reviews and back-cover blurbs aren't the only criteria a customer has to go by.

Amazon's innovation is only the beginning. Remember the glossy catalogs you used to get in your mailbox every week? Pages and pages of offers from Kmart, Toys "R" Us, and Radio Shack? I'd never seen an online equivalent to these brick-and-mortar catalogs until I happened to go to Gevalia. My visit to this coffee brand's site confirmed the term "click-and-mortars" -- a term I've talked about a lot over the past years -- has become reality.

The site promotes Gevalia's e-catalog, which appears on screen almost instantly. It's much like a print catalog. The graphics are familiar and resemble those of retail catalogs. You can flip through pages, as if it were print. But it also exploits interactivity. Every one of the pages literally sounds real! Birds sing when a pot of coffee is placed on a garden table; the sounds of brewing and pouring emanate from your speakers when freshly brewed coffee appears on the screen. As you trace your cursor over the illustrations, you're presented with the information you need. You can instantly purchase the product.

I contacted DigitalDM, the company behind this e-catalog and learned more surprising details. The catalog, once downloaded, leaves a minicatalog on your desktop that's automatically updated every week. There are no hassles finding the site again, and no need to repeat the downloading procedure. Gevalia's catalog is always updated and right there on your screen.
Branding is not just a logo in the corner of a Web site. It's a total sensory experience. The more senses a brand appeals to, the better its chances of being remembered and purchased. Retailing has an edge over e-tailing because it has the capacity to appeal to all of our senses. Browsing beautiful window displays, touching cloth, smelling perfume, tasting samples, testing a speaker's sound quality, comparing the colors on the table cloth with colors on the napkins -- all details that have been uniquely the province of brick-and-mortar stores.

You still can't taste, smell, or touch the stuff on e-tailers' sites, but they're getting closer to approximating real-life experience. Amazon's Look Inside and DigitalDM's e-catalog are proof that human experience can be translated to a digital medium.

Brand builders must keep one all-important fact in mind: Real people sit in front of computer screens. As Apple's founder once said, "Man is the creator of change in this world. As such, he should be above systems and structures, and not subordinate to them."


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OK. So it's finally happened. The long- and much-used .com address suffix has received support from seven new family members: .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .museum, .aero, and .co-op.

So for everyone who believes, in theory, that the overused .com problem is solved, think again. No more fights for .com addresses or battles that force prices sky high? If you believe there's no difference between perception and reality, you're very likely to question the success of this new development. Let me explain why.

Don't get me wrong. I welcome the move and wouldn't be able to suggest any other solution to the .com demand problem. But sometimes there are no solutions. The fact is that .com has become a synonym for the Internet.

Just think about the terms that have sprung from the .com suffix: dot-com company; dot-commer (employee). These terms have now been floating around within the new economy for nearly six years and have made it more than difficult to introduce new domain addresses. On top of this, .com addresses have become pseudonyms for the "real" brands and, thus, the most attractive ending for domain addresses.

A brand with any self-respect has a .com suffix at the end of its address. You don't even have to look up the addresses for Nike, Gap, Coke, Lego, Snickers, or Ford because you know they'll simply append .com to themselves to form their addresses.

And then there's the rest of the world, the world outside the United States. Even though local domain addresses are well used and well respected, like the Danish .dk, the English co.uk, the German .de, and Norway's .no, the perception of internationalism that attends a .com address impels many companies to adopt a .com address as well as a local one.

The reality is this: In the time it took for the Internet community to develop new address strategies, the old strategy became so solid, so well established, and so overused that no one is now willing to give it up. The result is likely to be that no changes will take place at all.

No companies will give up their existing .com addresses, and none will stop promoting them. And as long as all the big ones are using and promoting the .com address, all the small outfits will do the same. I bet you feel the same as I do when mentioning a .net address. It's good to have, but not something you're necessarily proud of. It's a common perception.

Very few large companies use a .net address as their primary address structure. The new address system is similar. But remember that most companies have now adhered their web addresses to all their collaterals, commercials, and merchandising. More important, they've educated consumers to remember those .com web addresses.

So the seven new address structures are likely to be no more successful or popular than the .net address. Which leads everyone back to square one. Can we squeeze another couple of million addresses out of the old structure?

This is for sure: The squeezing is making a .com address the world's most expensive real estate. There's no sign of the structure's value or desirability declining, despite its having seven new family members.


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Last week, I discussed how business-to-consumer (B2C) startups could handle the challenge of building brands cheaply. Having referred to B2Cs, I now need to comment on business-to-business (B2B) companies.

B2Bs' traditional branding techniques vary in many respects from those used by B2Cs. But there are some fundamental features that the two approaches share, because human beings are the ones making purchase decisions, whether in the business world or in their personal lives. With this in mind, let's think about how to build a solid B2B branding strategy.

The first thing you should do is make the product human and visible. I'm not suggesting you use cartoons to launch your brand, but I am asking you to communicate to your audience in a human way, not as if it were composed of robots. Intel, for example, managed to turn computer chips into tangible, understandable products. Of course, this company was equipped to launch its message with the support of one of the world's largest-ever marketing campaigns. Intel's approach sure worked, but I don't expect you to spend several hundred million dollars. What we can learn from the Intel example is that intangible, abstract products can be transformed into visible, concrete ones. Intel humanized the computer chip by using other respected brands to carry its message.

Undoubtedly, many B2B companies represent products that are pretty uninspiring as far as the layperson is concerned. But by teaming up with a second brand -- one that can convert the B2B-manufactured product into something interesting -- a B2B company can harness consumer attention that would have been inaccessible were the product to be marketed alone. What I'm talking about is a mini B2B2C brand alliance strategy.

The goal of this is to have your B2C clients do the marketing work for you, or at least show the value of your product in a human context. Whether you produce iron, paper, print products, lenses, merchandising, software -- you name it -- the strategy should be to create partnerships with four or five key clients by building cases around the ways they use and value your product. I'm talking about testimonials, not only from your clients but also from your clients' clients! Why? Because what touches people, what is meaningful and relevant to them, is to imagine a product in a "real" context. Paper and software products need no longer be comprehended as ingredients in some unknown product; they should be comprehended in parallel with, or as vital constituents in, products about which end-users express positive opinions.

Let me give you an example. One of the world's largest lens manufacturers, Carl Zeiss, has moved away from talking about lens production in favor of talking about end-user experiences, despite the fact Zeiss almost never sells directly to these end-users. Zeiss asked consumers to convey how its product changed their lives -- how its lens technology improved their lives. In one of its brochures, Zeiss points out that, because it produces the lenses that make computer chip production possible, almost everyone is in contact with the Carl Zeiss brand every day. Did you know that Zeiss is an integral part of Porsche production? Zeiss produces the equipment that measures and designs the car's shape. Suddenly the Zeiss product is rendered comprehensible and interesting because it's explained within a meaningful context. Carl Zeiss is no longer merely a lens manufacturer; it's a company that actually has an impact on "my" life!

Why is this so effective? Simply because we all are human beings and we need to comprehend the details of life from a human point of view. The good news is very few companies have managed to create contextual stories for their products so, if you were to go ahead, you'd most likely create a positive stir out there.

For some reason, most B2B companies think they have no alternative to presenting themselves as gray and boring. That's why they communicate in as formal a fashion as possible. But, in fact, even if I'm a B2B purchasing manager, I will always be affected by my feelings -- perhaps not much, but enough to make one company look more human than another.

Does it cost extra? Not at all. What it does is humanize your brand and create confidence among your B2B customers. They will perceive your brand as being popular among end-users, which will strengthen ties between you and your key clients. In addition, you'll have made your product and its purpose interesting to the world. When people are interested -- when they are talking about a product -- that captures the attention of the media. As you know, journalists like to be able to put things in context. They know that context is what creates a fascinating story. A B2B2C brand alliance strategy lays the groundwork for contextual understanding. Paper, metal, software, lenses... no longer are such materials mere components. A brand alliance strategy fits them into a product story that is relevant to the human in all of us.

That's what B2B branding is all about.
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When I first surfed the Net about six years ago, I clicked on every banner ad that came before me. I did this not so much because I was in desperate need of home-loan advice, fly-fishing equipment, or wedding dresses, but because I was curious to see what banner ads were all about. Well, I'm not curious about banner ads any longer.

But I am still curious about ads that appear within logical contexts. In these ads, the messages make sense, they pique my curiosity, and they encourage me to revert to my earlier discovery-oriented behavior.

Understand Customer Behavior

I wonder if I'm the only user in the world behaving like this. It's hard to tell because, according to Digitas, less than one percent of larger sites compile meaningful customer profiles. And, as a result of this lack of consumer-behavior data, even fewer marketers manage to situate their messages within appropriate, compelling contexts.

You might have occasion to claim that a great offer on a respected brand compels consumer attention. But the reality is that such occasions are rare. In fact, according to another study conducted by ACNielsen in Northern Europe, less than 0.05 percent of banner-ad messages are blessed with the uniqueness to harness the attention of consumers beyond the ad's main target groups.

Use the Right Technology

Maybe m-commerce will solve this problem. The Japanese i-mode phone can tell you when a friend is in your vicinity and about to pass by, and can then offer an online coupon redeemable at a nearby coffee shop. Via the i-mode phone, a bookstore can inform you that the book you've been searching for is available at the very minute you're passing by the store. But even though technology like this in Europe and Japan is miles ahead of that in the United States, the fact is that m-commerce represented less than 0.002 percent of the e-commerce that took place over the last year.

This leads me back to the premise that prompted this article: the urgent need for revising the way we serve advertising messages, the timing of the message, and -- you guessed it -- the context in which the message appears.

Context branding is simple. It's about how, when, and where you serve your message to achieve the best possible result. It's not a surprise that Amazon.com's business model is based on retaining each customer for a significant number of years -- up to an astonishing 12 years, according to some analysts' forecasts. Why is this possible? Because every year a customer is with you, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more value you can squeeze out of your marketing dollars.

Be Creative

I want to see every banner ad doing what Johnson and Johnson's Tylenol headache reliever is doing. The Tylenol banner ad appears on e-broker sites whenever the stock market falls by more than 100 points. Or how about what Unilever's mobile recipe book is about to do via digital mobile phones in Europe? Intended for use while shopping, the mobile tool suggests recipes and breaks them down into their requisite ingredients, identifying, wherever possible, Unilever products. I'd like to see American Airlines alert its customers to flight delays when customers are about to leave for the airport, rather than once they're there.

Let's be straight. What I'd like is to see advertisers become more creative. I'd like to see them thoroughly examine consumer behavior, figure out when the need peaks for particular products, and put their brands in the appropriate context.

Contextual branding is what professional marketers have been doing for decades. But brands now need another push to get themselves even closer to consumers' recognition. This can happen only by using three ingredients: informed insight into consumer behavior, an understanding of the technology available that gets a brand as close as possible to the consumer (without interfering with privacy), and tireless creativity.

At least that's my contextual branding cocktail. What will you include in yours?


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Some years ago, an Australian takeout pizza place used the Internet in an attempt to boost sales. Traffic was slow. Hardly anyone visited the site. The need for an increase in traffic was urgent.

If traditional online media planning had been used, banners and links would have been purchased and the URL added to the shop's phone-book entry. It might even have invested in some traditional ads.

The pizza place went a different route. Instead of spreading money between off- and online ads, it spent the entire budget on radio. The spots were simple but extremely effective. So effective, the restaurant's increased business caused most of the local competition to shut down.

How'd it do it?

Instead of offering discounts or merely promoting its URL, the pizza place's radio ads asked listeners to tear out all the pizza-restaurant pages from their yellow pages and bring them in. In return for the pages, customers received a free pizza of their choice and a sticker with the restaurant's URL.

Very clever!

Because the contact information for all the other pizza joints in town disappeared from customers' primary reference source, only one set of contact details was left in households that complied: the URL for the restaurant that dreamed up the promotion. That single outlet is now a franchise.

Creating traffic is not necessarily a matter of buying ads or taking a traditional approach. Of course, there's always room for traditional thinking. It works and always will. But if you really want to build effective traffic and branding, go one step further. That is, unless you're a Microsoft with an almost unlimited marketing budget.

Generating traffic combines traditional thinking with three idea-based elements. The idea is crucial. First, create the idea as the local pizza place did. Develop an idea that not only generates attention but also generates appropriate attention -- attention that enables people to remember the information that engaged them and to act on it.

You'll never forget the pizza story, right? The idea (removing the pizza pages from the yellow pages) is simple, clever, cheap, and audacious. Second, promote the idea via traditional off- and online channels and via new channels. The effectiveness of every piece of your communication is increased tenfold if each promotes that pivotal idea rather than simply touting some special offer, new taste sensation, or new product. Third, optimize any channel you use and ensure the message points in your direction.

I don't need to remind you more than half of today's brands have yet to optimize the way search engines secure consumer awareness of their existence. A quarter of the world's brands have not incorporated their URLs into the message customers hear on the phone while on hold. Nor have they added standard signature lines to emails that include the company URL. These details amount to free branding.

What's more important: the chicken or the egg? Both. Far too many brand builders believe traffic is secondary to site development. Wrong. Unless you have an unlimited budget, you can't afford not to think creatively. You risk ending up like all those vanquished pizza competitors.


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As more media opportunities open up, the issue facing marketers is not only which media channel should carry a brand's messages but also how to secure brand synergy across media channels. How do you ensure that you don't dissect your brand's image into isolated brand islands, fragmenting rather than integrating your campaign? Here are a couple of principles that will help you avoid disabling your brand's message.

Channel Synergy

Your brand should enjoy synergy across a range of passive and interactive media. For example, if you use television, a passive channel, you could use the medium to direct your audience toward an interactive medium, such as the store. Then, make sure the in-store promotion harnesses the traffic generated by TV. If it doesn't, failure occurs and synergy is lost. If you run a radio promotion, use that medium to push your audience traffic toward, for example, your Internet site, which enables interaction between your brand and its audience. Use print media to encourage interaction via the mobile phone's SMS service, enabling another form of consumer interactivity.

See the principle? Shift between passive and active media, and always make sure that you link the channels' traffic together. This spreads your brand's message as widely as possible and ensures that consumers have somewhere to go or an action to take -- anything that keeps them involved with your brand. Why? Because if you see a TV commercial tonight, you might not be able to act on it until tomorrow, by which time your memory of the brand could have evaporated. The passive/interactive channel combination allows for immediate response. If you happen to pass a billboard but can't stop the car, an Internet address links the billboard's message to an opportunity for imminent action. This passive/interactive channel combination secures the constant possibility of consumer action and response.

Tone of Voice

Let's dispel a myth: A brand needn't have the same tone of voice across media. Some media channels require a relaxed tone, others a formal and detail-oriented tone. In fact, it's likely that you could destroy your brand if you try to force a certain tone of voice upon a medium that's not sympathetic with that channel. Let's take the mobile phone. You have just eight words at your disposal. Formal language requires many more words. Its tone doesn't coalesce with the quick, easy, and disposable style associated with the medium as a message carrier.

I don't mean your message shouldn't reflect consistency across communication channels. Brand consistency lies in core values, key words, and identifiable style -- not copy. Copy can no longer remain the same in every brand manifestation. The range of media at your disposal requires your brand's tone of voice to be flexible.

Responding to Consumer Preferences

In my part of the world, "Big Brother" is a hit. Viewers vote on who should stay in the "Big Brother" house and who must leave. The TV audience calls a phone number to vote. Most "Big Brother" viewers fall into the 14- to 28-year-old segment, and most have mobile phones and Web access. Despite the fact up to 80 percent of the audience prefers to use email or SMS to vote, these options aren't offered. Why is that? Because the TV station earns a few cents on every call. How many potential voters is the TV station losing by forcing viewers to use one communication channel? Why doesn't it leverage the fact SMS or Internet voting would generate other advertising and revenue opportunities and, possibly, 50 percent more viewers?

Choice of medium should not be based on what's convenient for the marketer but what's convenient for the consumer. If consumers prefer email, give them email access. If they prefer paper coupons, give them paper coupons. In the end, your choice of channel will affect your traffic and brand loyalty.

Do these three pieces of advice make you an expert in cross-channel management? Hardly. But, if you can say you adhere to these principles, you're 10 steps ahead of most marketers. They still believe cross-channel management is about including a URL in newspaper ads or a phone number on TV spots.


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How often have you seen a URL advertised on TV and flown into a frenzy, scrambling to note it so you could check out the site later? How often have you visited such a site only to find the special offer, promotion, or featured product that prompted your interest was nowhere to be found on the page you were urged to visit?

No data documents how often this happens, so I collected my own in a homemade survey. My "results" are statistically unreliable but provide anecdotal evidence of a bad brand situation.

Over two months, I noted every URL I encountered. Most came my way via magazines and direct mail, some via television. Some were part of outdoor promotions, and some were on the radio. In addition to jotting down the URL, I noted brief details about the ad and context in which the address appeared -- information on what the promotion promised.

Before revealing the results of my survey, I want to mention I actually expected to find most brands at this point in time -- some eight years after the appearance of the World Wide Web -- to have created the necessary synergy between clicks, bricks, and brands. Such synergy has been indicated by several surveys, including one by ACNielsen, to be 35 percent more effective in improving conversion rates.

My results astounded me. Of the 259 ads I noted down, 64 percent resulted in finding absolutely no connection between the promotional message and promise and the Web site's content. Of the 92 billboard promotions I responded to, 72 percent evidenced no synergy between their billboard promotions and their sites' content. And 43 percent of addresses I heard on the radio missed the synergy boat, too.

The only positive result was direct mail promotions, which, for some reason, led to pages that manifested a link with the offline promotion. Only 8 percent of the URLs gleaned from direct mail failed to create a connection between the landing page's promotional context and site content. A promising 92 percent achieved a clear link between messages in their letters and brochures and their sites. Well done!

This survey is in no way comprehensive. Apart from the fact the sample group I explored was very small, the subjects were exclusively from Australia and the U.S. You'd need to investigate a much bigger group across a larger swathe of the globe to generate statistical validity. Naturally, the short bursts of exposure that media such as billboards and broadcast channels offer don't permit long, complex URLs, if that's what is required to create cross-channel brand synergy.

All those caveats and the purely anecdotal value of my little survey aside, where is brand synergy? Why does it seem to be so hard for so many brands to create synergy across channels? You've spent a heap of energy (not to mention money) establishing your online, offline, and wireless presence, but you've forgotten to tie these elements together.

It doesn't take much to ensure a 35 percent increase in effectiveness. It's just a matter of thinking about total communication solutions instead of individual channels. Almost no one only watches television or only listens to the radio. Human beings span multiple channels on a daily basis.

Reflect on the channels in your private life. Use these in your brand and channel strategy. It will pay off -- instantly.


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Finally Nike has done what many observers expected the company to do last year. Nike Retail Services, Inc. introduced Nike iD, an interactive site that allows visitors, professional athletes and everyday consumers to design and order customized shoes. And, almost at the same time that Nike offered this new service, Levi's deleted its customized service from the Levi's site. The reason? The service wasn't getting the results Levi's had expected.

So who is on the right track? Nike or Levi's?

Nike introduced Nike iD late, right in the middle of the customization trend. Levi's, on the other hand, was one of the trend's pioneers. Was Levi's too quick? Were they too far ahead of the trend to reap the desired results from it? Or is customization on the Internet not suited to jeans retailing? These questions are tough to answer. Let's take a look at the whole picture before focusing on customization via the Internet.

The presence of true customization on the Net removes the major enticement for consumers to visit stores. Why should I visit a Levi's store to buy customized jeans? I won't be able to take my new pants with me when I leave the store anyway. And I won't be able to actually see them. I'll probably even have to pay up-front for them, just as I would if I were buying from the web site. The added value of visiting the store is, therefore, nil. Thus it would seem that cutting the customization service from the Internet might support Levi's stores. However, deleting the customization service might also discourage users from visiting the Internet site. Why should I visit the Internet site now and why should Levi's be interested in my visiting the site at all?

In many ways, Nike is faced with the same set of possibilities and questions. What would motivate the consumer to visit Nike iD for customized shoes? There's no apparent motivation at all: the Nike Town stores offer well-branded expertise. Given this fact, Levi's conclusion would be not to go online with a customization service.

Yet Nike has chosen to introduce Net-based customization. Is Nike behind the times, is it charging recklessly ahead on the path that Levi's wisely abandoned? Or is Nike going to reap the benefits of a perfectly timed e-tail service introduction? And what of Levi's decision? Did they jump the customization ship too soon? Levi's might very well have been wise to remove their customization service from the Internet, though it seems a strange decision to have taken when the customization boat had set sail and, finally, become serious business on the Net. What we don't know is how many millions the customization exercise cost Levi's to maintain on a yearly basis, and what added brand and loyalty value was earned in return for the investment.

Conversely, the Nike introduction seems almost too late. Most people would have expected Nike iD to have appeared a year or more ago. But Nike might very well have timed the initiative just right. By now, all the e-tailing hype has subsided and transformed itself into serious e-commerce - with revenue returns instead of immeasurable public relations results.

Only time will tell which of the two players' strategies was most effective. Ironically, time may prove Levi's to be the winner. I say "ironically" because Levi's was one of the first e-tailers to take the customization chance. Levi's led the pack and, in so doing, captured early knowledge about online customization. But at a very high price. The learning experience has, for many site owners, been the real reason for going online, which they often did knowing that the market was not yet there. Such experimentalists deserve admiration for their patience and pursuit of Internet marketing knowledge. Hopefully the Levi's example won't discourage such pioneering or lead potential players to the conclusion that learning from experience doesn.t pay off.


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I bet over the past month or two you've been asked to cut your marketing budget. The recession is here, and anything that can be cut will be cut. And I bet, like most of us, you didn't really know where to start or, for that matter, when to stop fighting the cut of yet another 20 percent.
Well, I'm sorry I don't have a definitive answer for you, but what I can show you are some options a range of marketing directors, senior VPs, and chief marketing officers (CMOs) have tried over the past decade when they found themselves in just such a situation.

1. Ask your customers.

Before cutting anywhere, take a couple of days to evaluate your position. How do you rate your customer awareness? Is it high enough, or do you need to pay attention to your customer maintenance? Is your brand's value proposition well established, or do you have a diffuse brand image out there? Have you differentiated your brand from your competitors', or is your brand lost amongst others in its category?

I know these questions are simple, and you might already have answers to all of them. But, you know what? A recent Forrester Research survey shows that most marketing directors forget to define answers to these questions before they start cost cutting. Far too often they arbitrarily remove the "less safe" media investments -- such as online, direct marketing, and billboard commitments -- as an easy cut. But in doing this blindly, they ignore the untested possibility that one or all of these ostensibly dispensable elements may have been of great value to customer awareness -- promoting the brand's value proposition and its market differentiation. So, remember: Ask your customers about your brand's status before you consider cutting the "easy" stuff adrift.

2. Be creative.

Having evaluated your brand's position by assessing your customers' perceptions of it, try to approach your brand management both tactically and creatively. Wireless carrier Orange, for example, offered students in San Francisco a free paint job for their cars. The only condition was that the paint color had to be the Orange orange! Now, imagine the cost of this tactic against the value it gained the brand in the streets and in the press. Being creative doesn't necessarily cost a fortune. But it can save you one.

3. Don't forget to build your brand.

Some years ago, Shell decided to redirect its total marketing budget into direct marketing from Denmark. The response was great. But after two years, brand awareness among the population was as low as ever, so low that it was starting to affect sales. Devoting its marketing investment into one media channel didn't do the trick. And the real danger in the years of this single-channel strategy was the chance that consumers would forget the brand. Remember: By this stage you've probably invested millions of dollars in building your brand over the years. Why destroy that effort and investment by putting restrictions on your budget's application?

4. Evaluate your partners, but don't start all over again.

A classic cost-cutting maneuver is changing suppliers to gain lower prices. Read my lips: This won't help you in the long run. First, most of your expenditure is probably on media anyway. So, assuming you have a decent media deal, all you can cut are the agency and print fees. These are pretty marginal in the total scheme. More important, your agency probably has years of experience in handling your brand. If you were to turn tail and switch to another party during a crisis, I bet you'd lose half a year's momentum in just running the pitch again, changing the focus, and building a new campaign. Could this possibly be worth a 1 percent saving? I doubt it.

5. Be consistent.

Cost-cutting time is no time to change your branding style dramatically. Remember: What consumers really want now is consistency. Consumers want a brand they can trust, believe, and count on. And now you're changing your branding style because you have to save money?

Good luck with your cost cutting. Only time will tell how well your tactics will work, but hopefully these tips will help you avoid some major pitfalls.


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A couple years ago, I advised a major credit card company on its naming strategy. It should have been a straightforward process but turned out to be a nightmarish operation. The company had established hundreds, maybe thousands, of acronyms for its products, services, and divisions over the years. It had dug itself into a linguistic hole and was buried in terms incomprehensible to anyone outside the organization.

It's easy for insiders to become blind and deaf to company jargon. The result is a brand's identity becomes obscured by meaningless, invented terms.

When you repeatedly use a phrase, term, or brand name, you tend to shorten it. Without real awareness of the abbreviation's growing currency, you've created a second brand name. The most obvious example of this evolution is Coke. The short version of the brand name Coca-Cola was created by cola drinkers and company employees. It's been used internally and externally for over 20 years. Result? The Coca-Cola Company fights an ongoing dual-brand challenge.

Coke has become a familiar word. It's a special case. What about ADT, PPT, DET, ADI, and FTI? All are brand names used internally at various companies. Can you guess what they represent?

Using abbreviations internally carries the risk of communicating them externally. Internal company jargon kills the clarity of a brand's voice. Ever visited a financial or insurance company site, scrolled down a massive list of options, and wondered what the heck terms meant? Have you ever asked yourself, "What on earth does that mean?" when you've come across an obscure word on a site? Found yourself wondering how to identify your needs against a set of seemingly inadequate and alien site options? I've certainly had these experiences. They usually frustrate me so much, I give up on the offender and proceed to another company's site.

Your internal world is very different from the world outside. You're 100 percent focused, 24 hours a day, every day on your branch of expertise. Your customers hardly give you any thought. It's only natural you're infinitely more familiar with your territory and its language than any of your customers. Problem is, lots of companies forget this obvious fact. They use "advanced internal language" on Web sites, in brochures, and even in ads.

Your job as a brand manager is to keep a watchful eye on terms and phrases used in your branding to avoid finding yourself in a situation in which your brand literally speaks to your customers in a language they can't understand.

I'm referring to all your language, including that on your navigation panel, in offerings categories, and on forms. Forget about any internal jargon in communications. Instead, ask consumers what they would call each of your services, how they would categorize them, and how they would like you to talk about them.

Customers will feel your brand is speaking their language, not a company-invented dialect comprehensible only to insiders and experts.

Good branding is about constantly talking your consumers' language.


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As a consequence of our learning more about the Internet -- what works and what doesn't -- we're reaching a point at which more and more Web sites are looking more and more alike. Visit Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and Borders. Remove the logos, and you'll have difficulty recognizing which site belongs to which brand.
So, how do you secure strong Internet branding in such an environment? Have we reached a point at which it no longer matters how a site looks? Is a standard site design with your own logo the best solution?

Reinventing the navigation panels is disastrous -- analogous to surprising a driver by putting the steering wheel on the side opposite to its usual position. Reinventing the purchasing process leads to as many difficulties and has limited consumer value, if any. And the same is the case when it comes to the way you structure the content on your site.

The Internet freedoms enjoyed by most brand and marketing people a few years ago may seem to be evaporating as quickly as norms are being set. A set of navigational standards has evolved on the Net -- standards approved and accepted by consumers. So it simply doesn't help to introduce changes just for the sake of strengthening consumer brand awareness.

Let's extend that parallel with the steering wheel position. Drivers have come to expect a car to take a certain shape. All vehicles depend on common capacities, functions, and features. You wouldn't, therefore, alter the number of wheels on a car, change the necessary elements on the dashboard, adjust the seating, or remove headlights and taillights. Drivers all over the world expect and accept the shape and functionality of vehicles at this point in their evolutionary development. But does that mean the freedoms of vehicle designers have dissipated? Almost all of us would agree that there are major differences between the VW Beetle, the Rolls-Royce, and the Toyota Corolla. They are all based on the same functional structure, but design freedoms within that structure define the models' differences.

Web sites, too, share functional limitations and design parameters, but the potential for differentiation is infinite. The key to online brand differentiation and the savior of Internet brand-building freedoms is detail.

Yes, difference is in the detail. And this is how you need to think about your site. Forget about changing elements the consumer already accepts. This will only harm your brand. Concentrate on details that will add value to the consumer's visit to your site. These details can be found in everything, from your graphics to your language. And, crucially, in your ability to reflect the fact that you know your consumer well. Aim to add value to the consumer experience by offering well-defined, service-oriented support. Inspire your customers; inform them; surprise them. Your site's capacity to add value to the consumer's experience of it lies in the way you follow up and engage in dialogue with users. It lies in the site's communication -- its language as well as visuals, its policies and promises. It lies in the details that no other site is offering. It does not lie in a new navigation panel that nobody's seen before, in some creative purchasing process, or in a new approach to security -- that is, unless you've manufactured these revolutions with the customer truly in mind.

But, honestly, we're at a point where major inventions have already been created. It's not every day you see true revolutions within the car industry. Sure, it happens, but only after tough fights, many of which quietly end in failure.

The secret to online branding success is thoughtful, consumer-oriented detail, not general system differences that challenge your customer's confidence and experience. Your freedom as an online brand-builder remains, but there are plenty of development jobs that should be ticked off on your to-do list. Do me a favor: Don't try reinventing the wheel. Too many have tried and failed, and I'd hate for you to do the same.


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Have you ever made a spelling mistake when typing a URL into your browser? Ever been doubtful of how to spell to a brand's name? I have, and I'm sure most people using the Net experience confusion frequently.

Ritz-Carlton, the hotel chain, is a good example of spelling confusion. Is the company's name spelled with a hyphen, "Ritz-Carlton," or without? No matter which you choose, you'll end up on Ritz-Carlton's home page. What if you misspell the name? "Rits Carlton," for example. I'm sure this is a plausible mistake many of us might make. Here's what happens: You land on a site pushing everything from casinos to greeting cards, not on the Ritz-Carlton home page.

Smart companies are aware of people's potential to misspell (or mistype). Google, for example, includes a number of spelling options in its URL strategy. Try typing "www.googel.com" in your browser. Transposing the "l" and "e" is a common typographical slip. Or, you could type "www.gogle.com." Again, skipping one of the doubled letters is a not uncommon mistake. In either of these instances, you'd successfully land on Google's home page. All the variant URLs work perfectly.

We all get spelling wrong from time to time, even if mistakes are simply typographical rather than true. It follows that all Internet users will, at some stage, misspell a URL. Logic dictates your URL strategy should reflect this. You should purchase all the obvious variations on your brand name that could arise through misspelling.

It's easy to get a handle on common spelling mistakes. Regularly check the error logs generated by all WWW servers to identify mistakes. In addition, ask everyone in your organization with customer contact to report the most common spelling mistakes she observes in consumer dealings with your brand. Reflect all brand name variations in your URL strategy so visitors can link directly to your brand's home page.

Needless to say, this shouldn't be publicized. It's a hidden function that helps your customers find their way to your brand no matter how bad they are at remembering (or typing) its name.

Strong branding is about creating awareness, loyalty, and access. It's fundamental you keep an eye on your customers' communication with your brand. If you observe tendencies to specific errors, because of slips on the keyboard or unfamiliarity with the language, it's your duty to adapt your URL strategy in response.

Yes, you can try to educate your customers regarding your brand's correct name. But your customers' interest in being trained is likely to be pretty low. If you instead help them find what they're looking for, thus exposing the correct name on an ongoing basis, the subtle message will be absorbed by most people.

Do your brand a favor: Misspell it! Work all its variants into your URL strategy, and create another channel to optimize the valuable traffic you want to harness.


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You've probably already heard about this stuff: Pizza Hut has made a deal in which the company has purchased, for an undisclosed sum, one whole side of the next Russian space shuttle to be sent into orbit, the investment ensuring that Pizza Hut's advertised message will be seen across the planet; in San Francisco, private vehicles can be plastered with product messages, earning the cars' owners yearly fees for accommodating the advertising; and in Tokyo, Yahoo! has mounted advertisements on the dark walls of the city's subway tunnels. As the light from the speeding trains illuminates the tunnel walls, passengers are treated to animated messages, the windows revealing frame-by-frame illustrations that the eye interprets as moving images.

Such canvases are the result of the marketer's increasingly fraught search for unclaimed advertising territory. This alternative real estate offers its residents unencumbered occupation, being untouched by any previous advertising, and garners the fresh attention of its audience, surprised as it is to find marketing messages in unexpected quarters.

This trend is building as TV ratings are falling. The Sydney 2000 Olympics, lauded by IOC Chief Juan Antonio Samaranch as the most successful Olympics ever held, also gave NBC the dubious distinction of having achieved the network's lowest viewer ratings in decades.

Why were the NBC ratings so dismal? Not because of a lack of interest in the events being televised, but because of the style of their coverage. The viewing public is expecting more from the media than monologue and commentary. Competing with interactive expectations is a tough call for broadcasters.

And let's be mindful of this interesting fact: Television advertising has been developing for more than half a century, and consumer interest in it has taken that long to start declining. Internet advertising . banner ads, click-throughs, and direct emails . has weathered only five years of consumer tolerance, and already its effectiveness has declined. In fact, from the day Internet advertising was introduced to a skeptical user audience, it has faced declining consumer attention.

And, unfortunately, we're likely to see wireless Internet marketing face the same premature decline.

This prognosis leaves us with a fundamental question: What will be the model for future offline and online advertising? Let's face it: A truly interactive Internet advertising model has yet to be found. Web advertising, like all marketing via all media, has been confined to monologue-oriented techniques and, thus, has been tolerated rather than accepted by consumers. The result is that finding alternative advertising techniques is now a priority on the media planner's agenda.

Of course, there's still a huge role for monologic, even didactic, advertising. For many consumers and traditional clients, broadcast and print media still constitute preferred marketing fora. But because its results are weakening, conventional marketing techniques are coming at an increasingly high price.

Alternative marketing venues and communication techniques are thus inevitable necessities. The simple six-media marketing plan, incorporating TV, print, outdoor, radio, point-of-sale (POS), and Internet promotions, will have to include 30 or 40 media avenues. This plethora of channels, a mixture of traditionally recognizable ones and those that are yet to be thought of, will result in complex media plans and yield effective results. Such plans will combine unexpected channels with consistent brand messages.

Consistency in the brand's message, voice, and promise will unite its image across media channels and be essential for acquiring desired market share. No longer will TV, print, outdoor, radio, POS, or Internet promotions assume advertising leadership. The media planner will act as a media real estate broker, combining marketing investments in complicated portfolios of multitudinous venues.

Brands won't prosper on single, strong media blasts. Their unique messages will depend on consistent, repeated, and versatile delivery for their effectiveness - unless the blast is really big. Do you reckon Russia's planning to launch any rockets in the next couple of weeks?


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Have you ever tried driving in a country where the steering wheel and gear stick are on the "wrong" side and traffic is on the opposite side of the road from what you're used to? Many of us have had this awkward experience. You probably recall an instant of fear that struck when you realized you didn't know where to look, how to react, or which way to turn.

The foreign traffic experience has a parallel in our seven years of Net experience. On the Internet, as on the road, we follow habits, obey fixed guidelines, and instinctively respond to unarticulated rules. We habitually expect a Web site to have a "contact us" function, an "about us" icon, and a privacy policy. These have become standard.

What happens if you break with the standards? What happens if you want to redefine your interface to match with your brand's profile?

Disney has tried this. Visiting Disney.com, I felt I was driving on the opposite side of the road. The home page is beautiful, a remarkable achievement considering Disney's purview includes everything from hotels, film studios, theme parks, and cruises to magazines and merchandising. You name it, Disney's probably into it. This expansive set of interests has to be accommodated by one simple screen: the home page. The result is a Disney World type interface, with each division separated by well-known Disney icons, such as Cinderella's castle, Goofy, and the Disney Store. Cute. But, is it smart -- and does it work?

I remember a study conducted a long time ago by a major toy manufacturer. The study argued kids absolutely hate structure: grids and columns of data. Grownups, however, were found to dislike a mess of products not categorized into a logical order. The toy company's challenge was to find a way of appealing to both audiences. Its solution was to include both approaches by creating a catalog "environment" packed with products on the left and a categorized presentation on the right. I mention this because Disney obviously wants to differentiate its Web presence from the average site, which 99.9 percent of the time is designed according to a grid-like structure. Disney's solution is a city-like navigation panel.

Does this type of alternative navigation panel work? In this case, no. The site is the Web equivalent of altering traffic conditions without notice: changing signals and altering colors indicating rules for travelers.

In preparation for the Sydney Olympics, a blue line was painted along miles of the city's streets. It marked the marathon route and is still there as a souvenir of the Games. But it causes problems. In Australia, drivers are used to white and yellow line markings. For visitors to the city, this extra blue line has caused confusion and increased accidents. Motorists misunderstand the blue line's function and try to interpret it in the context of their own road-rule literacy. They find themselves in trouble.

A new tool may look great, signal its own significance, and not even bother those familiar with an environment, but for everyone else, new visitors to a city or a site, the confusion caused by the unfamiliar can be nightmarish.

The guidelines for good navigation were established in 1995, when the World Wide Web appeared. Since then, most sites aligned their navigation styles according to an established norm. Almost every site greets visitors with the same structure. You'd think it would be good branding to integrate your brand with your navigation panel, as Disney has. The results are counterproductive. Yes, kids might love it, according to the old study I referred to. But their parents are likely to give up on it. Disney's laudable intention of bringing joy and fun to the surfing experience may never see fruition.

People want to be able to find what they're looking for. Extraneous noises, superfluous icons, and a navigation environment foreign to what Web users are used to cause irritation. They get in the way of what visitors want to find. Disney's city-like environment doesn't meet the expectations of a visitor trying to book a holiday trip to the Caribbean.

This is not an attack on Disney. I love the company for doing something different. But there's danger in difference for difference's sake.

Branding is as much a matter of following consumer expectations as about innovation. Standard navigation practices make consumers' lives easier and their visits to your site more productive. I'm not suggesting you develop a cookie-cutter Web site, but I do urge you to reflect on the advantages of navigation habits the world has already learned rather than reinventing the wheel as Disney did. Save your creative resources for functions in which you know your consumers will expect creativity and difference --
and where you know they'll enjoy every minute of it.


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Two weeks ago, at DEMO 2000's tenth anniversary in Palm Springs, a wide range of hopeful new dot-coms vied for the attention of the media, investors, and potential partners. IDG, the event's organizer, did its best to prevent the new dot-coms' marketing machines from going berserk, but still every opportunity for marketing was found and creatively used.

The hotel rooms, the cutlery, the cocktails and breakfast all became vehicles for marketing gimmickry. At the exhibition itself, dot-com marketing and press personnel jostled to grab delegates' attention. The fight simply reflected a broader reality about what is going on in the wider world of Internet entrepreneurship.

On average, new dot-coms spend $25 million per year on marketing. If you were to approach an advertising company with a smaller budget they'd look at you as if you'd just arrived from another planet.

The tactics in this battle for consumer recognition are even more desperate during events like the Superbowl. This extravaganza secured almost 40 companies as advertisers and most of these were dot-com entities. A year ago, such exposure was enormously successful for a handful of dot-com companies. This year resulted in disaster, as expected. Not many in the audience could recall unaided any of the new dot-coms that were paraded before them. But many could recall the well-established brands.

Thus a very expensive advertising investment on the part of these new dot-coms effectively turned into a generic advertising campaign for the Internet itself. The most significant thing many recalled about the dot-coms is that they were... well, dot-coms. The rest of the name escaped them.

So is the advertising battle worth the investment? While the combatants shout and scream about their brands, as they did at the NYSE, no clear voice can be distinguished in the cacophony. What's the solution? Should new companies scream louder to be heard? Or should they leave the room and initiate dialogue outside NYSE? Will next year's average dot-com budget have to be $40 million to establish a brand name? Or will something dramatic happen to halt this desperate trend?

It's likely that alternative communication channels will be used for promotion. Radio, television and outdoor spaces are fully booked for the next half-year. The print media is approaching the same saturation level. So guerrilla marketing could be the next big thing. Internet start-up half.com, for instance, paid a small U.S. city to change its name to the brand's domain name.

But consumers have a low level of tolerance for stuff like this. The lavishly unexpected can become as ineffectual as white music if it's here, there and everywhere. The alternative might therefore be simple: Go back to basics.

The reason names like Pepsi, Visa and MandM's are so readily recognized and remembered by consumers is because they were established at a time when the advertising noise wasn't as loud as it is now - and because they've invested years in establishing a presence in the market. Significantly, such brands have a concrete existence in the real world with products on supermarket shelves, brand names in display windows, and so on.

Most dot-com companies have barely any visibility in the everyday community, with billboard advertising representing their toehold on real-world participation.
New dot-com brand names are likely to appear on the scene in partnerships, similar to Charles Schwab's clicks-and-mortar strategy. The idea is that the mortar isn't just in the recognition value of bricks-and-mortar retail stores. It's also in every shelf product the consumer knows and loves.

This isn't to say we won't see any new dot-com names appearing in the future. But it's likely we'll see new brands combining their marketing efforts with those of existing brands to exploit the leverage they can enjoy from association and borrowed brand profile. The offline brands deliver market position while emerging dot-coms offer a new mindset.

The past five years of the World Wide Web have been characterized by the exigencies of online survival. But nothing can survive forever in extremes, and now the pendulum is swinging back. And as it does it hints at how important brands will be in the next clicks-and-mortar wave.


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Last week, I focused on your ability to measure the return on investment (ROI) of your online branding. This week's article is dedicated to a question I bet you struggle with every day: How effective are banner ads in brand building?
Many have speculated about the value of branding banners as opposed to click-through banners. Click-through banners aim to optimize the number of direct responses (clicks); branding banners are primarily intended to increase awareness or convey a message. And, frankly, over the past years, I have had my doubts about the branding effectiveness of any banner ads.

My own response to this doubt has been to examine the branding effectiveness of advertising in discount-offer magazines. How much benefit can a brand derive from being exposed alongside hundreds of other products on the same page? "Very little," might be the logical response. But is this really the case? There might very well be a reason why major brands pay fortunes to secure minimal exposure in a crowded place. Perhaps the placement really does work!

And here's the big surprise: It really does work.

A hot-off-the-press study, the first of its kind, reveals the truth behind branded banner ads. Just-sites.com's recent study clearly documents that well-designed branding banner ads can contribute to achieving campaign goals normally associated with click-through banner ads. The study shows that nearly half of the responses were indirect, generated by the branding effect. Since indirect respondents were more likely to return to the destination site than direct respondents, the indirect responses represent higher-quality traffic.

The interesting fact from the study is that over half of this indirect response came to one of the sites within a day of being exposed to the advertisement. Had the campaign been analyzed purely on click-through rate (CTR), or even on post-click conversion rate, the results of the campaign would have been severely underreported. The study concludes that by aggregating the direct and indirect response data, the tested campaigns would have achieved half the cost per acquisition compared with that of direct response only.

So what can we learn from this study? That good advertising, whether it's offline or online, always works as long as it uses its medium in the best possible way.

And here are a couple of hints for you. Make sure you include a prominent URL on your branded banner ad. This is likely to increase your number of visitors by up to 50 percent! Not everyone is going to click on your site immediately. In fact, up to 50 percent of visitors delay their visit by up to 24 hours. So remind them of your key proposition as soon as they arrive at your site, because they may not remember it as clearly as they would have had they visited the site seconds after being exposed to the banner ad.

Most important, remember that it pays to be creative, to think outside the tradition of banner ads, a plethora of which will be fighting for your potential visitor's attention by using the same cheap tricks. Blinking, frustrating messages that have become the banner ad cliché often create more bad will than good.

Good branding is, as always, about effective and creative communication, a fact I stress in "Brand Building on the Internet." So remember: It is possible to achieve double branding for half the price -- as long as you're doubly as creative as your competitors. Since effective and creative communication is a rare phenomenon on the Internet these days, being doubly creative shouldn't be too difficult.

Don't click away. Next week, I'll reveal another fact about online branding. I bet it will surprise you, too.


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Imagine that you're a kid, and from the day you were born you had to look after yourself. No controlling parents -- or guiding parents. No demanding parents -- or limiting parents. Certainly, you had parents, but they offered you no assistance. They sent you out into the world to fend for yourself before you could even walk.

Now imagine that you managed to walk and talk and live by your own cunning and survived as a result of your instincts, but now your parents want you to come home and live with them. How would you cope with that?

There'd be more than a few conflicts to endure if you were made to comply with their wishes. You and they would hold divergent attitudes toward, well, everything; those differences would be obvious even if you did understand each other's language.

This is, of course, a parable, and I'm using parents as a symbol for brick-and-mortar parent companies. The majority of dot-coms were born in 1999. If their parents were brick-and-mortar companies, expulsion of the infant online companies into the harsh world of online commerce followed hot on the heels of those dot-coms' birth. The fledglings were under the parental wing for ultra-short periods before the newly born dot-coms were kicked out and expected to survive on the strength of their own identities. The likes of CBSNews.com, CNN.com, and FOX.com were all separated from their parents the very day they were born.

Not a bad idea, according to the experts -- the theory being that separation ensures the dot-com's dedicated focus on survival. Not only that, the eviction safeguards the parent company's well being, they said, by limiting the chances of the online identity cannibalizing the offline progenitor. Freedom was, apparently, the new dot-com's prize -- until February 2001.

In February, the parents almost simultaneously called their kids back home. CBS.com and CBSNews.com were rolled back into the television group. CNBC.com laid off 26 percent of its staff and was rolled back into the broadcasting division. CNN.com was also rolled into the parent's broadcast division. And News Corporation is folding its dot-com units, FOX.com and FOXSports.com, back into its broadcast operations.

The overnight, forced creation of click-and-mortar relationships, alliances that were not well-planned efforts at creating real click-and-brick operations, banished "spinoffs" from the world and relegated them to being just another entry in dictionaries. What management saw as a perfect concept two years ago -- independent online units -- was suddenly replaced with an ostensibly integrated solution. But integration was more of a concept -- a palatable buzzword for press release explanations -- than a description of the business mix's reality.

Tell me, do you know of any case in which a kid who has been living on his or her own and has been forced to move back home has immediately managed to find a harmonious, equilibratory relationship with his or her parents? Sorry, I don't. I'm not saying that the parallel I'm drawing is necessarily an accurate one, but you must admit that there are enough similarities. We might never hear about the companies' internal discord, and if we do, I'm sure we won't learn of it from the companies' own press releases. But the reality of these reunions is that they will cause disharmony and dramatic suffering over the next several years. Either the parents will have to change, or the dot-coms will have to adapt.

My question is this: Will the forced reunions yield true click-and-mortar solutions, or will they yield brick-and-mortar solutions, flavored with a twist of clicks? Knowing that the weakest link is the dot-com, I think the outcome is likely to be that dot-coms will adapt to the brick-and-mortar model.

Today's most successful click-and-mortar companies have been those that have been planning for successful synergy between both parties: partnerships in which online and offline parties clearly contribute their strengths to the collective progress of the company and in which both parties compensate for each other's weaknesses. Such relationships will become realities only if those parameters are observed -- from a logistics, operations, and branding point of view.

Moving back in with your parents when you're 18 years old isn't necessarily a great idea for parents or kids. But it may be convenient for the parents! Think of the warm, inclusive, effusive press releases the happy event would allow them to write to the world...


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What has been a fact of life in the real world since Adam and Eve trod through Eden has at last become a reality in cyberspace. The Internet is no longer mostly for, or by, boys.

Women, especially those between the ages of 18 and 34, are becoming a significant force in adopting new technologies and engaging in sophisticated Internet use, according to a poll of 2,000 Canadian Internet users. That POLLARA survey found that more than 40 percent of the most frequent and sophisticated Internet users are women. That's up from the 30 percent claimed by the previous year's study.

Now let me ask you one simple question: Bearing in mind that 40 percent of such users in Canada, and most likely even more in the States, are female, do the Net's content, style, navigation, and general approach reflect that fact? I don't reckon you would think so.

I'm not referring to an absence of superficial "feminizing." But of course you know I don't mean that. What I'm pointing out is that most Web sites clearly reflect a lack of an appreciation of the female user's psyche and approach to inquiry and tasks.

By now the Internet is part of mainstream communication media. So the flexibility, accessibility, and straightforwardness of traditional communication channels should be forming part of the Internet's operational repertoire as well.

But just think about it. Most Web sites, if not nearly all of them, look like index pages from the New York Stock Exchange. They use stock photos, often of people shaking hands or grasping something equally unoriginal, such as cell phones. The stock subjects are all clad in stereotypical colors. The result of such thoughtlessly deployed and, as a consequence, often superfluous imagery, is the site's utter lack of unique personality. Presentation is not a superficial issue. It's a vital part of a site's message, and it's an invitation to the user to navigate her way toward a brand's objectives.

If you're a woman, and I assume some 40 percent of you who are currently reading this article are, it's likely to have been some time since you encountered a Web site that elicited a response from you such as this: "Wow! What a useful and intriguing Web site. Great message, logical navigation, memorable personality. Hey, I wouldn't mind becoming part of that company! And I'll certainly return to the site." Am I right in guessing that you've never experienced such Net-inspired optimism?

On the other hand, when did you last visit a site and leave as quickly as possible, weighed down with an impression such as this: "What an incredibly boring, information-free, unrewarding site. What were they trying to tell me/sell/achieve?" I find this reaction a regular occurrence, and I'll bet you do as well, even when you're supposedly part of the site's target audience.

But hear this, all Net users: Despair not of your fading interest. Things are changing for the better, and soon site builders will be achieving that all-important site characteristic: stickiness.

One of the reasons site design has been so apparently uninformed by the driving need to gain and hold human interest is that most site builders have to date been -- you guessed it -- men. In fact, an Australian survey shows that 85 percent of Web sites have been designed by men.

But the female portion of the world's technology and programming population is growing rapidly. The result is likely to be navigation and style characteristics that better reflect an appreciation of human interaction and a broader understanding of communication needs. Site logic and accessibility will assume the universal application enjoyed by other mainstream communication channels.

The real world of men, women, and children -- the elderly and the young, the informed specialists and the generalists -- will at last be reflected in cyberspace.


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With six years of experience in the knowledge bank, I thought it might be interesting to summarize the key lessons that e-tailing should have learned -- those absolutely critical to surviving in today's retailing/e-tailing competition.

There are five success factors. They are simple, but critical. Yet they are too often neglected and mismanaged, which explains why only 5 percent of e-tailers survive.

Critical Success Factor 1: The Full Story

As consumers, we like to know what we're buying. In the brick-and-mortar buying context, we can use all five senses when distinguishing between items and exercising our preferences -- an essential facility when selecting anything we wear, eat, or recline on. Clothing, unfamiliar foods, perfumes, and furniture, for example, usually require the try-before-you-buy test.

The catalog of items that doesn't fall into this category, which requires minimal sensory assessment, is limited -- CDs, DVDs, books, everyday items -- and defines the limits of successful trading items on the Net. In the Net-buying context, the consumer has recourse to two of the senses.

To compensate, e-tailers must provide answers to every conceivable question consumers might have about every item for sale. Pictures are an absolute must, even though the necessarily high-quality and comprehensive photo library costs e-tailers a fortune.

From which online store would you choose to purchase a shirt? The one that offers you a single picture and a short description of the garment, or the e-tailer that shows the same shirt from multiple angles and preempts your every query with a satisfactory answer? I reckon you'd opt for the latter.

Selling online is not only about attracting attention; it's also minimizing whatever blocks the consumer might encounter, and a major obstacle is lack of information.

Critical Success Factor 2: Keep It Simple

Help your consumers narrow down their options. Don't mistake a plethora of choice as being the best possible solution to enticing visits. By offering every available product online, you tire and confuse customers. Faced with 50 rows of CDs, for instance, it's hard to know where to start or to end.

The golden rule is simplicity. You're much wiser to manage a few products really well, telling the consumer everything he or she needs to know about them, than attempting to superficially market a myriad of items.

Critical Success Factor 3: Clean Up...

Turn your store's inventory around as quickly as possible. Where a brick-and-mortar store has an inventory turnover rate of 6 per year, a company like Amazon has to demonstrate a turnover rate of 18 and has ambitions of reaching 20 before the end of this year.

Quick turnover saves money; it's such a crucial contributor to a store's economic health that it can determine whether a business will survive or not.

Critical Success Factor 4: Be Upfront, Even About the Bad News

The main reason consumers reject online shopping is the added cost of shipping. Many users are simply not prepared to pay an extra 10 to 20 percent to have purchases delivered when they can just as easily pick up a similar product down the street.

But don't hide the unwelcome news till the last minute of the transaction. To your new customers, this looks like subterfuge. It's very damaging to your credibility and dilutes your brand's value.

Yet the solution might be as simple as incorporating the shipping price into the product price, basing the inclusion on an average purchase amount.

Studies show that there's almost no point in running an e-tail store unless you enjoy an average per-customer, per-visit sale of $80. E-tailing graduates from just viable to attractive once this average climbs to $100.

Food for thought for a lot of e-tailers!

Critical Success Factor 5: Learn About Your Customers

Last, but not least, one of the key advantages an e-tailer holds over a retailer is the Net's capacity to enable monitoring of consumer behavior.

Over the years, many retailers have attempted to map customer behavior, often using loyalty programs. But interpreting the gathered data as concrete, one-to-one information has been elusive. Not so for e-tailers that, like Amazon, can relate every consumer action on their Web site with a marketing-related outcome.

Amazon, for example, now runs a contextual tracking technology that enables it to see what the user was looking at/for prior to visiting the Amazon site, thereby giving the company the means of making keyword searches more relevant.

All five guidelines are as difficult to execute as they are easy to identify. But let's not forget, it's taken retailing a century to arrive at its current position. No wonder e-tailing has made loads of mistakes over a mere six years.


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Some time ago, I wrote a couple of articles on the battle for supremacy in the consumer ring between retailers and e-tailers. At that point in retailing history, it seemed that the first round went to the retailers, as online shopping was just too new for the average consumer to feel comfortable with.

Then the second round seemed to be going the e-tailers' way. Online shopping was by then an everyday household possibility, and the e-tailing hype associated with so many online launches, distracting site publishers from their consumer care duties, had subsided.

However, a recent Forrester Research report on e-tailing inspires me to revisit the situation in the ring and report on the third and final round.

According to Forrester, by 2002 almost all pure e-tailing will be dead. I still maintain, as I did in my previous articles on the retailing/e-tailing battle, that e-tailing has never really gotten off the ground.

The first real test for e-tailing was during the 1998 and 1999 holiday seasons. Unfortunately, the weaknesses that led to the failures that dominated the online experience for most shoppers during those two holiday seasons have yet to be addressed. In fact, the pure online e-tailer's shortcomings have been solidified since then, and this is an impression shared by the market. E-tail share prices have been decimated in the last few months, suffering particularly savage cuts during Nasdaq's April nightmare earlier this year. So far, not a happy life for the wunderkind that we all thought would take over the world.

Let's look at the third round's progress.

The brick-and-mortar retailer really has overcome the online adversary, so much so that the promise of online-led cooperation, in the form of clicks-and-mortar enterprises, has been overturned by retailing's resurgence. Now the term for "cross-channel cooperation" is likely to be "clicks, bricks, and brands." And the shift suggested in the translation of the former term (clicks and mortar) into the latter (clicks, bricks, and brands) lies in branding power.

Brands have shown themselves to be the key component in keeping offline retailers afloat and pushing online e-tailers further out of their depth. Established brands have been the retailer's life buoys. Enjoying a high degree of consumer awareness, established brands have saved offline business from the huge consumer-acquisition costs that have so crippled the online merchants.

In 1999, online pure plays spent an average and unsustainable 118 percent of revenue on marketing. By leveraging established brands' consumer awareness, consumer trust, and offline partners' existing infrastructure, clicks-and-mortar enterprises fared much better. The brick-and-mortars' hold on street-level contact with consumers and their embrace of established and trusted brands are among the characteristics that have helped online partners through the punishing second and third rounds. Amazon.com/Toysrus.com, drugstore.com/RITEAID.com, and yahoo.com/bn.com are examples of the success of clicks, bricks, and brands.

The strength in these unions is the bricks, not the clicks. The backbone of online/offline entities is the real-world infrastructure, centered on the store. From the online end of the operation, a range of channels could reach into the world. One of these is called e-commerce; the other is m-commerce. But these valuable means of global penetration are simply channels that depend for their life and support on a well-established central point: the offline partner and its branding and infrastructural resources.

Selling everything online is never going to be the case. Write me an email 10 years from now if my guess is wrong. What's my guess? That in a decade's time, a maximum 25 percent of all commercial enterprises will have an "e" in front of their names. Some things work online; others don't. It took us five years to figure out the clicks-and-bricks formula. It'll take another five years for us to make it work perfectly.

So the conclusion is that the third-round winner is, again, retail. But this isn't bad news. The rounds haven't been walkovers. The second round, particularly, saw dot-coms give retailing a good shakeup. Offline businesses found themselves questioning their processes, attitudes, and goals, all of which can only benefit the consumer. And what's good for the consumer should be good for the retailer.

Retail now has access to online channels, broadening the customer base and introducing retail to consumer-driven innovations and responses. The Internet has introduced retailing to a cost-effective service-delivery revolution. In five years, dot-coms have become a vital part of consumer expectations and retailing growth. So the bout's winner is, in fact, the referee: the consumer.

What more could you ask for? A recipe for ongoing retailing success, one that rests upon the right mix of clicks and bricks and is achieved in just 1,800 days.


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A recent AC Nielsen study shows that only 20 percent of all shopping will take place on the Internet over the next five years. This estimate is down from the 30 percent predicted a year ago. What once looked so good and efficient has turned out to be a more complex process than we'd ever envisioned. And this leaves bricks-and-mortar retailers as the second round victors in the battle for consumer loyalty.

You may remember an article I wrote in December, "E-tailer Testing Season," discussing the tough times e-tailers were facing during the pre-Christmas shopping season. Most e-tailers couldn't deliver on time or as promised, setting the whole e-tailing trend back months.

Now it's become apparent that the crises e-tailers weathered in December weren't restricted to that season alone. More and more e-tailers are facing tougher and tougher times, trying to justify high stock prices when set against sales and potential sales performance.

Drugstore.com and eToys.com are examples of e-tailers juggling stock price against performance and returns. Both pioneers within their merchandise fields, these enterprises have, since their launch, faced a constant decline in stock value.

A Boston Consulting Group study named "Insight into Online Consumer Behavior," was conducted among 12,000 consumers in the USA and Canada in 1999. It shows that 57 percent of Internet users have shopped online, and 51 percent have actually purchased goods or services online.

The typical online purchaser completed ten transactions and spent $460 online over the previous twelve months. Yet 28 percent of all attempted online purchases failed, and four out of five consumers who made purchases online experienced at least one failed purchase attempt over the same period. These failures resulted from technical problems consumers encountered with the sites, difficulties in finding products, and logistical and delivery problems after the sale.

The study's results clearly indicate that e-tailers only have one chance to survive. One bad experience almost guarantees a customer won't return for more. Not so for bricks-and-mortar businesses, which can sometimes get away with bad service repeatedly without losing a customer.

This is partly due to the geographical location of bricks-and-mortar businesses. Even if service is lousy, a customer may be persuaded by a store's convenient location. But one of the most prominent determinants of return customers is the goodwill factor. Established over years, goodwill can inspire a customer to defend the shop and its bad service five or six times before considering a move elsewhere.

The study also shows that consumers who have a satisfying first purchase experience online are likely to spend more time and money online. The satisfied first-time purchaser typically engaged in twelve online transactions and spent $500 during the previous twelve months. The dissatisfied first-time purchaser spent only $140 on four online transactions. Twenty-eight percent of consumers who suffered a failed purchase attempt stopped shopping online; 23 percent stopped purchasing at the site in question.

Compare this scenario with the bricks-and-mortar parallel where only eight percent of consumers who suffered bad service stopped shopping offline. The scariest data was that six percent of users who had bad online shopping experiences also stopped patronizing the retailer's physical store. The relationship between off- and online branding. the clicks-and-mortar synergy . is, therefore, clearly a factor which could diminish the harmonious synergy between the brand off- and online.

On the other hand, this synergy also offers some positive prospects. Another recent study conducted in Australia showed that the synergy between off- and online brands is impressively high. A good online experience will, in nine percent of the cases, lead to offline-generated sales in the same brand stores. Consumers having positive offline experiences are, in 32 percent of the cases, open to trying the store online if they have access to the Internet. The synergy is clearly present both for good and for bad.

It takes time to establish goodwill, and goodwill cannot be bought. It must be earned over time. The stakes are high for online retailers who don't deliver, a fact that can only lead to the conclusion that it's better not to have a presence at all than to be online without knowing why.

A non-serious presence on the Internet can dilute the value of bricks-and-mortar stores. This is a fact that should be well known to most retailers. Unfortunately, most retailers still think that some online presence is better than none. Hopefully this misconception will soon change.


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Last week I discussed how the great superbrands have become anachronisms in the face of dot-com brands' meteoric rise. The brand pioneers seem to be languishing in offline limbo, gathering dust on supermarket shelves. This week I'd like to take a look at how we can dust these great entities off and restore their lustre.

Let's define what it is that's causing the classic brands to fade. I reckon there are five main reasons for the struggle:


Their product development cycles are too long.


The organizational structure of their parent companies is too inflexible.


Being so well-established, their brand platforms aren't geared for innovation.


Their organizations aren't attracting energetic new staff.


They're arrogant.
As I mentioned last week, Gillette took 10 years to develop Mach3, and LEGO, until recently, took 5 years to develop new toys. Product-development cycles of such longevity can't possibly introduce exciting new products to the eager consumer. A toy idea might be revolutionary today, but if it takes five years before it sees the light of day, it's unlikely, in these times of rapid innovation, that the concept will be surprising in half-a-decade's time.

Let me just ask you a simple question: How will the Internet look five years from now? Before answering, just remember that the World Wide Web didn't even exist several years ago. And now look! Something new, which you and I could never predict, is likely to appear tomorrow and revolutionize the world as we know it. So how could we realistically forecast Internet developments with any certainty? The moral of the story is, of course, that it's impossible to stun the consumer world with inventiveness if it takes five years to reach fruition - unless we're talking about building airplanes or rockets.

Such ponderous product development reflects inflexible organizational structures. Most of the great brands are run by huge organizations that, over time, have inherited bureaucracies and the leaden policies they often promulgate. The resulting inflexibility leaves little play for innovation and invites far too much process and protocol.

The classic brands' platforms were developed decades ago, adjusted frequently, but very seldom reinvented. It's time for most of the old brand platforms to reconsider their strategies. They need to reinvent their platforms by analyzing their core values, assessing the anachronisms in them, and reshaping them to speak meaningfully to consumers along multiple communication channels.

At the basis of this stagnation is the superbrands' lack of new and energetic staff. An injection of new-economy marketing nous might just introduce stable but flagging brands to rejuvenated corporate thinking. The list of the top 100 most attractive companies to work for in the United States has changed dramatically over the past five years. A number of technology brands have squeezed their way to the top as well as great established brands that have conquered the reinvention challenge, like Charles Schwab. Scarily, a frightening number of superbrand organizations have lost their favoured positions on the list. As surely as this is a signal that discourages bright new candidates from seeking employment with these companies, it's a warning light to those businesses that flashes the message: "Some self-analysis is called for."

So why have the surperbrands' organizations been so seemingly reluctant to heed this warning? In a word, arrogance. Superbrands are superbrands because they have been, well, super. They've surpassed all others in their long climb to robust market dominance. So why should they have ever considered reinventing their marketing platforms and the core values that they communicate? The good news is that many brands are shaking themselves free of this complacency. The bad news is that the price of that arrogance-induced torpor has been high. So extravagantly high in some cases that those brands will never regain the market kingdoms of which they were once kings and queens.

So, what are you waiting for out there, you superbrands? Get up, get behind the wheel, and make those dot-coms eat dust.


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It's been about 11= months since the first major e-tail disaster. Last year's holiday season really put e-tailers to the test, and few passed. Even such retail giants as Toys "R" Us and Barnes and Noble were forced to recognize that web-based retailing isn't the same as the brick-and-mortar variety.

So what did e-tailers learn from all this? Can consumers expect a better performance from them this year?

Today's article discusses five lessons that will make the difference between e-tailing's 1999 and 2000 holiday seasons. They are simple points -- almost too simple. But I guarantee that if e-tailers follow them, this year's holiday season will look a whole lot different from last year's e-disaster.

Lesson One: Speed matters. No wonder Toys "R" Us teamed up with Amazon. The partnership married the toy retailer to a successful distribution network. Tapping into Amazon's seven gargantuan U.S. distribution centers has probably eliminated the possibility of Toys "R" Us seeing a rerun of its 1999 delivery debacle, one in which Toys "R" Us had to give dissatisfied customers $100 vouchers to compensate for failed deliveries.

Lesson Two: Answer those damn emails. Last season, 56 percent of e-tailers didn't answer emails within 48 hours, and 26 percent didn't answer at all. These results were gleaned from a survey by Resource Marketing, a Columbus, Ohio, Internet strategy and marketing firm. The same survey conducted this year shows a dramatic increase in email inquiry responses. Now, 78 percent of shopping sites answer emails within 48 hours, compared with the last survey results of 44 percent.

And let me remind you of an obvious, but apparently neglected, fact. An answer within 48 hours means a real answer, not some standard reply assuring the consumer that an answer is on its way. Emails mean business. And sometimes they even mean extra business.

Lesson Three: Consumers still don't trust the Net. You know what? I understand why, 100 percent. Lack of consumer trust is why e-tailers have to encourage its development by offering new types of guarantees like a no-questions-asked return policy. Such incentives build consumer confidence in e-tailers and ensure that the 79 percent of online customers who, according to AC Nielsen, still feel uncomfortable about typing in their credit card numbers on the Net, will continue to do so.

What other policies make your consumers feel uncomfortable? Find out what they are, and replace them with consumer-friendly policies.

Lesson Four: Be the best at what you do. E-tailing does have some advantages that brick-and-mortar retailing can never achieve: outstanding selection, no waiting time, and lower prices. These are the ingredients for e-tailing survival. If you don't have even one of them, you destroy your ability to attract customers.

Lesson Five: Keep your promises. If you promise to deliver, DO IT. Eighteen percent of products never arrived at consumers' doors last holiday season; don't let the same thing happen again this year. Remember, one bad experience means no return customer.

It's a simple principle: Keep your promises. Never underdeliver. Only overdeliver. When I bought some flowers in Australia via www.rosesonly.com.au, I not only received my roses, but I also received four other small gifts that included chocolate and perfume, which I hadn't asked for. What a wonderful surprise.

You're probably now saying to yourself "So what new information is offered in this article?" And you have just cause to wonder. There's nothing new here, and ain't that what it's all about? Since last holiday season, 80 percent of e-tailers have gone broke, and, in almost 90 percent of the cases, it was simply because they never managed to tick off the five lessons we've just considered.

This year is absolutely the last chance to retrieve consumer confidence in e-tailing that was lost last year. Learn from the five lessons, and you'll help ensure that your e-tail customers feel it's a happy season after all.


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Over the past years, thousands of companies have been unable to establish a good reputation among their consumer audience. Unfortunately, this has often been the case because these companies failed to achieve synergy between their strategic intentions and the real outcomes the market perceived.

Nike provides us with a classic example. During 1999, Nike diluted its brand dramatically. The "Just Do It" ethos became a nightmare tagline when it became global knowledge that Nike exploited labor in Third World countries. "Just Do It" was translated into counter-campaign T-shirts bearing the slogan "Just Don't Do It." Thus the philosophy and marketing drive that Nike had spent years creating was washed down the drain.

This fatality has to do with 180-degree branding. "Quick" branding doesn't exist. To think that it does would be like imagining you could paint the roof of your house to repair the holes.

This is the type of dilemma facing most dot-com sites. On the surface, their image is perfect, but just beneath the surface, the holes appear. In the split second that it takes to make a purchase from the site, or worse, during the longer time you might spend contacting it with requests for information or to return products, it is then that the rain and the wind start coming through the holes.

So far, dot-com branding has covered the first 10 degrees. What about the other 350?

A recent study conducted by Bang and Olufsen, the high-quality stereo-equipment manufacturer, shows that the future of branding doesn't lie in imaging, the product itself, or the ads. It's the whole brand story that counts. The term "story branding" is based on the philosophy that every product needs a story to prompt a consumer's involvement with it. I'll give you an example.

At home, I have a salt-and-pepper set designed by Arne Jacobsen. It's nice but not something you would spend hours talking to your guests about. But there is a story behind the set that you would find fascinating if you were at my table.

You see, almost 50 years ago, the designer had dinner with one of his business partners who admired this salt-and-pepper set. The business partner was so fascinated by the design that he asked Jacobsen to design a whole hotel around the salt-and-pepper set. And so he did.

It took Arne about 20 years, but the hotel he designed became a bit of an icon in Copenhagen. Not only was the hotel specially designed to match the salt-and-pepper set, but so were the plates, the cutlery, the curtains, the beds, and, well, everything you could name that a hotel would need. The chairs were also inspired by the design, and his "egg chair" later became part of the Museum of Modern Art's collection in New York. The whole environment was spun from a simple salt-and-pepper set.

What is your perception of this salt-and-pepper set now? Has it changed? Probably, and you haven't even seen it.

Strong branding is all about creating a story or, if a story already exists, making it spin off the product and the brand. Fascinating stories quite often create the foundation for the whole brand . its philosophy, its direction, and its ethos. In the case of the salt-and-pepper set, the designer's philosophy became so integral to the hotel that every staff member, every guest, and every supplier knew of the story, respected it, and worked with it.

There's a lesson to be learned from any business that has a nice web site with nothing behind it. The risk of everything falling apart is huge, and this might be the reason why up to 25 percent of users who fail to use an online site satisfactorily decide never to return to the site again (according to Forrester research). Sites like this kill their brands, even before birth.

Three-hundred-sixty-degree branding is about creating a solid brand philosophy. Often this can be founded in a true story from which the brand can grow in all directions, covering all disciplines and all media channels. Whether you're a business-to-business player or a clicks-and-mortar partner, or you're just trying to win your brand strong customer loyalty, the first and, probably, best step for you to take is to dig into your history. Perhaps you have a goldmine somewhere that can be used to create your full 360-degree branding.


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Those desperate times, from 1995 to 1997, when getting the absolutely best Web brand name for your dot-com was of paramount importance, are long gone. You can forget all about any hope of getting names such as milk.com, water.com, house.com, or car.com.

So do I mean that all the best names are long taken and nothing is left?

Well, if you ask a nonmarketing guy, you'd probably receive a yes, sorry to say -- the nonmarketing guy being of the opinion that a dot-com name absolutely must be related to the product category most appropriate to it.

But hang on. How does that automatic response square with everything we've learned about brand building? Who can seriously claim that chocolate.com is the best brand name for a chocolate brand?

Prefer the Particular

In reality, a generic brand name simply confirms a product's lack of uniqueness. A generic name is a general one. Finding a good brand name is all about lots of good homework and coming up with an identifier that's either free of heritage or blessed with a twist of something positive.

Only someone who's naove would believe that you can find a brand name that works and is perceived positively all around the world. Most company names are developed from scratch so that they are unencumbered by any history or innuendo beyond that which the brand builders massage into existence.

Procter and Gamble, for example, recently put up more than 150 domain names for sale, including the likes of "nails" and "detergent." Its reasoning is that "tide.com" is a more powerful brand name than the generic "detergent.com."

Relearning Learning

In lots of ways the Internet business has been undergoing an education process just as the advertising industry did some 80 years ago. The good news is that we don't have to wait another 74 years before we relearn what we've already discovered from brick-and-mortar marketing.

Actually we're pretty close to enlightenment already. Just take a look at the most recent Super Bowl commercials. They were "real" commercials, not promotions that advertised the media more than the message. Last year's super-high-investment Super Bowl advertising, on the other hand, in many cases amounted to expensive showing-off exercises rather than disseminating brand and product knowledge.

Starting from Scratch

Trovan., Vitria Technology, Clareon Corp., and CoVia Technologies are examples of company names that you and I might not be familiar with. What do these names stand for? In fact they represent an electronic ID system company, a business software company, an Internet payment company, and a technology company, respectively.

Currently, from the general consumer's perspective, their names are like empty boxes that have yet to be filled with identifying brand values. If you reckon such brand names are ineffective just because you have no idea what they stand for, you need to think beyond the Net. In reality, such names will be much more effective than generic brand names that lock products into categories.

So let's give up the fantasy.

Just like in the real world, not all songs are written, not all brand names are taken, and not all URLs are gone.


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Amazon.com recently launched "Look Inside," a tool enabling previews of new books. "Look Inside" is the virtual version of picking a book off a shelf and leafing through it. It offers a feel for contents, graphics, and layout through text excerpts and reproductions of actual pages and the front and back covers -- all to aid you in considering your purchases.

Amazon's not alone in this initiative. Several e-tailers have launched all sorts of features that bring the Web one step closer to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. All data indicate that the strategy works. Consumers want reality checks. They need points of contact on the Net that serve as anchors. The days of purchasing CDs and books purely to test the novelty of using e-commerce functionalities are long gone. So are the days of purchasing items online at rock-bottom prices. Now offline retailing competes with online e-tailing, and the e-tailer's artificially low prices and inflated hype have dissipated.

This brings me to my point. Each advantage an offline store enjoys represents a disadvantage for its online counterpart. Unless, like the Amazon example, new methods are developed to convert offline characteristics into online advantages. This doesn't apply exclusively to e-tailing. Your company brochure, business-to-business (B2B) Web site, client extranet, or online support center might also benefit from a reality injection.

Seven years after the emergence of the World Wide Web, I still see each day Web sites promoting companies -- even big global companies -- exactly the same way they do in print brochures: click, and you move to another page. No interactivity. No justification for being online. Clever sites take every piece of offline content and adapt it to exploit the advantages of the online medium. Cleverer sites forget offline documentation altogether and develop online content created for interactivity.

This is exactly what Amazon does, time after time. Amazon either invents new site characteristics that would be impossible offline (e.g., one-click ordering and customer reviews) or manipulates the offline possibilities by making them work better for the customer (e.g., the no-questions-asked return policy, the system that enables it to predict which books are likely to interest you, and the advisory panel that helps customers select books). Amazon has managed to use every advantage offered by a real-world bookstore. It's leveled the offline versus online playing field.

How well are you using the benefits of both offline and online environments? Have you, like Amazon, optimized the advantages of both worlds to make your site unique? Have you ensured your online and offline characteristics are working together? Have you created a click-and-mortar enterprise? If you have, you're among a special few.

It's seven years now since the Net was born. In the technology and marketing sense, that's a long time. Yet most of us are stunned by the lack of progress made in site design and conceptualization. Most Web sites continue to use the Net passively, providing customers with little justification for spending (or wasting) time online. Instead, they encourage users to maintain their reliance on the offline world.


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Company presents and giveaways as a form of merchandising have become part of our lives. Most every company -- large, medium-sized, small, even one-person operations -- has taken to creating its own merchandising program. Take a look at Tom Peters's Web site. You'll find an impressive "Tom Peters" merchandising selection.

Merchandised giveaways frequently assume the form of mugs, T-shirts, posters, and such. Digital media is pushing merchandising into a new phase. It's possible for even the smallest organization to develop unlimited quantities of branded giveaways cheaply and very effectively.

Not long ago, I was sitting in a café when I noticed the ring tone on another patron's cell phone. The tone played a simple but well-known melody: "Always Coca-Cola." The phone rang for only five seconds, but the tune was etched into my memory. I couldn't get it out of my mind for hours! Now that's digital branding. Not only will the phone's owner hear the Coke jingle several times a day, so will everyone around him. That brand's signature tune is a highly effective piece of merchandising.

Cell phones have become increasingly more branded over the past months. It's not uncommon for someone to download a logo for wallpaper on her phone's display. Even phone covers are branding vehicles, available in shapes such as an Absolut or a Coca-Cola bottle.

This is a new era of merchandising. It is very cheap (almost free, actually), no matter how many units are distributed, and represents an essential characteristic of strong merchandising: an impression on a large number of people with every moment of exposure. We'll see more of this type of merchandising in the future, as digital media and communications become evermore integrated into our lives.

Before you're persuaded to proceed with your next order of company merchandise, consider these points:

Creative channel thinking. Use channels that are rarely exploited. A cell phone is a good example of a relatively new merchandising vehicle. A rarely used channel attracts keen attention. I'm not suggesting you forget the regular, tried-and-true channels (such as T-shirts), but you'll get heaps more bang for your buck if you rethink channel use creatively.


Value add. Strong merchandising isn't about simply sticking your logo on stuff. Almost everyone on the planet is exposed to merchandising daily. Merchandising is increasingly challenged in its ability to add value to brands. The days when a logo-bearing coffee mug was a statement are long gone.

This is especially true with digital merchandising. Consider screensavers. For some reason, marketers think consumers want to decorate their PCs with boring logos and corporate designs. Forget it. Screensavers (as if you need reminding) are no longer popular, new, or exciting. Your merchandising should be about adding value. The value needn't be gigantic, but it needs to import more to your brand than a carelessly placed logo can manage.


Consistency. Remember, it's your brand you're playing with. Don't let your choice of media compromise your brand's look, feel, and tone of voice. If you can't ensure brand consistency, forget about using that channel for your merchandising.
I'm convinced merchandising will continue to grow. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, in 20 years' time, we all have our own personal merchandising programs, as Tom Peters does. This will introduce more challenges to marketing departments as they puzzle out new, interesting, and relevant merchandising programs.

Interesting channel use and creative thinking are the two main factors in your merchandising strategy. Think twice before you order that batch of 10,000 T-shirts!


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Day by day, global branding is becoming a bigger challenge. Why? Because it's no longer possible to isolate a brand and its reputation.

You might think you've created an excellent strategy for your brand in one local market, only to realize that the rest of the world has access to that same local communication. This exposure destroys any possibility of separating your local branding strategy from your global branding strategy.

This unavoidable exposure of your local brand-building strategy in the international arena is part of the growing difficulties that attend global brand building. Related to this complication are the internal issues that arise. For example, how can corporations handle the local and global mix in their marketing departments? Is every local marketing department now obsolete? Can local marketing be taken over by a single department of centralized marketing functions?

Such issues are the result of the speed and spread of communications. The Internet has enabled every consumer to access every piece of communication in the world. Good old concepts like running test markets have been dramatically altered because of the increasing proximity among markets. True separation among markets has disappeared.

When Coca-Cola selected Australia as the test market for the first non-Coca-Cola drink it had launched in years, most of the world watched the experiment, and almost as many people participated in the experiment from outside the test market. This might very well have been the strategy's intention. However, if the objective was to test a new product in a local market, the strategy clearly failed.

Global communication is more or less forcing brand builders around the world to adjust their approaches. They're having to forego the strategy that provides local marketing teams with full autonomy. So, how should we handle the brand challenge?

First of all, the local brand is not dead. But some of the activities that are used to promote it are now obsolete. I would separate local brand-building activities from global brand-building activities on the promotional side, as McDonald's has done. Ronald McDonald is the key in-store promotional figure. Very seldom do you see him on television commercials and, when you do, you see him publicizing in-store promotions.

Ronald, very cleverly, has become McDonald's point of differentiation in each market. He celebrates Christmas in Northern Europe and the Chinese New Year in Hong Kong. He promotes McDonald's wine in France and McDonald's Filet-o-Fish in Australia. But he never appears in globally accessible media. McDonald's' global messages come through television commercials. The corporation produces local adaptations of these, too. But you can see McDonald's local twists are substantially stronger in the in-store promotions than on television.

The purpose of global brand management is to conceive of and control a brand's global direction, and this is done by defining and communicating the brand's core values. The execution of this communication lies in devising and consistently applying a specific style, tone, and image.

The role of local brand management is to refine the communication of the brand's core values by adjusting their execution to communicate meaningfully with each local market. If a local event like the Chinese New Year is taking place, it's the local brand-builder's task to ensure the brand leveraging on it. Local brand building depends on an acute awareness of local trends; it's all about leveraging knowledge that the international marketing department has no access to or sympathy with.

The global marketing department is the strategic group. The local team is the tactical group. Both need to work hand in hand.

Sound easy? Give it a go, and you'll realize that it isn't. But hopefully, I've helped explain this fairly complex reality. Now it's your turn to execute it.


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Going international with your brand can be like starting from scratch. Successful national brands establish their image over time, an image that relates to their local market. It's impossible to introduce the locally successful brand to the international market without reassessing the brand's platform.

If a brand achieves an ostensibly uniform identity all over the world, is it recognized by consumers from country to country in the same fashion? That is, would respondents to a market survey in Moscow identify the same key values they associate with the brand as the Sydney consumers would? Probably not, our ideas and perceptions being inextricably related to the culture with which we identify.

So what are the implications of this human fact for the Internet? A place where users anywhere in the world have the same access to the same information via the Net. Where any international brand's web site will be subject to the simultaneous scrutiny of consumers from Norway to New Guinea.

There's a Catch-22 at work here. Developing a marketing profile that speaks to the immediate community creates a specific relationship between consumers and the brand. The brand will possibly have a different identity from one country to the next. Burger King, for example, is known in Australia as Hungry Jack's.

The catch is that localization limits that marketing strategy's application to one market segment. It stands in the way of a brand's access to the world's demographic pool.

Marketers perceive a consumer preference for the same service, same experience, same product, same warranties all over the world. And venture capitalists would contend that brands can't afford to be local anymore, that they must be global - with the same logo, same identity, same customer base and same product worldwide - from the day they are born. So where is the freedom to be local?

Yet, this rationale is itself limiting: Global service preference can only be held by people on the move. There are sedentary consumer groups to whom global uniformity means nothing.

So, can any truly international brands exist? Brands that stand for the same values worldwide? Coca-Cola boasts international recognition, but is its image perceived by all consumers in the same fashion? Not by a long shot.

Recognition is not the same as understanding. Ask Eastern European consumers what they perceive of the product, then go to the U.S.A. and ask the same question. The values attributed by each demographic to the brand will be different.

But Coca-Cola, born over a hundred years ago and raised in a webless world where nations could hardly claim to be connected, is not a brand that exists within the parameters of the true globalization argument.

MTV and CNN demonstrated that global communication was possible. But even such a well-defined segment as the MTV generation was very different from country to country. MTV recognized this fact, ascertaining that one station wasn't enough for the world. The United Kingdom, Northern Europe, Asia, the U.S.A. and Argentina all needed their own version of MTV if the brand were to communicate effectively and have consumers worldwide buy into the MTV product and philosophy.

The MTV experience shows that global brands aren't necessarily "global" just because they exist in most countries, using the same logo. A brand is truly global only when it has matured uniformly worldwide and offers the same message to its market internationally and simultaneously.

The next generation of brands - Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay, for example - are characterized by being able to communicate with their users worldwide at the same time. These brands educated a new segment, activated a new need, and therefore had the opportunity to create a brand platform with global application. But true globalization is elusive. Yahoo! was considered global until it entered Japan. This ostensibly global brand then had to adjust itself dramatically to survive in the Japanese market.

The fact is that human preferences cannot be the same everywhere. Right now, we are witnessing the first phase in a long adjustment process that will take decades to achieve, one that will see people's needs and behaviors becoming alike across demographic boundaries. The dream of a truly global brand could yet become a reality.

The Internet has made worldwide brand building easier. But don't let this fool you. Net users are human beings. They don't suddenly adopt a worldwide preference by upgrading to version 2.0. Cultural change is needed to achieve this, and that takes time. The Internet may just offer us a chance to telescope that time, bringing global brand building closer than we thought.


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Companies are realizing their home pages are one of their most important pipelines to the world. What's their response? To try to shoehorn evermore material into them.

To an outsider, this content overload might not be so obvious. But ask the people behind the corporate sites, and they'll tell you about internal disputes between brand managers and divisions as all vie to secure home page visibility.

Disney, General Motors, and Sony have clearly been through a careful process to determine what to expose on the home page and what to relegate to second place. Most corporate sites have concluded their primary URL is their chief conduit to customers, investors, suppliers, employees, and potential employees. The realization has made the home page vitally attractive to department managers, who compete to secure as much home page real estate as possible. The result? Messy, unstructured home pages that are difficult to visit. Visitors can feel they need a special road map to navigate to what they seek. Everything the company stands for is squeezed onto that first page. Internal disputes and home page disasters will worsen if companies don't get the selection process under control.

Why promote everything your brand has and stands for on the home page? Newspapers don't promote every news item on the front page. Editors select, prioritize, and bundle news. They never assign the same priority to more than one or two stories. They feature one story and let that article drive the rest of the paper's content. Stories that are semi-important, or important to some of the paper's readership, can receive front page space, but less exposure than the lead. These smaller items are big enough to be noticed, yet small enough to prioritize readers' interests.

The parallels between a newspaper's front page and a home page don't stop there. When did you last read a paper with the same lead story, the same headline, and the same photos, day after day? Were this the case, you'd never pick up the newspaper, thinking it was out of date. So why do most brand sites display the same home pages visit after visit? Go to Levi's, Mattel, or Fisher-Price, and you're greeted with the same message, the same graphics, the same features... The same old home page loads every day. Why?

Don't tell me these companies don't have any news for their visitors, because they do.

Go to a site such as LEGO, and you'll see a change every visit: a new brand, a new theme park, a new toy, a new idea. Something new makes the site attractive and interesting for kids to visit every day.

The work necessary to achieve this is not big at all. It's easy. Create 10 home page designs and have them appear randomly over a month-long period. Then, develop another lot of designs and have them run for another month. The trick is simple, the effect huge. Your brand will occupy a dynamic space instead of a static message board. This will distinguish your home page from the rest of the corporate world.

Your home page is your brand's face. Keep it as fresh as you want to keep your brand for your customers.


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Did I mention I received a newsletter yesterday? No, probably not, because I received 18 newsletters. I get about 65 newsletters a week. If I were to dedicate just five minutes to each one, I'd spend 6.5 hours a week reading them all. I doubt very much I'm the only person in the world receiving such large numbers of these things.

My bulging inbox and growing reading duties have led me to wonder how useful and effective any of these newsletters really are. We know how they come about: Some genius on the marketing team comes up with the highly original idea of producing... a biweekly newsletter. The first three issues are well received. There's lots of interest among the recipients and plenty of appealing content to maintain that interest. Then, it all goes horribly wrong. Internally, the newsletter becomes, more or less, a pain in the you-know-where. Everyone's run out of ideas for articles, no one's really interested in writing them, and the publishing deadline is stretched to the very last minute. Result? A newsletter filled with more junk and filler than interesting material.

At this point, subscribers find themselves trapped as well. Having enjoyed a great article or two, clients subscribed to receive what promised to be a valuable contribution to their industry knowledge. That, or they were hijacked into receiving the thing by some sold-to-everybody mailing list. These clients might read the newsletter's first two issues but will quickly tire of the same old stuff recycled repeatedly, the redundancy of content ineffectively disguised with new headlines (often very compelling headlines). Do reluctant and disillusioned subscribers opt out of the mailing list? No. Opting out seems to take days to take effect. In the meantime, those newsletters just keep coming. The recipients just keep deleting.

Lame newsletters do not build your brand. Of the 50 top Fortune companies I happened to visit yesterday, 29 offer newsletters. Most of those newsletters look the same. And in about four months, their original, enticing quality fades. Yet they keep going and going and going -- like a Energizer battery.

Don't make the same mistakes with your newsletter. Forget about committing to a weekly, biweekly, or monthly schedule. No matter how big your marketing department, the newsletter will become its biggest time waster. Trust me. Your customers are not sitting in front of their PCs waiting for your newsletter to appear in their inboxes. Send news when you have it. Don't invent news just to have something to say. Unless you really have something important to say, something unique, something you know your customers really would love to hear more about, forget all about sending a newsletter.

If you absolutely love the idea of distributing news via email, don't refer to the document as a "newsletter." Come up with another term that won't repel your jaded readers.

If, despite all this, you do decide to publish a newsletter, here's how to do it right. First, send a sample newsletter to 10 customers you really know well. Ask for their opinions. You might think this is a lot of work. It is. I'd rather achieve quality content that interests my customers than waste the time of 5,000 of my best clients with junk. If you keep sending material your customers never read, eventually they won't notice when interesting news arrives. Remember the fable? Cry wolf too often and people become deaf to your voice.

Remove all the links in your newsletter. A couple of weeks ago, I discussed links on your site that make no sense. The same principles apply to newsletters. One or two good links are fine, but recently I received a newsletter containing 21 of them. I hardly knew where to start and where to end.

Producing news on an ongoing basis is a complex business. Newspapers do it every day and struggle to make it happen. I love the idea of notifying your customers when there's interesting, relevant, mind-blowing news. But wasting their time, continually, is counter to the reason you decided to publish a newsletter in the first place. Branding is about making your product relevant for your customers, ensuring they can't live without it. A relentless newsletter that inexorably repeats itself, issue after issue, is one of the best ways to disconnect your customer from your brand.

PS: OK, OK, I asked for it. If you read this email via one of ClickZ's newsletters, you have every right to object to what I'm saying.


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When passing through Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, you notice the billboards: Their messages change. I don't mean that they have the simple capacity to switch between three different displays as most outdoor billboards around the world are able to do. These billboards exhibit unlimited change. They display whatever message is required at any particular second. How is this possible? The billboards are actually digital TV screens that link directly to the outdoor-display company's database.
Let's cross the Channel to London. In the streets of that city, people are busier typing text messages into their mobile phones than they are using the phones for conversation. Here you notice the instant attention given by text recipients to their received messages. They love receiving text messages, and they devote their full attention to them as soon as the "beep-beep" alerts them of a message's arrival.

Soon, when our Internet connections are no longer dependent on dial-up modems but are always on, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, we'll notice that our Web use will change dramatically. Instant commercial messages and emails will acquire new significance: They might offer 50 percent discounts for customers who respond within five minutes of receiving a promotional message, for example.

Those three instances are realities, or very close to being realities. And the scenario they paint for marketers includes an interesting challenge. That challenge is summarized by the term "instant branding."

Consider this. Ten years ago you had to plan a TV campaign at least a year ahead. You had to book it at least three months ahead, and you had to start production at least four months prior to airing. That lead time has evaporated. The months of preparation have been reduced to hours.

Now let's imagine some scenarios. Imagine that Shell Oil faces an environmental controversy of some sort. Instant branding would allow the company's marketers to communicate a clever message via all instant media channels within hours, circumventing the growth of any negative publicity in the marketplace and restoring the desired equilibrium to public perception. Imagine that your competitor decides to drop its product prices by 5 percent. Instant branding would mean that you could respond appropriately with all due expedience, using instant media channels. Imagine that the temperature hits 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Coke's marketing machine might be triggered into action, sending instant commercial messages that promote a "heat wave" sales drive. Or imagine that some newspaper scooped a fabulous photo of Tom Cruise: Its promotion via instant media would double the tabloid's sales in hours.

Instant branding is, without any doubt, a tool every marketing director has been waiting for. But it's a challenging tool; it deteriorates marketing plans that depend on one- and two-year time frames. Instant branding both puts into question and calls on the advertising business's ability to manage brands cleverly, spontaneously, and within a flexible strategy. There may only be hours to control a brand's destiny.

My question is, How do you reckon you're going to plan your marketing campaign knowing that you're likely to have to change your message dozens of times a year, knowing that that change will be initiated by a thousand variables: what your competitor might do, what the result of a local soccer game was, what the weather is like at any moment, what the traffic conditions are on the nearest highway?

I promise you this: This is just the beginning. And this beginning signifies the end of any marketing plans that we've used over the past decades. Instant branding will stamp question marks on lots of things we're used to doing in advertising. Because we suddenly have a license to react -- fast!


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Without exaggerating, we can say that 2001 was a year of catastrophe. One reflection of the collective insecurity we developed because of 2001's tragedies has been the uncertainty grown around some of the world's most respected and established icons -- structures, personalities, companies, and brands. Close to 1 million people lost their jobs, millions lost their savings, companies folded, and the airline industry took a severe battering as a result of the ghastly events of September 11 and the attack's ongoing after-effects.

What's the result? My belief is that kids and teens are likely to change their behavior dramatically. Having witnessed startlingly sudden loss of life on a massive scale, this generation will start to question the point of planning, anticipating, and developing long-term goals. They'll question the virtue of patience and simply want instant gratification.

Instant gratification has been a feature of our everyday lives for a long time, anyhow. Just think about it. You play a game and instantly experience the gratification of your win. You watch a movie and in 90 minutes have found gratification in the story's denouement. You chat and enjoy the gratification of instant feedback. You no longer have the patience for a snail-mail reply time of four weeks; you expect an email response within 24 hours.

So the instant gratification mindset has been on the way for years; 2001 just hurried along consumer adoption. You no longer save up millions of points on your airline frequent flyer account -- you use them instantly. You no longer hang on to that gift certificate -- you redeem it right away. We've arrived at a point in consumer evolution that requires brand builders to work with the instant-gratification generation. Yes, brands are still here, and, yes, they should maintain and communicate their solid values. But they now need to reward their customers immediately.

Forget about long-winded loyalty programs, discount campaigns, and points systems. Give your customers their rewards now, and keep your promises. The better your brand is at keeping its promises, the better chance it has of being trusted. If your brand is one of the many millions running reward programs, dismantle it. Allow consumers to use their points instantly on smaller rewards. If you're a retailer, consider changing the twice-yearly sale cycle. Just two sales periods might be insufficient to gratify your customers. They may no longer have the patience to wait for those usual sale times. Offer your customers a small selection of year-round sale items. If you're looking after fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs), forget about drawn-out competitions. Let your customers know if they've won straight away.

The past year's events have placed more pressure on marketing's accelerator. Consumer patience has been spent, so you'd better tune your brand's engine to 2002's conditions. Your competitors are likely to travel faster than ever before, just to catch up with the instant-gratification generation.


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A quick quiz: What do toothpaste, toothbrushes, chocolate, CDs, hair gel, building blocks, games, calendars, films, chewing gum, cups, and... (could I forget?) four books have in common?

You guessed right. Harry Potter!

I'm sure neither J.K. Rowling nor any of the rest of us expected Harry Potter to become, within only four short years, one of the most sought-after kids' brands ever, competing head to head with venerable names such as Disney, Nintendo, and Sony.

The amazing and positive fact is that a book, for the first time in over a decade, has managed to become the key attraction for kids all over the Western world, despite the competing presence of computer games, the Internet, interactive television, and mobile phones. But a shadow is looming, one that's likely to cast a pall over the amazing brand story.

Between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. yesterday I was exposed to Harry Potter more than 20 times. Of course, magazines and newspapers accounted for most of the exposure. But the thing that concerned me was the character's insistent presence in places such as the supermarket, the local burger bar, the kiosk on the corner, the gas station, the dentist, the bank, the hairdresser, the toy store, and, naturally, the book store.

Now, I've been in the brand business for more than a decade, and I can't recall another brand that was so widely exposed so quickly and so intensely. Never. Not even Coca-Cola, Disney, or Microsoft has achieved such powerful visibility in the retailing environment across the globe. The really scary part of the story is that I saw exactly the same situation two weeks ago in Japan as I did this week on Australia's Gold Coast.

I pay all respect to the author. Who wouldn't respect a person who can create a character that captivates a generation of children (and their parents) and inspires them all to discover the joy of reading? But is there too much hype? Is Harry in danger of dying prematurely?

I remember the son of LEGO's founder observing that his father never wanted LEGO to become a fashionable toy, because as soon as it did it would be out of date in a summer. I am still, to this very day, convinced that he was right. Just think about Pokémon and a whole bunch of other brands that reached dizzyingly high popularity -- brands that became crazes in a way the world never had seen before. But they disappeared as quickly as they bloomed. Ironically, LEGO is one of the three toy manufacturers producing Harry Potter toys.

As well-planned and successful as Harry Potter's global launch has been, the very success that's propelling the brand toward its huge potential is likely to drive it toward catastrophe. It seems as though after Warner Bros. purchased the rights to the brand name, it instantly began milking the brand for every potential cent. And this rapacity is despite Rowling's clever embargo against Coca-Cola using Harry Potter's or any of his companions' images on Coke bottles. The author's conditions were that Coca-Cola's multi-million-dollar sponsorship should come with a global obligation to teach kids to read. But the fact is, when I last saw a Harry Potter Coke bottle, I didn't even notice that Harry's face was missing. I realized the trick days after I'd seen the bottle. Simply displaying the brand name persuaded me to believe that Harry's face was on the bottle. A great fairy tale, eh? Amazing branding.

But is all the publicity and promotion the best way to use the Harry Potter brand? By the time the fourth movie is scripted, will the brand be overused and fatigued, or even dead? Would a slower market launch secure the Harry Potter brand a more permanent place? Would a more tempered strategy help ensure the longevity of the brand, granting it the type of endurance enjoyed by Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or any other decades-old Disney figure? Is it possible to engage in a more moderate brand launch without sacrificing an opportunity? Or will the revenue that's currently pouring in dry up in two years' time, when Harry has evaporated from the minds of youngsters and been replaced by the next brand sensation?

I am inclined to think the latter may be the case. No matter how much I love Harry Potter, admire Rowling, and am amazed by the fascination the books have engendered all over the world, I fear that the Harry Potter brand is on its way to committing suicide. Not today, not tomorrow, but in two years. That is, unless Rowling can conjure up some magic again.


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I continue to be surprised by some of the world's largest companies. Their email communications are still conducted on the virtual equivalent of plain white pieces of paper. When it comes to companies' digital relationships with customers, security, user friendliness, and technology must all work together, and they all must reflect the brand's signature style. Because of this, the days of anonymous emailing should be over -- because even the small bits and pieces count when it comes to creating perfect brand perception.

Every company's communications portfolio likely contains many elements just waiting to receive a touch of consistent branding. I'm literally talking about every element, every detail: the language and tone used in letters, the standby music on the phone system, fax cover sheets, downloading time on sites, the presentation of invoices... I could go on and on.

Sounds ridiculous? Well, tell me if this isn't ridiculous: You're already in dialogue with your customers and potential customers, a dialogue you've probably paid millions of dollars to establish and maintain, and yet you don't make the most of what is now a free channel to enhance your brand's growth.

For example, think about waiting on the phone. When did you last have a positive and memorable experience while waiting in a phone queue? When did you last have a negative and tedious wait? When did you last receive a memorable and positive invoice (not counting the invoice you remember because it charged you less than you expected)? When did you last receive a fun fax? Received any memorable company emails lately?

For some reason, I can only recall the bad experiences: the ennui of waiting for 10 minutes in a phone queue, the irritation inspired by badly written company letters and emails, the boredom of anonymous envelopes and packages, the uninspired faxes. But do these essential details in every company's operations have to be like this?

Back in the '80s, LEGO decided to change its letterhead. Until then, the company's writing paper was simply white with a logo. After LEGO composed a manual to change and guide the company "look," colorful LEGO bricks covered company stationery -- an exciting addition to the letters sent in response to kids' correspondence with LEGO. The manual set out guidelines for packaging and parcels, for sending faxes, and for raising the LEGO flag outside every factory. Unsurprisingly, I still remember LEGO letters. I also still remember Mars's MandM's letters, which were just as exciting and different as LEGO's. But that's about the extent of my positive company communications memories.

Now, I'm not saying that using colors and exciting illustrations will do the trick. But tell me, why should essential pieces of everyday, routine communication between a brand and its customers be undistinguished, anonymous, and boring? Why should one company's fax cover sheet be just like the cover sheets faxed by every other company in the world? Why should every email be uniformly like the next? That's not good branding!

Individually, these details don't build your company image. But by consistently working on each of these communication elements -- adjusting wording to reflect your brand platform, paying attention to the look of everyday elements, and using creativity -- you'll succeed in your mission to build your brand cheaply and effectively.


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It's time for a new buzzword. How about "K2K"? A takeoff of B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer), it's a term that can change the way we perceive brands, and the way we build and evaluate them.

Today, the Internet accommodates more than three billion pages, and all estimates indicate that within three years the number will have increased to seven billion. Lack of content is no longer a problem in the Internet world. It's the quality of content, its authority and reliability, that has become the key objective for most companies and consumers. And from now on, we could be looking at the users themselves as the providers of credible content.

Until now, only a few web sites have built upon user knowledge in a systematic way. Sites like ICQ.com, most chat rooms, bulletin boards, and online auction sites are, to some extent, based on user contribution and interaction between users. Millions of users exchange ideas every second via the Net. That potential for interaction was, after all, what made the Internet popular and functional.

All indications are that this limited forum for user knowledge sharing is going to expand. Most users receive a high number of emails asking them for favors, opinions, information; most chat rooms do the same. Eventually, jaded users will need to be motivated by some form of reward for contributing their knowledge to a site.

The reward will be knowledge, inspiration, ideas or money. But until now, only a few web sites have evaluated the quality of user contributions and arrived at some form of exchange value. Knowledge, shared between users, is the Internet's currency: That's K2K. Knowledge-to-knowledge enables users to exchange ideas systematically and achieve a productive and positive synergy between themselves and the medium they're working with.

With the introduction of these types of sites, it is likely that thousands, or even millions, of users will become their own broadcasters and, in so doing, start earning money from the exercise. Users will, effectively, become trustworthy brands. Brands will no longer be the exclusive preserve of the few large entities that can afford to establish and maintain products. Branding will be an exercise available to anyone who has knowledge and is prepared to share it.

What will all this lead to? Possibly the "traditional brands," that is dot-com and clicks-and-mortar brands, will exploit the leverage that is available from the brand platforms created by reliable users. Every user will become an interactive testimonial source, whose function by choice is to interact with other testimonial-sharing users. Users will therefore create branding content themselves.

Just imagine how this could work: experts with business-to-business expertise establishing sites and exchanging knowledge. Photographers exchanging ideas with other photographers, chefs with chefs, engineers with engineers, lawyers with lawyers,... and so on, ad infinitum. The content will not be about products; it'll be about ideas, experience, networking and thought sharing. Now just imagine the leverage available to dot-com brands that will be able to promote the support they enjoy from certain K2K user groups.

This year will probably be the last in which we will see users prepared to share knowledge with other users for nothing. Each user is becoming a small brand in the big Internet picture. Soon the most attractive payment of them all . knowledge . will be required, and it will work like this: K2K between B2B, B2C and C2C.


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Here we were thinking teens might abandon reading and writing in favor of visual communications, and they've confounded us again, turning the tables on our predictions. Contrary to expectations, this year's sales of extracurricular books in the U.S. are up 40 percent compared to last year's sales. Yes, Harry Potter contributed in fair measure to this increase. But the universally loved books he inhabits aren't the only reason for this growth in children's reading. I'll bet you can guess the three other emerging elements of teen life that might account for the change: texting, chatting, and emailing.

These days, according to ACNielsen, teens are spending an average of 25 percent of their lives in front of computer screens. And most of the communicating they're doing involves chatting with friends. If you are sitting in a cafe in Europe, Asia, or Australia, I guarantee you'll hear a beep-beep within the first 30 seconds of your settling down with a coffee, the beep indicating that a text message has arrived on someone's cell phone. Needless to say, emailing is a more popular means of communication than letter writing.

Yeah, you know all that. But what's fascinating is the language evolution emerging from cell phone and online communications. Maybe you could call this a language revolution: It's a completely new thing that I, and perhaps some of you, can't "speak" fluently. But this language is destined to become common among teens across the globe. It's a universal language in which apparently superfluous words are dropped entirely and relevant words are abbreviated almost unrecognizably. Could this developing language make everyday, offline languages obsolete to this generation of texting teens? I can certainly imagine them having trouble with conventional spelling and verbosity as online communications make up a greater percentage of their interactions.

This reductive language treatment may portend Orwellian depersonalization of language, or perhaps it represents a step in the progression toward a global communications medium. But that isn't the subject of this article. I'm considering the topic because it's my belief that we'll soon see this language reflected in brand communication. There may even be cases for brands to replace their current language with the new universal language.

Now, I know this sounds extreme. Pepsi, PlayStation, Nintendo, or Abercrombie might be first in line to adjust their language. And, in reality, this shift won't affect brands aimed at other segments of the population. However, if you're adapting your brand's language, you'll need to constantly evaluate the communication performance of your site, your brochure, your annual report, and your radio ads. You'll need, as always, to ensure synergy between your audience's language and your brand's speech. I'm sure you keep on top of this all the time. Language is ever changing. Or have you fallen asleep over the past many years? Have you forgotten that everything evolves -- your product, your audience, and your brand?

The test to make sure your language matches is easy. Ask your current audience to email you, or chat with them on the Internet. Now compare the language you receive with the language your brand uses, and assess if your brand is really talking to your audience. You may be maintaining a perfect match between brand and consumer. But I'll bet that some of you will be shocked to learn that while you've been concentrating on other aspect of your branding, your customers' language has changed. Look carefully. The last thing you want is to be speaking a foreign language in an inappropriate tone of voice, therefore disabling your audience's connection with your brand.


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Before a television commercial is aired, it undergoes thorough testing to ensure that every second is effective and that the advertiser's message will be understood by viewers. Testing is not only conducted before commercials go to air; it continues afters ads have hit the screen. "So what?" I hear you protest. "Market testing has been going on for decades. That's standard." And you're right.

Hollywood adopts the technique, subjecting major movies to viewer-testing processes and thus ensuring optimum commercial popularity for highly tuned blockbuster productions. For example, several endings might be produced for the same movie just so plot variations can be evaluated by test audiences.

You know where I'm going with this, don't you? Every consumer product undergoes market testing; every communication product is launched with the objective of succeeding among an increasingly skeptical consumer group. Seeing that market testing seems such an obvious prerequisite to commercial success, and that probably 9 out of 10 commercials and products are thoroughly tested on consumers, why is it that less than 1 percent of every web site goes through any market testing?

I'm not talking about QA (quality assurance) tests that ensure that there are no bugs or errors in site coding. And I'm not talking about editing, undertaken to ensure there are no spelling errors or incorrect data exposed on the site. I'm talking about brand testing: tests to ensure that the objectives the brand had in going online are realized.

Now, let me ask you a couple of very simple questions. Did you concept-test your web site? Did you brand-test your web site? Did you test your web site's navigation ease and appropriateness? Did you test that visitors understood your web site and its functions, aims, and purpose, both before launching it and after it went live? If your answers to any of these are "no," I have to ask you why!

You know that consumers spend longer with your web site than they do with your television commercials; you know they interact with your site, meaning they are more involved with your online presence than with your television presence. So why would your answer be "no" to any of these questions?

My advice is simple. Test your online concept on paper and later on screen-based storyboards. Test consumer perception of your brand. Test what values consumers see your proposed site as supporting. Test consumer response to the online proposition and ascertain how their view of your brand changes after spending time with it online.

Test the harmony between your brand's message delivery and consumer understanding of the message. Find out if you're satisfying consumer expectation. If no e-commerce is accessible, test to ascertain whether consumers expect your brand to offer this service. If your brand offers no discounts, test to see if the consumers are alienated by such a policy. Test every bit of the site, just as you test every second of your television commercials.

If you don't believe me, show me the test results that prove my advice to be in error - that prove testing is unnecessary. I would love to see the results, but you'd have to conduct market tests to acquire them.


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Have you ever walked around an airport hopelessly searching for something? At every corner, 10 signs point you in every conceivable direction. None are of any use in finding your destination.

An alternative (which I've only encountered a couple of times -- but what a wonderful feeling when it happens!) is The Well-Signed Scenario. The environment feels good because it not only allows me to find my destination in a hurry but it also imparts a feeling of control. Every time I look about for helpful signage, there it is. When this occurs, it seems the planners must have anticipated my needs before I did.

These two scenarios apply to my ongoing tests of Web sites. For some reason, the intuitive element of sites seems to diminish in proportion to the amount of information sites attempts to expose. Desperate to tell the visitor everything, preferably all at once, the site instead drowns in chaos.

In one of her articles, Pamela Parker mentions a study on the choice of chocolate. It reveals that the fewer choices available, the easier it is to decide. Often, the result of greater decision-making comfort is more people actually make a choice. Conversely, when a plethora of choices dazzles an individual the result is more likely to be the confused person makes no choice at all.

Some sites hyperlink every 10th word. At first glance, you'd think this is good and thorough service. It isn't necessarily the case. Here's why:

Ton of links can deflect visitors from their original purpose. Distracted from their mission, they quit the visit.


What is it you want to achieve with loads of hyperlinks throughout your copy? Good service? Remember the chocolate. Pick the best link options and predict what your visitors will do.


You can link left, right, and center -- but have you checked your links to ascertain what the visitor will encounter? Will all the links increase your visitor's satisfaction rate or increase sales? If you're not linking for an advantageous reason, forget it.
Consider the airport again. There are always tons of signs, but I don't think I've ever been in a terminal with perfect signage. The worst examples confuse the traveler with an overwhelming plethora of signs pointing to everything at once.

What does all this have to do with branding? The total experience is what forms a brand's impression on the consumer. If I feel comfortable about my visit to a site, if I feel the site seemed to understand what I was looking for, if I feel (as a result) some affinity with the brand, then the site's done well. I guess that's what branding's all about.


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Let me ask you a difficult question: How on earth would you build your brand on a canvas smaller than a matchbox? What if you could use only one color (say black on a green background), you had no scope for graphics, and the consumer was paying for every second it took for you to send him or her a commercial message?

Welcome to the new world of m-branding. Now, more than ever, creativity and discipline are needed for preparing a branding platform. Why? Because everything is telling us that the WAP-enabled (Wireless Application Protocol) cell phone will soon be bigger than the World Wide Web we know today.

"Soon" is three years from now, according to AC Nielsen. Do you believe this? I do. Just think back to 1995 when the World Wide Web was born, and then think about the criticism the Net weathered at that time. Yet look at the Net's onward growth today.

Knowing how fast this next branding revolution could arrive, you'd better be ready and start preparing for wireless branding. Excuse me for comparing this with a cigarette brand, but I can't stop thinking about Silk Cut, an English cigarette brand which, in the '80s, prepared for a government ban on cigarette commercials for all media.

All the cigarette companies knew it would happen, and they had plenty of time to prepare for the restrictions, but only a few used the time well. So when the day finally arrived, Silk Cut was able to continue its marketing campaign where its competitors' hands were tied. Silk Cut maneuvered around the legislative constraints by eliminating its brand name from all publicity.

Silk Cut became recognizable as an image: Luxuriously rumpled purple silk with a gaping slash through it communicated the identity wordlessly. Color and image became the communicators: Racing cars in the distinctive purple livery, as well as billboard advertisements, were just two vehicles that carried the message to the community. And the interesting thing was that no one really noticed that the name was gone. The branding was intact.

Marlboro was another brand which, through its clothing line, escaped into the new advertising reality. The cigarette retained its smokers and communicated with potential smokers by promoting its "Marlboro Country" clothing brand.

So what's the connection with m-commerce and m-branding? Being limited to using a matchbox-sized display, with no colors and no resolution, is like running a Silk Cut campaign without being allowed to show your logo or your brand name. It demands creative, disciplined planning for the branding platform.

Yes, you can show your logo, but consumers are paying for every second you take up on their mobile display. So what would you do? One technique might be to work on product placement: to ensure that your brand is exposed whenever it's relevant . on the news, in movies, and so on.

Another method would be to develop your brand's language - to use phrases that the consumer can recognize as being the voice of your brand. Some brands have already developed brand phrases. Just think about Coca-Cola which, over the past six months, has been heavily promoting the word "Enjoy."

The connection to m-branding is apparent, isn't it? Such a simple word, yet, through disciplined brand use, so charged with meaning that its exposure on that tiny mobile display will say a thousand things to the consumer in a split second.

Think about Intel Inside's melody and imagine how easy it will be for that brand to broadcast its signature melody via the cell phone. Both companies have created identifiers around their brands which can, independent of the brands' logos, names, and images, remind the consumer about the brand and all it stands for.

But many, many more brands haven't been as inventive yet. M-branding is all about using very few tools in a very creative way. If you don't have any tools, create them fast. Because the race for branding real estate on the cell-phone display has already begun. And I can tell you, there's not much space left.


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M-commerce's biggest headache right now isn't how to make graphics look better, the sending frequency stronger, or the reach better. It's about how to make money in the future.

A Success Story

I guess you've heard a lot about DoCoMo and its mobile success story, i-mode. I don't want to bore you with the details of the technology, but I do want to remind you why DoCoMo is so interesting. In fact it's fascinating, mostly because of its ability to create new revenue models.

One of its first inventions was a function we take for granted: individuals composing their own ringing tone or private melody. Each tone costs less than a cent, which is charged every time people send their melodies to new users. Cool!

And let's not forget DoCoMo's service that sends, via its mobile phones, invitations to individuals to meet up with each other. The system simply checks whether anyone on an i-mode phone's address list is within a short distance of the i-mode phone. If so, presto! The phone alerts the i-mode phone holder and suggests a meeting take place. The alert is sponsored by the nearest cafi, for example, which offers a digital coupon that makes a meeting at the establishment an attractive prospect for the two people concerned.

A Special Case

Such concepts have put i-mode one step ahead of everyone else in the business. Others have not managed to invent new revenue models like this, so they have also failed to execute revenue-generating services.

But remember that i-mode is a special example that few could consider emulating. DoCoMo is a spinoff of NTT, which is already the dominant mobile phone player in the Japanese market. The introduction of the i-mode phone was just an extension of DoCoMo's already considerable offerings.

Accordingly, telco companies around the globe are desperately searching for new ways to invent sustainable revenue channels, and the channel that keeps coming up trumps, time after time, is gambling.

Taking a Gamble

Let me take you through a scenario: Mary eyes the horses as they jostle before the starting gates and prepares to place her bet. After considering the field, she decides on Indigenous, a former champion, now running at 15 to 1. But instead of racing herself all the way to the betting booths, she picks up her cellular phone. From her perch on the living room couch, she places her $10 bet with a punch of the OK button.

Fantasy or reality?

Well, that's a preview of what's already going on in Hong Kong. The city's racing monopoly has put its multibillion-dollar betting franchise on the mobile handset. Although the service is still in its infancy, more than 22,000 gamblers have already signed up for it. It took the Hong Kong Jockey Club eight years to net just four times that number using other devices for personal remote betting.

M-commerce is instant commerce. It's impulse-driven commerce and will remain so for a long time to come. Gambling, too, is instant and impulse-driven, and this compatibility is the key reason for m-gambling's probably bright future.

So, is m-gambling likely to be the next big mobile hit?

When one thinks about this question, a couple of parallels suggest themselves: Some newspapers' largest revenue sources are the contact/personal ads in the back of the paper, and the pornography business is one of the Internet advertising industry's biggest spenders. Odds are, gambling qualifies as a top contender for the role of mobile phone moneymaker.


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If I asked you what a banner ad is worth, your answer probably would be, "It depends." If I asked you what a television commercial, a billboard ad, a store display sign, or a radio spot was worth, your answer would probably be the same.

And your answer would mean that worth depends on the comparative success of each of these media. Similarly, as more online ad forms are introduced, there arises this question: "What is the true value of online media compared to offline counterparts?"

Is it true that offline media are more trusted than online media? If so, is it because users trust the offline media more or simply because they know these media better? All research, in fact, indicates that offline media, like television commercials and newspaper ads, do enjoy the greater share of their audiences' trust.

But in future, it will be difficult to distinguish between media players, to analyze where one drops away and the next picks up the message. And it will become even harder to measure the comparative and "true" value of media types.

More and more dot-com companies are seeking offline communication channels to achieve a position in the "real world." It's not unlikely that we'll soon see a Yahoo! clothing collection or eBay glassware on store shelves.

Why is this likely to happen? Because it would help online brands establish an even more solid brand position in the consumer's mind by reaching beyond the already crowded online market. And, again, because offline branding still inspires more consumer trust than online marketing. So what is the value of the ten-by-ten-inch space the eBay-branded glassware occupies in the supermarket compared with an onscreen banner ad? Nobody knows.

But let's look at the idea in more depth...

Consider the introduction of WAP (wireless application protocol). Soon it's likely that shoppers, while strolling supermarket aisles and perusing the shelves' contents, will find themselves receiving a call on their mobile phones. Activated by the customer's position in the supermarket, the call will be about a special in-store offer. The call will not only have been activated because the shopper passed by a crucial trigger point, but because the WAP system will have known that the shopper actually needed the item related to the offer.

For example, the call might be about a Coca-Cola offer: Get three bottles for the price of two. The call will have been triggered when the customer entered the beverage aisle and, most importantly, because the WAP system understood that the customer in question was a Coca-Cola drinker.

Now, what is the price of such a space . one that allows a brand to communicate one-to-one with a customer via the display on his/her mobile phone at the very minute the user would be in the mood to purchase? Its value must be high, probably much higher than that of a billboard ad!

The introduction of many new media to the consumer gives rise to an increasing demand for a true comparative media valuation. Right now, we may as well be comparing bananas with apples, and grapes with lemons. We have no true idea of what the value of WAP messages might be, of the floor space in the supermarket, of banner ads, television commercials or brand names on T-shirts. We need some understanding of an exchange rate for online and offline media.

Once a reliable media exchange rate has been introduced, it's likely that marketers will be able to create amazing media strategies. These plans will exploit a delicate understanding of consumer potential, awareness, trust, geographic parameters, socioeconomic limitations and relationship to the product in question. The mix of offline and online media won't be coincidental: It will be determined by data that analyzes what works and what doesn't, if trust, for instance, is the key objective of the campaign rather than awareness.

What I'll call a "media exchange rate" would make every brand marketer's life easier. And hopefully it would create a balance between two worlds that currently exist far too far apart in most media plans.


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Last week, I asked you why your home page had to look the same, day in and day out. This week, I'd like to take this question a step further and ask why you have to squeeze all your visitors through the same single home page.

Some years ago, the term "microsite" began to be used to describe small Web sites -- 5 to 10 pages -- that promoted a particular topic, a certain brand, or a distinct event. Once upon a time, everyone needed a microsite. You couldn't survive without one. But, for some reason, only a few businesses have maintained and developed the technique, despite the fact that microsites can be impressively useful. Let me explain by drawing a hypothetical scenario.

Let's say you're planning for retirement and researching annuities. You search on Google and the usual list of suggestions appears on your screen. You pick two. The first is an insurance company, one of the big ones that offer car, house, and life insurance; annuities; investment services; the lot. Now, tell me: How do you promote these many and diverse services on the one home page? The second site presents you with 20 boxes, again covering the spectrum of financial services, but one of the 20 boxes is labeled "annuities." This is a second link to a company that only offers annuity solutions and is expert in the field.

Which option would you choose?

Myself, I'd go for the one that specializes in the service I am after. I wouldn't be interested in pursuing the one that baffles me with a plethora of services superfluous to my needs and that, at the same time, manages to convince me it doesn't have a lot of annuity expertise.

But here's the background to this hypothetical scenario: Both sites belong to gigantic insurance companies with the same portfolio of services and with comparable knowledge and expertise. The difference is merely one of perception. The second company presents its annuity products with focus and simplicity. By promoting this small part of its business exclusively, independently of all its other products, the second company allows me -- as the less-knowledgeable customer -- to feel confident with the site's authority and clarity.

On the Net, the trick is no longer to look like you can do everything for everyone. The trick now is to make clear that you can do something for someone. You need to separate your services from each other. Present your products on their own microsites, each of which acts as a channel to your main site. This way, if I'm looking for annuity products, your specialized annuity site will appear in the list of results on the search engine. The fact that, over time, I realize that your company offers all sorts of other potentially useful services can only be positive.

But, if you approach that initial customer contact with the thick end of your services wedge, you risk scaring potential customers away. Promoting your company as an expert in everything simply isn't credible. Yes, you might well be expert in almost all financial services, but persuade your customers of your unique virtues step by step. Attract them with tens of microsites rather than one big, confusing home page. Have each of your microsites promote a discrete service, talk your inquiring customers' language, discuss cases that are relevant to their world, and show that your company is the expert in the field. These are the factors that give rise to credibility and inspire customers with the confidence to accept your services rather than those of a generalist.

The future is not about squeezing everything you have onto one home page, but in developing tens of home pages that each attract particular customer segments before leading them into the core of your brand. By doing this, you not only avoid internal disagreements about what services and which brands to expose on your corporate home page, but you also present a substantial and credible face to your potential customers.

And I guess that's what branding is all about: sending the message your customers want to hear and speaking in a language they understand.
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Remember the first time you encountered miniature MandM bags at the supermarket? You know, the baby bags that held only 30? Bet you liked them.

How about when the mini Toblerone, Snickers and Bounty bars appeared? You might have been able to justify purchasing these small sizes by telling yourself they were convenient. In fact, you probably just thought these miniature versions of the full-size products were cute.

Most of us harbor a fascination for miniature things. And manufacturers have noticed this predilection. Mini-products have proven to be huge sales successes, despite the fact that these smaller products sell at proportionately higher prices than their larger predecessors.

The tactic is called mini-branding, and it's not easy to analyze the formula that makes it work.

It's emotionally driven, and often makes no logical sense. It's not practical to open a bag of MandM's for every 30 you consume. I suppose if you were eating MandM's only for the taste you wouldn't be wrapped up in the idea of small packets. But sales statistics show that this isn't the case. People love smallness.

The reasons for the effectiveness of mini-branding are open to theorizing. But in the end, mini-branding adds a human touch to the product and to the brand. Cuteness immediately creates a relationship between the user and the brand. If that happens in the absence of purely practical reasons, mini-branding has succeeded.

So what has this to do with the Internet? Well, mini-branding might just prove to be the next-wave branding trend on the Internet. Why? Because this type of branding draws upon something ineffably appealing to humans: Small and cute charms us.

Our sentimental response to cuteness is in major contrast to the working relationship we have with the boring desktop window. After almost 15 years, the only icon to have survived desktop evolution is the wastepaper basket icon that Macintosh introduced. All the other icons, though designed in a high-tech and appealing style, died. But the wastepaper basket, in mini-format, survived. We could all relate to the image, understand it, and use it without instructions.

Now it looks as if the mini-branding that's successful offline could be successful online. One of the first companies to realize the potential of mini-branding online was the successful Australian start-up wotch.com.

A year ago, wotch.com launched its mini-browser, a browser that gives users access to all the programs on their computer via a cute little window furnished with mini-icons. Later, wotch.com launched its mini greeting cards and mini books, all cleverly designed in small sizes. And users love them. More than 650,000 users now download the mini-applications, many of which are, in reality, simply scaled-down versions of what we already know.

In Japan, mini-branding is also popular. DoCoMo is a company that offers users cute mini-icons they can download and send to their friends' computers and cell phones. These have become so popular that the company now ships out 100,000 mini-symbols every day.

In a time where technology is providing an increasingly causal and predictable working and recreational environment, the quirks of human nature continue to provide an ironic counterpoint to technology's insistent logic. Irrationalities, like a fondness for the miniature, suddenly have an important role to play on the screen and in everyday transactions.

The crucial constant that underlies this paradox is that branding has nothing to do with functionality. It's all about feelings, the feelings evoked in users by images and associations. People don't choose Coke or Pepsi ahead of one or the other for logical reasons. They do so because they relate to one of the brands more readily than they do to the other. Mini-branding is just another way of harnessing such feelings and ensuring that users and brands are on the same communication frequency.

In a world where technology is enforcing predictability - a systemization that's reflected in the presence of highly tested icons set up in ordered frames using standardized color schemes - the unexpected is becoming ever more popular. Humans are irrepressibly prone to being human. Despite the structures they build for themselves to enforce order, human emotions are apt to stage breakouts and introduce surprises to the system.

Mini-branding is the outcome of strategies that wisely understand the importance of the human touch in an increasingly inhuman environment.


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If you're one of many moviegoers to have seen "Pearl Harbor" recently, you'll probably recall a scene that includes a Coke bottle.
However, this scene doesn't place the iconographic bottle in a positive promotional context. It locates it in the historical context: the staff at the hospital at Pearl Harbor using Coke bottles as blood containers, pumping blood directly from patients into the well-known receptacle. It is a scene that certainly changed my perception of the Coke bottle.

My first impression was, "Oh, yeah. Just another product placement." But this assumption changed when I noticed, later in the movie, the Pepsi identity also making an appearance. Pepsi was represented in a less surprising and more conventional context. Juxtaposing the contexts in which each appeared left me wondering, "Who paid for what?" Was I witnessing an intriguing piece of negative product placement orchestrated by Pepsi? Or was this simply Coke's alternative means of attracting attention? I guess the color of blood could be interpreted as approximating Coke's corporate color!

Over the past months, I've been noticing the emergence of negative product placement -- on TV, in movies, and on the Web. The trend forms a sad parallel with U.S. electioneering practices in which candidates use as much dirt as they can find on their adversaries to further their own interests. This negative approach is interesting, because in one way it does make sense: Negative branding puts the attacker in a position of advantage. But the price of this strategy is likely to be inescapability: Negative branding can become part of a never-ending story in which both brands eventually lose.

Mind you, the negative product placement trend has been part of the evolution of a number of fascinating promotional undertakings. For example, major search companies feed journalists with guidelines on judging the quality of a search engine. Often the result is that the journalist finds the guidelines useful and uses them to judge the world of search -- from a controlled point of view. Is this, then, effective PR management or negative product placement?

Another example involves a major tobacco company. It supposedly purchased 100 keywords from a major search engine. These led consumers (by coincidence) to a raft of Web sites all telling one side of the smoking and health-risk story, namely the side that promotes the minimum-risk propaganda. All these sites, of course, claim to be independent of each other, to have no direct relationship with the tobacco company concerned, and to be able to call upon trusted authorities to back up their views.

Recently, certain viruses have been claimed to target certain branded software programs -- a major irritation for users that can result in a decrease in user loyalty toward that software brand. The fault of the virus? The question that is never answered is, "Who was behind the virus?" A competitor? Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Maybe the explanation for this trend toward negativity lies in desperation. In a world where the consumer's per-week media consumption hasn't increased by more than 3 percent in the past 10 years -- while more and more media, representing more and more brands and messages, are appearing daily -- brands are desperate to capture every extra minute of the consumer's attention.

The experience of the press and mainstream media tells us that bad news sells 10 times better than good news. And so, it follows, that bad news about a competitor promises more sales for the communicator. Is the trend here to stay? Are we seeing product-oriented advertising being usurped by the negative promotional habits demonstrated so capably by U.S. political campaigns? Or will the trend evaporate from the brand-builder's repertoire as quickly as it arrived?

As usual, time will tell. The wild card lies in the consumer's hand. The consumers are canny, analytical, and product literate and are quite capable of seeing through the stories built by marketers. Consumers can pick truth from falsehood, and their inclination to do so will be a factor that determines the survival of the negative brand-building approach.

One thing's for sure: The recourse to negativity adds another dimension to the marketing director's job. Now, not only must you create campaigns for your own brand, you're obliged to mount less-positive campaigns for all your competitors as well.


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Just when most people would have sworn that offline toys were dead, Pokemon appeared on the toy scene with paper-based toy cards - and, within a few weeks, almost killed online toy sales.

Most toy products went the other way: LEGO introduced LEGO Mindstorms, Disney offered Disney Blast, Mattel went for CD-Barbies. These companies went for toys on the Net or on CD. But Nintendo did the unexpected and introduced a truly interactive concept: An offline toy.

What does this teach us? Right when we were thinking that everything has to be online to succeed, the new generation, the "Tweens," display a preference for going offline.

Pokemon isn't the only example of a new product being placed in the offline environment. Drugstore.com resorted to bricks-and-mortar selling when it teamed up with Rite Aid. Is this the beginning of a trend that manifests the reality that within all businesses there has to be a sensible balance between the offline and online worlds?

Research figures show that only eight percent of the American population prefer to shop via catalog services. The remaining 92 percent prefer the shopping experience - the social interaction, festive decorations, color, clatter, and carols.

It's always fun to try something new, like online shopping, but even champagne begins to taste a little dull if it's the only thing you drink. People need variety in their diets - and, as we know, every diet should be balanced.

Does the fact that kids love Pokemon cards indicate that they're already over online mania? Do they now seek offline media to achieve a sense of balance in their entertainment and communication diets? Or is this simply a replay of the shift in preference we saw years ago when young television addicts - who could barely leave the couch to go to the toilet - transformed their television preferences into a devotion to... the Internet?

Sure, certain new toys enjoy remarkable popularity. But it appears that we are facing a future that reflects a recognition that a more balanced mixture of off- and online media is desirable. Everything we do doesn't have to be on the Net, just as everything doesn't have to be offline. Both environments have their strengths, and getting the best from them means using them the right way.

The fact that what is perhaps the most computer-addicted generation yet, the "Tweens" - who've grown up with computers in front of them, studied computer science at school, done their homework on the PC, and spent much of their free time in front of the screen - now go offline is an interesting signal, one we shouldn't overlook. This might be the best hint we ever get on how our brands should look in the future and how the online and offline split should balance.


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It's an interesting fact: A uniform global brand hardly exists.

Now, what do I mean by that? By a "uniform global brand," I mean a brand that has the same image, represents the same values, and stands for the same philosophies around the globe. I'm talking about a brand that exists uniformly without packaging design changes, without alterations in its metaphorical or real flavor, and without variations in the product selection associated with it.

Almost every global brand cultivates a different look, a different approach, a different taste, or a different name in 30 percent of its markets. If the world weren't as connected as it is today, you would blame these local variations on a lack of communication between countries. Or perhaps you'd think isolation in some markets gave brands freedom from their corporate headquarters and consequently allowed brand variation. In the past, both these scenarios have contributed to brand variation. In reality, there was no need for a brand to speak with a global voice. Before the advent of global media, the benefits of speaking with a single voice would have been negated by the fragmentations caused by broadcast limitations.

But the reality has changed. We do have global TV, global newspapers, global magazines, and the Internet. In fact, we have so much global communication going on that most countries are banning global materials on their TV and radio broadcasts. France, for example, is banning the use of certain English words on radio, on television, and even in contracts between companies.

So here's the massive irony: While the world's discrete cultures become more exposed to a world culture, via the agency of global communications, branding is becoming increasingly local.

Just take MTV. You know the TV channel, right? Wrong. MTV is no longer one television channel. It is 30 different television channels, each with its own programming, content, style, and brand images. Each has been formulated according to the culture for which its signal is destined. The whole brand does exhibit shared values around the globe, but its local parts promulgate locally driven values that distinguish one station from the next. You could say that MTV has become global by deglobalizing. If the world were as global as communications imply that it could be, MTV wouldn't be represented by 30 stations, but by 1. The fact is that cultural differences around the globe are still enormous, even amongst a narrow teen market.

Global branding is far from being truly global, in the way theory dictates it could be. Almost everyone in the Western world has access to the Internet and, therefore, has access to every brand that's out there. But global branding is still a matter of balance between global and local values. It's still a mixture of local culture and global attitude, of local traditions and global trends.

Don't be fooled by the apparent reality. If you're a manufacturer, service organization, or small business with international plans, your brand is far from global the day you emerge on the Internet. You're present in a global environment, yes. But that's just the beginning.

Take a brand like Starbucks, which, since its first store opened in Seattle in 1971, has expanded to more than 5,000 stores worldwide. One of Starbucks's key global marketing plan commandments is to team up with local players to secure a local voice and, as a result, gain fast local penetration. Even the brand of all brands, McDonald's, manifests local differences from country to country. In France, McDonald's serves wine; in Denmark, it's beer; in Australia, it's McOz Burgers. By now, McDonald's has developed a substantial local-product portfolio that has lent a necessary local twist to the global product and secured vital local acceptance.

So, be careful when you attack the world with your brand. Don't be fooled by talk about a global market served by global media and cognizant of a global voice. It sounds great in theory. But the one-voice theory is far from being a global reality... just yet.


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I arrived in the Philippines a few days ago as part of my global tour to publicize my new book, "Clicks, Bricks, and Brands." My expectations of the country had been formed by my previous visit (in 1996). I had lots of impressions to call upon, but they had little to do with communications technology. That was then.

This visit, on entering a taxi at the airport, I found I had trouble communicating my desired destination to the driver. Not because we couldn't understand each other's English, but because the driver's full attention was on his mobile phone, which rang more frequently than the busiest Wall Street stockbroker's!

And the taxi driver wasn't the only one occupied with his mobile phone. The whole country seemed preoccupied with cell phones. Every kid on the way to school had one; the receptionist checking me into the hotel was distracted by hers; and the teens at McDonald's shared the same diversion. Everyone! But nobody was talking -- they were all writing.

Take a Message

I am, of course, talking of short messaging service (SMS), the pre-WAP-generation communication tool that has captured audiences in even the poorest economies.

Most mobile phones in the Philippines are, according to the locals, secondhand models from major manufacturers. They're apparently shipped to countries with markets that can't justify high mobile phone prices.

When you also consider that sending an SMS message costs about two U.S. cents -- and that's about 15 times cheaper than sending a letter or phoning -- you can better understand why the SMS infrastructure is booming in third-world countries.

But it doesn't stop there. In all the Philippine major cities you'll find an Internet cafi every 50 meters or so. And they're packed. It's estimated that the world's five biggest Internet email suppliers, including Hotmail, Excite, and Lycos, share more than 36 million active email accounts in the Philippines -- close to half of the country's population.

Note This Notion

This story is not about the Philippines, however -- or the fact that my taxi driver never managed to communicate with me on the way to the hotel. It's about reminding Internet brand builders of the value of countries such as the Philippines that have high communications-technology uptake. Their lack of first-world offline infrastructure should not obscure your appreciation of the sophisticated online infrastructure that's been fostered in countries such as the Philippines.

A media plan for these and similar markets might not emphasize strategies for traditional media but would most profitably concentrate on electronic media -- the mobile phone and Internet -- combined with broadcast communication channels.

The reality is that countries such as the Philippines are more "clicks" than "bricks" when it comes to the split between their online and offline media. They also accommodate audiences that capture information and communicate in ways that are totally different from the communications habits of their Western-world counterparts -- and that's a crucial distinction.

Ponder These Points

On the way back to the airport, the taxi driver received an SMS ad promoting cheap gasoline; he immediately asked if I would mind waiting two minutes for him to fill up at the appropriate gas station.

I saw a crowd of people watching a game show on a television in a street restaurant: 30 out of the 40 people sitting at the bar were on their mobile phones, communicating the bets the show called for.

A seven-year-old girl sold me some bananas on the street. In response to my overgenerous payment, she quickly grabbed her mobile phone from behind her bananas, pointed at it, and asked me for my SMS phone number.

I'll now leave you Internet brand builders to ponder these everyday behaviors.


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Five years ago, you were likely to be asked, "What's your Internet strategy?" Today's question is, "What's your channel strategy?"
If within 30 seconds you can summon up a reasonably sound answer to this question, forget about reading the remainder of this article. If you can't, reading on might be worth the effort.

One of today's realities is that new communications media are hitting the market every year. I don't need to name the plethora of choices already on consumers' plates -- the Internet, the personal digital assistant (PDA), WebTV, the wireless application protocol (WAP) phone -- all of which appeared within the last decade.

The problem is that consumers haven't yet found a way to increase the number of hours in the day. So the likelihood is that as more media channels land on the plate, the consumer has less time to deal with them. And, consequently, facilitating their use is becoming more complicated for professional communicators and brand builders.

Ten years ago, a media, or point-of-contact, plan was rather simple to comprehend and construct. If human interaction was required, only two media channels were available: face-to-face or phone contact. In addition, of course, there were the monologic, one-way media: not as few in number but just as simple to quickly comprehend.

Well, the world has changed. Outdoor media channels are no longer confined to posters and billboards. They can include everything from mobile phones, PDAs, WAP, iMode, and short message service (SMS) as well as billboards. Dialogic, two-way interaction is no longer limited to face-to-face visits or phone calls: It encompasses almost every personal communication tool.

So given this complex communications fact, my question is: Have you optimized all your consumer touch points, or are your touch points relying on haphazard coincidence? In other words, what's your channel strategy?

Just as airlines deploy "yield management" to optimize the value of every seat, your channel management strategy should be built on yield-management principles. There is one "but" to this parallel. Optimized channel management reflects two principles: cost-effectiveness and branding. By "branding" I don't mean a company's ability to vociferate its name as many times as possible; I mean a company's ability to create the strongest possible relationship with the consumer while exposing its identity.

And that's the tricky bit. You might claim that any interaction between the consumer and the brand would be a fine way to create brand loyalty. This may be possible for some brands and for some consumers but certainly not for all brands and all consumers. And this is where your channel strategy justifies itself.

Let me give you an example from Charles Schwab, arguably the world's largest discount broker. It has been a pioneer in managing and optimizing consumer touch points. When other companies were closing down their branch offices in favor of online trading, Schwab established storefronts. And the results were amazing: 80 percent of all new accounts were opened face to face, in Charles Schwab offices. Having established that contact, 70 percent of these new customers were comfortable with having their accounts managed via the Internet -- from their very next contact with the company.

You see, it was important for these customers to make initial contact with the company via a real face. Human interaction with a real person in a real store established requisite consumer trust. This trust, developed early on, then enabled Internet transactions to take place right away; the trust made the convenience and cost- and time-effectiveness of the online medium mutually beneficial to the consumer and Charles Schwab.

This isn't the solution for every company. Company-consumer communication is a dynamic process that demands change according to target group, time, mutual objectives, and a host of other variables. Some target markets might do anything to avoid human contact; others crave it; others still need a mixture of communication channels. And, for any group, preferences established at one point in time are likely to change with altering circumstances and with consumers' increasing knowledge of alternative media channels. I remember when I used to prefer dealing with a real person when checking on my bank details. For me, those days are long gone.

The benefits of online communication are clear: It enables companies to track consumer behavior cost- and time-effectively. Not surprisingly, face-to-face dialogue is more cost- and time-consuming and is harder to track than interaction generated online. Tracking communications established via the screen achieves great cost savings.

But the moral of this story is that establishing consumer touch points isn't just about cost. Personal interaction is a splendid channel for establishing loyalty and building brands simultaneously.

So why haven't you created a channel strategy yet? It might channel more consumers to your brand than you could ever imagine.


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Pick two customers. Have them visit your Web site and walk through the main pages. Starting with the home page, ask your customers to name five core values they immediately perceive on the page. Then, get them to explore the page carefully: to read the text and examine the contents. Now, ask them to reconsider the five values they thought the page represented at first glance.

Repeat the procedure with every one of your site's main pages. I'll bet the results of this exercise prompt some major changes.

Why is this exercise important? Since you launched your site (maybe five years ago?), your business circumstances have changed. Perhaps your original Web page manager is no longer with you; perhaps several departmental heads have moved on. May be your staff is entirely different from those who were around when the site launched; may be all sorts of people and circumstances and cultures have had input. You're likely to have lost control of your site and its brand values.

Sure, your site might very well fulfill the requirements for corporate information dissemination. But, hey, meeting those criteria doesn't mean you're successfully communicating your brand's values. Your content might go nowhere near creating the perceptions you want your customers to have of your brand.

Being focused on the values your site communicates is crucial for three reasons:

It's not healthy for brand-building if your home page reflects one set of brand values and page two communicates another. Consistency is the key to brand survival. The more consistent your brand exposure, the more trustworthy it is. Most sites change direction a number of times over just a couple of pages. Result: The consumer loses trust in your brand. If a person you knew was unpredictable in mood and behavior you'd be wary of him, and perhaps grant him little credence. You'd be unlikely to trust him.


The fewer values your brand represents, the stronger your brand is. Some of the strongest brands in the world represent only four or five values, but everyone -- consumers on the outside and staff on the inside -- knows exactly what those values are. Brands wanting to be everything to everybody become weak. Consolidate your values. Concentrate on ensuring they are consistently communicated from one Web page to the next.


Secure click-and-mortar synergy between all your other marketing activities. Have you ever visited a site totally different from the rest of the marketing around the brand? I have. There's nothing more confusing.v
Be clear about your brand's values. Ensure your panel of test consumers perceives your brand exactly the way you want them to when they visit your site. You'll be much more likely to achieve synergy between your site and the rest of your communications.

This holds true, of course, only if you've used those same brand values to inform your offline communication materials. Is your brand's value platform in use and in synch across all your communication channels? If not, it's time to fine-tune your branding machine.


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Yesterday I wanted to book travel between Denmark and England. I'm in Australia, but knowing Scandinavia's regional airline is SAS, I decided to go to its Web site to make my reservation. This article might have been about my frustrating search for SAS's URL, which (counter to logic) isn't www.sas.com but www.scandinavian.net. However, it's about a greater frustration: how a seemingly simple and potentially positive experience disintegrated into a complicated, negative, two-hour exercise in system analysis.

Here's what happened.

Arriving at the airline's home page, I found an excellent offer for the flight I wanted. I began the booking process. It took me through five rather involved steps and required me to fill out the usual: departure dates, class preference, and general preferences.

Then, the problems began. The system asked for my member number. I didn't have one, so I was requested to enroll. This necessitated leaving the reservation system. I did and proceeded to complete an extensive application, replete with all the questions you'd expect. Returning to the ticketing system, I was astonished to find that while I'd been away for the 55 minute sign-up affair, my offer had disappeared.

I checked the home page. The offer apparently no longer existed. Maybe my choice of cookies tagged my sign-up information and eliminated the offer I was halfway through booking? My only recourse was to call Sweden to find out how to continue. So I did.

This was how I learned that by signing up with an Australian home base rather than a Scandinavian one, I'd caused the system to automatically redefine its home page. Those original offers were gone and replaced with irrelevant (to me) offers. This, despite the fact I was visiting SAS's global home page in the first place.

The one-to-one attempt backfired on SAS, too. To retrieve the offer I wanted, I had to create a Danish profile. No fake Danish address allowed, either. The telephone adviser told me a false address meant no ticket. Off I went to establish a second user profile, this time using personal data with which I'd hardly recognize myself. It worked. In two hours, the offer was back up on the home page, and I booked the good-value ticket.

Not a very exciting story to take up your time with, but a very instructive one for a growing number of sites. As Web sites of airlines, car-rental companies, and hotel chains try to coordinate and personalize international offers and communications, consumers are entangled in a web of confusion. Sites are harder and harder for laypeople to use.

This type of experience is hardly unique to SAS. Visit American Airlines, US Airways... you name it. You'll find challenges that turn sites' one-to-one intentions into one-to-one confusions. What could have been a great experience and new client opportunity for SAS turned into a profiling drama. The results are useless to the airline, unrecognizable to me, and a waste of time all 'round. The unnecessary complications and tedious time wasting on the site are seared into my memory, making me sceptical about my next trip with the airline.

Can you think of a worse start to a client-brand relationship than one that creates a negative impression of the brand before the product has been encountered? One-to-one is crucial to smart branding. Don't let it lose its mind and turn into one-to-none by frustrating, alienating, and chasing away customers.


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Most of us battle to expose our brands to our target groups for just a minute a day. We produce and air 30-second TV spots worth millions of dollars. We mount billboard campaigns that, amongst the hundreds of other roadside structures, are barely noticed. It's a fact of life these days: Ensuring your brand's message is able to cut through advertising clutter has become an almost impossible task.

Having said that, what are your plans once your brand has achieved its audience's awareness and your target group understands your brand's core values, products, and services? Do you still plan to use the classic media strategies that can be overlapped, crowded out, and squeezed by competitor brands?

If your product belongs to the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand category, you're luckier than many. FMCGs by their nature are able to secure a more permanent brand visibility than less-frequently bought goods. Your core consumers are likely to see your brand every time they open their refrigerator doors, set their dining tables, or go to their pantries. But, despite the fact that such visibility is often fleeting and habitual, how does it compare with the visibility of other brand categories, such as service brands or business-to-business (B2B) brands?

Recently I encountered a range of interesting Web-based tools that enable marketers to convert a brand's initial attention-grab into permanent brand awareness. They're tools that offer medium-sized and large corporations the possibility of solidifying and directing their brand images at a comparatively cheaper cost.

One of these tools is from a little-known company called AboutPhace. The company, which has been around since 1999, runs on the philosophy that the best possible branding platform is your desktop.

Let's think about that for a second. Microsoft is probably the best-known example of a company that fights for space on everyone's desktop. Internet Explorer had absolutely no chance to beat Netscape Navigator before Microsoft systematically established a highly visible icon and active link on most desk- and laptops around the globe. Intel is rumored to have paid a staggering $5 per computer to secure what's perhaps the most visible spot in our daily lives -- a sticker placed beside the screen, on your monitor frame.

Which brings me back to AboutPhace. AboutPhace is all about securing a permanent space for your brand. The concept is simple: The software simply reconfigures browsers into 100 percent branded browsers. It works like a super-skin (which it calls a "phace"), creating a permanent scheme that is always visible to users whenever they open their browsers. The brilliance of this and similar concepts is that they make it possible to utilize every desktop icon to create a brand experience, with high-quality sound effects and music, and custom functionality if desired.

Currently, companies such as AboutPhace offer practically unused advertising tools. But they could be emerging as the next generation of brand-building equipment because they enable brands to secure daily visibility that lasts several hours and, most important, to create brand shortcuts between consumers and their favored brands.

So, what's the value of this concept? We can't surmise the value of this specific tool and its achievements yet, but we know that extended or permanent brand visibility creates brand loyalty. The mechanics are simple. People tend to trust things that they see often, that they're familiar with, more than things they see rarely. Of course, this assumption depends on the visibility being positive.

Visibility is probably the most expensive asset you can buy when you're building your brand. It's no coincidence that, having invested millions in the exercise, Intel and Microsoft's Internet Explorer have become what they are today. You should take note of this type of alternative thinking every time you're constructing a truly creative marketing plan.

Brand Marketing will return on Tuesday, January 8th. Happy holidays from ClickZ!


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Product placement: a concept familiar to us from the movies. In one story, James Bond will be driving a Lotus. In the next, he might be behind the wheel of a BMW. In "Back to the Future 2," Pepsi logos were ubiquitous.

Theoretically, the Internet, too, could be one big product placement opportunity. In reality, though, the fact that product placement possibilities are free means that they generate no trust in the viewers - they have no meaningful placement connection - whereas James Bond's connection with the vehicle product, for example, might inspire fans of 007 to consider purchasing the car.

So what new marketing trends can we expect to see on the Internet? Perhaps a harbinger of the latest is the interesting site Epidemic.com. Launched in late 1999, this site is based on the idea of letting consumers do the advertising and rewarding them for doing so. Sound intriguing? Here's how it works.

If you send emails, and I imagine you do, you are in this product's target group. Before sending an email, you sign up for the service. This enables you to survey a range of advertisements and choose one that you then drag into your email and send to others. So, if you know that your friend is having problems with his girlfriend, for instance, you could add the 1-800-Flowers.com advertisement to your next email to him.

And what do you get out of this? Money. For every advertisement you send. The concept is that the consumer spreads the advertising news, not the advertiser. This consumer-driven principle is based on true interactivity, up to the point where you send the email.

Another concept dependent on interactivity is wotch.com. This idea rewards the user with visuals, not money. By visiting the site, you can download a range of funny little illustrations known as "wotches." When you have installed the application wotch.com offers, you receive an illustration. Then every time you link to one of the ten sites the application suggests, a funny new element is added to your wotch. The user is rewarded for using the application.

New concepts are finally appearing on the Internet as potential replacements for banner ads, which everyone agrees are ineffective.

We are moving from the passive use of the Internet as an advertising medium to an interactive (two-way) one. The day we see truly interactive advertisements on the Net will be the day decreasing banner ad click-throughs will no longer be an issue. A clever way of handling product placement might be the way to address this issue.


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While strolling along Copenhagen's main street recently, I noticed a peculiar thing. The baby carriages parents were pushing had changed. No longer were they essays in color harmony -- they'd exchanged their anonymous liveries for branded ones. In fact, the baby buggies in Copenhagen were heavily branded. I encountered a carriage promoting a toy product, another lauding a cell phone operator, and yet another displaying a clothing brand. I was transfixed by the phenomenon of private people promoting brands in the most untraditional space I'd ever seen.

The story was that these parents had sold corporations the rights to promote their brands using the buggies as the advertising space. In return for displaying a message controlled by the advertiser, parents received a check or a buggy free of charge for use during the required period.

Sponsorships as we know them have reached into new spaces. They used to be seen only on T-shirts and billboards at football stadiums. It's now clear that extra creativity was needed to push the sponsorship stage beyond the confines of sporting arenas. Sponsorship has reached a new level in revenue generation and awareness building.

Several national parks in the U.S. are close to striking sponsorship arrangements with companies such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Such arrangements will give these companies the right to install their vending machines in the parks. A San Francisco-based promotions company has specialized in selling advertising space on private cars. One company has even offered parents substantial sums of money for the rights to name their children! Whether that story, first reported in USA TODAY, is true is another matter, but its currency indicates brand sponsorship is reaching into unexpected quarters, and the spaces it's finding are inspired by brand builders' creativity.

Now, how might this effect the Net? Just imagine alternative sponsorships for Yahoo! Instead of banner ads, icons, and buttons, there'd be, say, an MandM's color-vote campaign that takes over the Yahoo! logo for a day or two. Crazy? Well, a couple of months ago AOL signed a sponsorship agreement with Britney Spears. The star will re-record the world-famous "You've got mail!" utterance. It's a deal that provides more evidence of the alternative thinking being exercised in the world of sponsorship deals. Get ready to see brand sponsorships entering every media channel in a bid to secure a more effective voice. In a bid, in other words, to secure attention.

I guess my problem is I've never really believed in the effectiveness of sponsorships. However, creative thinking is clearly injecting new brand-building potential into the practice. In fact, sponsorships are probably the way to go these days. I'd certainly remember the first baby buggies I saw that were decorated with Yahoo!, LEGO, or Nokia branding. My perception of AOL would certainly change if I heard Britney announcing the status of my mailbox. And I'd certainly remember MandM's if that colorful confection replaced Yahoo!'s usual icons for a day.

But, I reckon I'd still claim to forget anything I'd seen in traditional sponsorship environments. Perhaps they worked at some point, in my unconscious memory. But the effect hasn't been enough for me to recall more than one or two of the promotions I've seen displayed during World Cup matches -- despite the fact I've been watching every match.

My question is, if you had to choose between creative sponsoring methods and more classic methods, which way would you go? I'd put money on your selecting the former alternative. So, before you race out to invest your next wad of sponsorship money, rethink the sponsorship's execution and add a twist of creativity to it. It's possible to increase the effectiveness of your sponsorship investment just by getting some creative thinking behind it.

Right now, the space is all yours. We still live in a world clothed in the results of old-fashioned thinking about sponsorships. So go out and get your space -- before someone else does.
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I'm one of the five million fortunate people who currently live Down Under, upside down, and in the center of the world's biggest-ever branding exercise. It's called Sydney 2000.

Being so close to a world event is not only exciting but fascinating from a brand-building perspective. When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) faced its major crises over alleged bribery following the Atlanta Games, I was one of the many who subconsciously killed off the Olympic philosophy in my mind. The allegations were so counter to the promise of the Olympic ideals that they dismantled much of the global community's trust in them. No trust, no brand.

The Olympic Committee product is its image and philosophy: its brand identity and, by extension, that of the games that are underwriting the Sydney 2000 brand.

The Olympic Committee doesn't own the Olympic city's inventory, the city, the staff, or the athletes. It owns a philosophy and a valuable logo. So, for the past four years, preparation for the Sydney Games has largely been an exercise in pumping renewed trust into a deflated brand.

The repair work wasn't only aimed at restoring sponsor faith but at rehabilitating the palpable, global cynicism occasioned by the corruption revelations. Sydney 2000 had a role to play in diverting the consumer's focus from the Olympic Committee and its machinations to the Olympic's core values: international friendship through sport. Sydney 2000 has built a brand that has had to surmount the politics of drug testing, potential terrorist threat, and sponsor withdrawals.

This has been a serious rebranding exercise, particularly because so many Olympic promises had failed in such a concentrated time, with such a large audience, and with tremendous money on the line.

Over the past year, Australia has participated in an intensive campaign to ensure that every citizen of the country is sympathetic to the true philosophies of the Olympics. Hundreds of thousands of Australian kids have participated in drawing competitions that resulted in 10,000 of those drawings being selected for display in all the rooms housing the athletes. Community cleanup days have been staged and enthusiastically participated in to ensure the place looks its best for its visitors and the world's media.

The Olympic torch has visited every city in the country, having been run around diverse regional population centers and held aloft by thousands of Australians. The torch relay has been a carefully controlled contribution toward selling the Sydney 2000 brand to an often cynical population.

And in the fight for rebranding, the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) has introduced a Sydney 2000 brand DNA. And when I say "brand DNA," I mean brand DNA.

A true human DNA has been replicated and included as an ingredient in the ink used on all official Sydney 2000 merchandise that carries the valuable Olympic logo. Armed with special equipment, SOCOG officials can identify when the official ink has been used on merchandise and when it hasn't. And this is how they can spot whether merchandise is authentic or not. This resulted in tons of merchandise being destroyed over the past few weeks because it didn't pass the brand DNA test.

Even though the 2000 Olympics seems to be just another major world event, Sydney 2000 has been a significant branding exercise. SOCOG has fought hard to convince sponsors that the Games are worth every cent of the millions of dollars they have pumped into them. And believe me, SOCOG has had its hands full persuading sponsors that the price of sponsorship wasn't too high. The Sydney committee also had to ensure that a country full of taxpayers supported the more than AUS$2 billion that was spent on enabling Sydney to meet the cosmetic demands of the Olympic brand.

Now, I'd love to tell you what my opinion is on all this, but that's of little interest to you. What Sydney 2000 has amply demonstrated is what we, in marketing language, would call the first stage of a major rebranding exercise. Right now the new, slightly revised product is appearing on the shelves. It's now, while the Games are in progress, that the rebranding efforts will be realized.

What more can I say but good luck to the athletes, to the IOC, and to the marketers - SOCOG. To be continued...


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Over the next couple of years, retail and brick-and-mortar businesses will be compelled to look at their roots and find a new identity and purpose. The race for most retailers today is getting online. But underlying this functional compulsion is the fact that retailers are trying to compete with a competitor that, at any point, can offer services and products at a substantially cheaper price.

For most retailers, the focus has been on beating the online competition. But is this where retail should focus? Can retailers really compete with the Internet on price, product selection, and unlimited information? Isn.t this a battle that.s lost before it.s begun?

Retailers will have to rethink their focus and find answers by looking back in time. Back in the thirties and forties (so I hear), retail stores looked different and functioned differently than the way they do today. Every grocery item was carefully selected by the customer and handled by the grocer behind the counter. By the fifties, the first supermarket concept appeared, and this changed everything. What had been considered good, polite service was seen as slow, old-fashioned, and inefficient. The personal touch was suddenly perceived as being intrusive, and mom-and-pop businesses became synonymous with limited.

The change in perceptions and expectations of service that happened almost 40 years ago is similar to what is taking place today. Values that we appreciated in the past are disappearing in the desperate race for online success.

But no brick-and-mortar travel center, for example, can survive by focusing on price and selection; no bookstore can survive by competing against title selection; and no wine store can compete against price. The fact is, focusing on the wrong criteria is misguided and can make business exponentially more difficult.

The travel center has just as much future as it always did, but it needs to identify the features that differentiate its service from that of its online confreres. The opportunities for personal attention available to the brick-and-mortar client are incomparably greater than those enjoyed by the Internet consumer. My local travel center can offer me theme-based afternoons, for example, where a ski instructor can tell me about skiing conditions in the Swiss Alps, and an experienced climber can fill me in on the unique experiences Nepal.s mountains have to offer.

The bookstore can survive by hosting frequent author visits, signings, launches, lectures, and readings. A French chef and author can be invited to run a cooking demo and promote his title in-store. A friendly gardener would be thrilled to sign books with a muddy hand, offer some potting tips, and meet her interested readers.

And the wine store can survive by having tastings and inviting local and international sommeliers to visit and talk about their experiences with wines of the world. Winemakers might be prevailed upon to promote their products by chatting over an in-store tasting and discussing their part in the thousand-year-old history of winemaking.

If e-tailers tried competing in these people-contact events, the results would be as disastrous as retail.s misguided attempt to compete with e-tailing on price.

The more I work with clicks-and-mortar, the more I realize that success all comes down to knowing your strong suit and being the best at what you.re good at. Retail is good at using all of our senses. The Internet is still restricted to appealing to two of the five. And I bet it will be a while before it can add just one more sense to its repertoire.


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Over the years, I have been intrigued with comparing and contrasting e-tailer and retailer operations. I've observed the fight between the two camps, and that fight, at one time, was nearly lost by the retailers. The potential defeat loomed when amazon.com proved to the world that selling books needn't be a bricks-and-mortar experience.
From my ringside vantage point, I've watched three rounds -- so far, every one of them won by the retailers. That concerns me -- not because I'm in love with the e-tailers, but because most retailers, even as we speak, are taking a rest.

The adrenaline that urged them on some two years ago (when Barnes and Noble was losing market share to e-tailers by the minute, for example) seems to have dissipated. The skeptics, persuaded to change their opinion and agree that dot-coms were a commercial necessity, were growing fewer and fewer in number. And then the fight stopped. But, hey, retailers! This doesn't mean you can afford to rest on your laurels and stop developing yourselves. Experience clearly shows that retailing concepts are dramatically challenged every decade -- by mega brands, for example, trying to diminish the retail store's role and intercept the retailer's contact with the consumer. You better recover that adrenaline rush: It tells you you're alive and prepares you for the inevitable, ongoing competition.

Remember, even though the value of dot-coms has been diluted by more than 70 percent, and even though 80 percent of e-tailers have closed their virtual doors since 1995, it doesn't mean that online shopping will disappear. I'm sorry, but consumers have smelled retailer blood, and they want more. They won't flock online as quickly as they did 12 months ago -- dot-coms have nothing in their marketing budgets to pull consumers their way. But I guarantee that e-tailers' market share will grow, most likely harnessing 25 percent of total consumer expenditures within the next four years.

Retailers have to use their third-round victory beneficially and intelligently, while there's still time to do so. What Barnes and Noble did by opening cafis in its stores -- reaping a sales increase of 18 percent -- is still not a bad idea. That Charles Schwab opens 80 percent of its accounts face-to-face, across a real-life counter (then induces 70 percent of these account holders into an online relationship) is still not a bad idea. We just need to see more such ideas.

You see, retailing's biggest advantage isn't to be found in price or selection competitiveness. Let the e-tailers play on that advantage. Retailing's biggest advantage lies in its capacity to make contact with the four senses: No e-tailer will ever be able to compete with the real-world advantages of tangibility, touch, smell, and taste, all of which contribute to defining the human experience.

Over the past four years, retailing has received warning signs advising them to stick to what they were best at and avoid trying to reduce prices and add shelf-space. Price and selection are the e-tailer's edge, and retailers can't compete using the strategies those strengths suggest.

The reality is that the fight has just begun: The division of consumer patronage is still a matter to be decided, and the online-versus-offline battle is still going on. Retailers, don't fall asleep. It's still your moment. For now.


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Before you can tell people what you want them to think about you, you must know clearly who you are. A quick review of most corporate sites reveals a disappointing lack of unique brand visions and distinctive corporate identities. Though some company executives devote time to thinking about and defining who they are and where they want to go, the vast majority seem to come up with impotent copy-and-paste statements, redolent with empty clichés and nebulous objectives.

Take a look at this excerpt from one company's vision statement: "We will be seen in all our markets as the quality leader among international airlines. This will be achieved by:

Mobilizing our joint talents, know-how and skills

Inspiring all staff to support our persistent effort to improve quality

Placing quality first in everything we do

Setting an annual target of measurable improvement

Doing things right the first time

Providing both our external and internal customers with a reliable and punctual product and careful and friendly service."
Now, tell me, which airline is this? American Airlines? British Airways? United Airlines? Well, in fact, it could be any of them, couldn't it? This was taken from KLM's vision statement but, demonstrably, most corporate vision statements read the same. They're largely cut-and-paste jobs, with the only difference being in the company name.

I'm not criticizing the way people run their companies. But I am flagging such vision statements with huge question marks. What value do companies gain from such statements? What value do companies gain from probably spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars on articulating a supposed mission? Could it be that these "company visions" are nothing more than pieces of verbal livery that are nice to have and are obligatory on corporate Web sites? Or are the management teams really using these vision statements as guidelines for their work?

As Gary Hamel and K.C. Prahalad stated in "Competing for the Future," "At most companies, employees focus on short-term performance, like improving profitability or process. These are important challenges, but people won't go the extra mile unless they know where they're going." A thoughtful, substantial, meaningful vision statement can communicate direction.

Personally, I'd love to see a company's personality reflected in its stated vision. Why do these statements have to be the same? I'd like to see some managerial courage reflected in a vision statement. You could think about an airline's vision like this: "It's not fair that only birds should experience the pleasure of flying." Or, "Humanity should be free of the burdens of distance because any movement limitation is a waste of time." Perhaps these sound more facetious than I intend, but I want to illustrate the value of injecting some provocativeness into the corporate vision, some quality that communicates the corporate personality through a meaningful vision statement and thus differentiates its brand from that of competitors.

Vision statements should be distinctive and strong so that anyone within the company's target group can identify the associated brand. Consider this vision statement: "Man is the creator of change in this world. As such he should be above systems and structures, and not subordinate to them." Can you identify what corporation might have expressed this? You guessed right: Apple. This vision was articulated decades ago, but it holds true for Apple today and is compatible with its "Think Different" campaign.

What about this vision statement: "One can embrace either a static or a dynamic way of seeing the world." And this is followed by the brand's "company ambition," which is "to be the catalyst of change for a whole generation." Any guesses? You got it: Pepsi!

A vision expresses a brand's place in its world. It articulates a brand's reason for being. For some reason most corporate "visions" are disturbingly similar. Perhaps that reflects the fact that most companies' objectives and most brands' purposes are similar. Or perhaps that reflects the fact that courage is lacking, or nonexistent, in the business world.


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Things used to be pretty turbulent while the e-tailing infant was growing up. And now it looks as if e-tailing has already weathered its teenage years and, showing signs of maturity, may be safely leaving home. It's the silence surrounding e-tailing's 2000 holiday season that tells me this is so.

The media tried to remind us how terrible last year's holiday season was for e-tailers and how disastrous the season before last year's had turned out to be. You recall the 1998 and 1999 holiday seasons, when major fulfillment problems annihilated many e-tailers and crippled many others. CEOs all over the place were up to their ears in trying to ensure on-time, accurate delivery. There were more lawsuits filed against e-tailers than in any other period of dot-com "history."

Even the big boys -- the Toys "R" Uses and Amazons of the world -- had to resort to partnerships to remedy the fulfillment ills. Such strategic maneuvers not only led to healthy improvements in online service delivery but also ushered in the most silent of all holiday seasons.

Why? Because the din of bad publicity that e-tailing delinquency had elicited was suddenly gone.

In many ways, the latest holiday season's tranquil passing paralleled that of the millennium bug. Remember the hype and expectation, the fear and preparation? All the precautions and presentiments were understandable or necessary, but, as things turned out, the forecasts and arrangements simply contributed to the proverbial tempest in a tea cup. Although e-tailing weathered the storm of failures during the 1998 and 1999 holiday seasons, expectations of e-tailing's inevitable collapse and demise were as rife as the worldwide expectations of electronic collapse on the eve of 2000. But, in the end, instead of a big bang we heard barely a whimper.

Silence is golden. There wasn't a lot to make a big noise about as far as online retailing was concerned. Perhaps because everyone was so focused on the fact that the e-tailing disaster just shouldn't happen again, it didn't. And a review of the last holiday season's sales figures confirms that it didn't.

eMarketer states that consumers spent an average of $215 online during the 1999 holiday season. Average spending increased to $280 in the 2000 holiday season. Not bad, considering all the bad press dot-coms had attracted during the previous year and the threat of fulfillment problems that prefaced consumers' relationships with dot-com e-tailers up till this period.

Yes, the holiday silence was golden because it whispered of a successful, disaster-free season for e-tailers. Apparently, there wasn't much for the media to report on: no major failures, no major lawsuits, no major consumer-complaint rushes.

The fact is, there should be no need to report on the absence of failure. Do you remember a holiday season prior to 1994 in which the media headlined articles like so: "This Year's Holiday Season a Major Success for Retailers as They Managed to Deliver All Their Products on Time, Had Fewer Complaints, and Kept Their Promises"? I don't.

Why?

Because such achievements are surely assumed to be everyday facts in retailing. They represent adherence to fundamental business principles that determine commercial survival.

Well, congratulations, e-tailers. You finally passed the test. It was the most elementary one, but also the most important. You've matured, so much so that you're now included in the grownups' press coverage. You don't occupy columns of your own that discuss infrastructure problems, branding problems, keeping-your-promise problems, and other start-up problems. Articles on e-tailing can now discuss how the business looks as a mature industry: how the e-tailing machine is growing and being maintained rather than how it's being built.

Having this in mind, my next question is, What will be the press's focus on e-tailing during 2001, now that the media's love-to-hate darling has succeeded? Time will tell. But I wouldn't be surprised if you find the answer in articles covering traditional retailing.


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These days, any Hollywood star with a shred of self-respect has his or her own web site. In most cases, these sites support fan-club activities. But, more and more, they are becoming revenue centers.

You could think of the money-attracting star web site like a gig. Most major world tours receive their revenue in a 30/70 split: Thirty percent of the revenue comes from sales of the actual product . the music, the ticket sales . and 70 percent comes from event merchandising . T-shirts, caps, cups, CDs, etc.

The merchandise sold for chain entertainment restaurants, like the Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood and the Harley-Davidson Cafe, makes up a similar portion of revenue, though analysts estimate product sales account for around 40 percent of revenue and up to 70 percent of profits for these chains.

So where does this lead me? It leads me to wonder about imminent change in the star's relationship with the world. Most film, pop and sports stars are soon likely to be earning most of their revenue from their web activities. Not many have done so until now. But the few who have taken the chance on the web have shown there's substantial income in the idea.

I was probably one of the first males in the world to head down to the newsstand to purchase Oprah Winfrey's new magazine, O, published a few days ago. I wanted to see how such a good example of human branding could be extended into a new revenue model. We already know her show . the whole world knows her show. Now it's time for us to know her magazine.

And interestingly enough, several pages in the magazine were devoted to promoting her next product: the web site. This website has, of course, interactive possibilities that would never be possible via the show or the magazine. I bet that within five years the 30/70 rule will apply to Oprah's revenue stream as well: 30 percent revenue from the core product, her talk show, and 70 percent from everything else her entertainment factory produces. And, probably, most of this 70 percent will be generated by the web site.

Actor Robin Williams announced a couple of days ago his plans for a weekly half-hour talk show on www.audible.com. Williams, who possibly may never have wanted to present his own TV talk show, will, via the Internet, interview guests of his choosing, dig into archives and do some of his stand-up acts online. The most interesting fact is that he charges $US39.95 for a year's subscription to the series, although the first eight weeks, up till May 18, are free.

Other Hollywood stars are also involved in promoting web sites: Pamela Anderson Lee deals with AltaVista, Anna Nicole Smith is promoting E*Trade, Sophia Loren is promoting GiftCertificates.com, and Whoopi Goldberg promotes Flooz.

And not only do they receive substantial options in the dot-com companies they have these relationships with, the experience offers them an opportunity to learn how to move their intellectual entertainment property onto the Net.

On the music side, stars have web sites dedicated to them. David Bowie, for example, is the subject of a number of sites (archives sites, for instance, like the David Bowie Megastore), and Hanson's site is at Hansonline.com.

Some sites even charge visiting fans for per-second use when chatting online. Other sites offer downloads of never before released pictures for huge amounts of money. And the latest extreme is that some stars offer the use of their brand name as the URL in bidders' personal email addresses. The result? Every time you send an email, your star's name appears in your email address.

Star branding has taken a revolutionary direction. In the past, the stars were entities you could reach for but never catch. Now the Internet is introducing another dimension to the star/consumer relationship, one that makes consumer access to celebrities interactive.

The big picture from this focus is that it shows us yet another way in which the Internet is offering brand building new life. The Net introduces new approaches and new energy to what was seen as a well-defined, unimprovable formula.

Keep this in mind when you start working on your own brand building platform.
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Over the years, promotional tools have become oft-used weapons in the brand marketer's arsenal, employed by thousands of brands to attract and retain customers. Last year alone, more than 20 percent of total marketing expenditure went to promotional activities. Analysts predict that, by 2003, 50 to 70 percent of Internet marketing budgets will be spent on promotions.

One of the major benefits of running promotions has been the window such efforts can open on consumer behavior. Brand builders can monitor the effect of promotions by soliciting action from consumers -- getting them to complete coupons, enter competitions, return product labels, you name it. The response to these gimmicks then stands as a clear indicator of the success or otherwise of a campaign. Compare the measurability of this strategy with that of, say, pure TV advertising, which affords brand builders scant consumer analysis in the short term.

But what are you measuring? It's one thing to monitor the number of coupons being returned by customers, but it's another to ensure the marketer's message was understood. The case might very well be that the consumer acted on the coupon, completing and returning it, without ever having understood the brand message behind the promotion.

You can understand my pleasure, then, in noting the recent debut of several companies that offer what I would call second-generation online promotion. These startups are using the Internet's interactive capacity in new marketing tools -- tools that enable marketers to monitor their online campaigns and enhance their promotions by measuring the consumer's demonstrated understanding of the brand message.

One example is YouWinTrivia.com, a Florida-based site owned by YouWinIt.com that has, over the past four years, created a small but very lucrative niche for itself and gathered a very attractive audience. The company has developed a new form of brand advertising and ad analysis, called MindShare Marketing. The idea is that consumers choose subject areas that interest them, then play a trivia game based on those interests. But before they play, they're exposed to an ad -- and the game includes questions about the ad.

Now, the difference between this and other online promotional concepts I've seen over the past months is that MindShare Marketing uses incentive-based marketing to get consumers to read and, more important, understand the marketing message being presented to them. What I find fascinating is that, behind the scenes, the players' (or consumers') answers demonstrate to marketers which messages they remember, which they forgot, and which they misunderstood. And, the marketer only pays when an individual plays the promotional game, which means seeing and answering questions about the ad.

Matthew Mariani, YouWinTrivia's marketing coordinator for MindShare , draws this analogy: "It's comparable to running a commercial on TV but being able to stop after the ad runs and ask the consumer, 'Repeat back to me what our message is. What did you like about our offer?'" The approach is appealing because it allows marketers to constantly adjust their messages in response to the observable effect they're having on consumers. Additionally, marketers are constantly aware of the promotion's success (or lack thereof).

Of course, this type of product only appeals to a certain audience -- people who have the patience to engage in online promotion. But, looking around at the huge number of people who spend time on lotteries, at casinos, filling out coupons, and participating at home in TV game shows, the audience can hardly be called a small one, even on the Internet.

Including online promotion tactics in your marketing strategy is not necessarily the solution to overcoming your competition, but offline promotions are certainly still going strong -- and they have the potential to be translated online. It's a potential that, thus far, not many companies have explored. Only a few have created promotional campaigns that truly listen to consumer response and can be adjusted according to consumer reaction. And here's the potential bonus: Tests show that online marketing promotions cost less than 1 percent of what offline promotions cost.

So if you happen to have an audience to which gaming promotions appeal, ask yourself if you're still working in the dark. Do you know if your brand's message works? Perhaps you should be considering making a move into the second phase of online promotion, in which guessing has been replaced with concrete facts.


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Over the past five years we've witnessed the birth of an unsurpassed number of brands. Not surprisingly, most of these have been born online and christened with a ".com" suffix. And most of these have been sources of amazement to me.

Dot-coms have launched some really innovative products that reflect new ways of thinking, and I don't think I'm exaggerating if I say that it's become almost the norm to be surprised by great new dot-com brands: "Wow! That's smart!" is a response I'm sure you've had when you've encountered yet another ingenious way to use the Internet.

But hang on! What happened to all the old brands? The superbrands that we all admired and respected in the early '90s: Coca-Cola, Gillette, McDonald's, Heinz...? Have they gone into hibernation somewhere?

Take a look at Interbrand's "The World's Most Valuable Brands 2000" study, reported July 18, 2000, and conducted in conjunction with Citibank. You'll read that Interbrand found the technology sector had garnered the most brand value in the previous 12 months and that dot-coms showed the greatest growth.

The survey's findings showed that technology companies (Microsoft, IBM, Intel and Nokia) dominated the top five most valuable brands. The fact that four out of the five top brands in the world are technology brands is witness not only to their strong brand-building, but to the fact that the Internet's innovations are affecting how we as consumers value brands.

Nearly all the past five years' highlights have been online brands. Yahoo!'s value increased 258 percent since last year to reach a worth of $6.3 billion, and Amazon.com enjoyed a 233 percent rise and climbed to $4.5 billion.

The classic superbrand, Coca-Cola, while still ranking number one as the world's most valuable brand, has seen its value decrease from more than $11 billion to $7.5 billion.

While thousands of innovative, shiny brands are entering the market, the old brands are looking older and more faded. Coca-Cola is still Coca-Cola, and the brand has its web site. But that's about as advanced as the brand has managed to become since 1995. Gillette developed Mach3, which increased sales nine percent over the last half-year. But this development took more than 10 years to come to fruition. And Heinz? There's not much new under its umbrella, nothing that stands out clearly from the familiar products.

Classic superbrands have been given a superchallenge. For every new dot-com brand that appears on the cyber horizon, the classic superbrands seem to recede a little more from the consumer's notice. The development cycle they've pursued over the decades has lost its value: It's just too slow to keep the brands from gathering dust.

The average production cycle for toy manufacturers was, until recently, five years. As you know, the total existence of the World Wide Web as we know it today spans that time. Most other manufacturers have similar product development times, and this leaves the brands they belong to in a 1995 time capsule.

Five-year-old ideas, once part of a product's present manifestation, are now anachronistic. They relegate products to the back of the shelf, out of reach of the consumer's current needs, interests and preferences.

Next week I'll take a look at the key reasons for the superbrands' struggle and consider what they can do regain relevance in a world where innovation takes place within days, not years.


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Nine months ago, Visa and American Express placed bets on the teen generation: Each company launched its own new-look card. Both cards targeted an audience that would stun most people -- teenagers from 12 to 18.
Since the launch of both products, an estimated 300,000 teens in the U.S. have signed up for the debit cards. Both cards can be controlled by parents, who have supervision over every detail, including which establishments the card may be used in.

This concept has lots of positive and negative angles. But, for now, let's concentrate on one sure thing: These teen products are probably here to stay.

Why? Well, they're bound to become invaluable marketing tools. They simultaneously enthrall their target market (donating a sense of consumer independence a teenager is unlikely to renounce) and give marketers a ready set of enviable opportunities. Let's summarize the situation: Teens, the fastest growing of market segments -- which also happens to be the largest online audience segment, the quickest-learning online segment, and the segment likely to become the biggest spending group in consumerdom -- are now able to purchase stuff online.

Nevertheless, few marketers seem to have recognized the opportunity this new development presents. Visit some of the largest teen sites, and read the small print. It advises that only persons 18 years of age and over are allowed to make purchases. And if this condition isn't stipulated, at least 1 site in 10 presumes itself to be addressing grownups in the e-commerce zone. This approach is negligent of the fact that, by now, at least 300,000 potential teen visitors have their own debit cards.

Once, the Internet market was aimed at adults and visited and patronized by them. But all that changed last November. The change has given birth to an active e-commerce consumer group that brings with it new characteristics and demands -- criteria that are quite different from those of the adult online consumer.

Teens, for instance, don't necessarily fancy the same type of warranties or purchase guarantees that grownups demand. This is an audience substantially more computer and Internet literate than other online consumer groups. This audience is also constantly looking for a different selection of products. But it is also highly brand loyal, yet it adapts readily to new brands that manage to hit the right note and appeal to the consumers' profile appropriately.

In short, this is a user group that, by this analysis, may yet offer the most attractive prospects for ongoing online patronage. The teen consumer group is fundamental to the future well-being of Internet commerce.

Several decades ago, an Australian bank established a school-banking system, giving all kids direct access to their own bank accounts. The bank was, and still is, appealing to the youngest of audiences by introducing children to banking in their infants-school years. The rationale is, of course, that school banking introduces these young minds to the habit of banking, to the concepts of saving and investing. Even though the school-banking system costs a fortune to operate, it still runs today. Why? Because the strategy behind the rationale remains cogent: School-banking introduces customers to their bank early in life and, every year, adds new future-adult customers to this infant foundation.

All research demonstrates that loyalty is created in the consumer's younger years. Brands that appeal to teens will be remembered by those teens as they enter their adult consumer lives. And those brands will enjoy a loyalty from that early-won group that is unlike the loyalty they will ever receive from any other consumer group.

Whether I like the launch of debit cards for teens or not, undoubtedly the innovation represents the real genesis of a new online audience -- the teens. Here's an audience that has always -- always -- had access to the Internet. For this group, the Internet has nothing to do with computer fear; for this group, computer fear does not exist. The Net has always been there, as has the instrument for accessing it.

Net + teen card + consumer instincts = yet another term: "T-Commerce."


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Over the last six years, brand building on the Internet has been struggling to find the balance between the consumer's perception of a brand and whether the Internet was a vehicle for delivering that brand.

Heaps of hype in the early days persuaded brand builders to believe that the Internet was a medium they had to be a part of, but many brand builders have found that consumers who favor particular brands have been keenly disappointed by their brands' online performance.

E-tailing felt the crush of this reality during a cold Northern Hemisphere holiday season simply because e-tailers and brand builders weren't well prepared. So many brands fell into the hype trap by grasping the online lifeline and promising their customers all the "usual" services they offered offline.

In retrospect, this was a gamble, one that caused a giant like Toys "R" Us so much grief that it had to look laterally to find a new business model. So Toys "R" Us teamed with Amazon.com. The idea was a good one because it diverted the possibility of any future brand crises. Amazon.com had the online experience and preparedness to make the online operations of Toys "R" Us workable.

But have we learned from the Toys "R" Us experience? It seems not. There are plenty of other giant brands lining up their Net strategies, brands we know and love for what they are: Mars, Snickers, Pepsi, and Nike, just to name a few. And what do these brands have in common that causes us to know and love them for what they are? They all have incredibly well-developed offline brand equity -- and very little else online.

You see, that's the problem. The Internet is not for everyone, just as any medium is not always for every brand. Some brands are more successful online just as others are more successful on television or in magazine advertising. Procter and Gamble figured this principle out in the fifties. It assessed that television suited any products that benefited from demonstrations. And for Procter and Gamble, that covered everything from soap to general household products. Nescafi recognized that sampling was the way to success, so the company shared its product through magazines all over the world.

Let's agree that the best medium for brand building varies from product to product and that the Internet isn't a vehicle for everyone. Given this hypothesis, can you tell me what the online role is for brands like Pepsi, Nike, and Mars? Do they really have to be online today? What advantage are these brands gaining from Net exposure? Should they wait until technology allows them to meet consumer expectations online? Does an online presence that falls below consumer expectations add to its brand equity or take away from it?

The crucial factor is consumer expectations. So let's examine this further. What would you expect from, say, a Pepsi web site? That it would be cool? Fun? Interactive? Innovative? These are Pepsi's core brand values. But nominating these qualities doesn't get at the heart of consumer expectations of Pepsi's online role. What on earth can Pepsi offer on its site to fulfill consumer expectations? Games? Probably not. Games don't have much to do with the brand. Free tickets to concerts? Hmmm... Would that be a point of differentiation, or could that gimmick just as easily belong to some other site?

It's hard, very hard, for many brands to go online without looking foolish. There's no doubt that consumer expectations are high, so there's no room for online mistakes. Should some brands avoid going online? How should brands negotiate the brand Catch-22?

Perhaps Pepsi could do damage to its reputation by not having an online presence. One of its core values is innovation, and a large part of its market is young people. So an innovative brand like Pepsi will be compelled to be where young people are: on the Internet. There's the brand Catch-22: For brands like Mars or Pepsi, going online is dangerous. Almost anything the brands do online won't meet their markets' expectations. Yet avoiding an online strategy will create just as much criticism, with consumers questioning what's going on with these brands, wondering if these brands have fallen by the wayside.

I'm afraid there's only one way to deal with the brand Catch-22: Keep thinking of new ways to deliver the old message, and deliver that message only when it's ready. And by "ready" I mean tested on and accepted by the consumer. By venturing online without a plan, as the Toys "R" Us experience showed us, you're exposing your brand to a dangerous gamble. And once you're online, you can't switch your web site off because this sends bad vibes as well.

Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will the Internet be. As I've always said, it's better to have no online presence than to be online without knowing why; however, this doesn't quite solve the brand Catch-22, which is a big problem for every brand marketer.


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Recently, I saw a cartoon depicting a couple in spacesuit-like outfits opening a letter. The caption read, "Thank God. It's a lovely bill!"

The cartoon reflects our growing fear as malevolent, powder-tainted envelopes appear on desks and in mailboxes all over the world. In response, most direct marketing companies have realized that a once-attractive customer communication tool has become a pariah. People don't want to open mail from anyone they haven't heard of or didn't expect mail from. We are witnessing the spread of a virus infecting direct marketing in a way not unlike how viruses carried by unsolicited email infect computers.

Viruses of all kinds, including the email-borne variety, threaten us all. In addition to the fears we share over uninvited snail mail and email, over the past month a side effect has been unprecedented damage inflicted on the direct marketing industry. The results have been mind-blowing.

Hallmark, the renowned greeting card manufacturer, reported a record drop in sales. Almost every European country has reported hundreds of anthrax threats and subsequent post office closings on a daily basis. Postal traffic has dropped almost 50 percent in some countries, and several thousand companies in the U.S. alone have banned the use of postal services as a communication medium. This crisis is threatening the well-being of an entire industry which, over three decades, successfully built itself on direct mail.

Will the global postal trauma kill direct mail as we know it? Presumably, the letter as a communication tool will never disappear. But the way we use letters, their form and content, is likely to change. It's important that all brand builders considering the use of the letter as a marketing tool develop a communication plan in light of the current threat.

The days of being able to send anonymous letters to consumers in the hope that they would be read out of curiosity are over. Once, companies could lure the recipient with advertising material, freebies, and other gimmicks. No more.

Is this universally true? Has the day arrived when an unsolicited letter from one of the world's most respected brands won't be opened? Will a recipient's fear overcome long-time trust in a brand? What justifies the risk of opening an uninvited letter?

My feeling (and my hope) is that this crisis of consumer confidence will be temporary -- as, hopefully, the vicious threat of anthrax will also be. Right now, damage to the direct marketing industry increases day by day, forcing its adherents to reconsider marketing plans, messages, and their medium. The Internet might, for a while, be the best available direct marketing tool as a replacement for traditional postal channels. Short messaging service (SMS) might do the trick. Both channels would ensure a brand's message is being promulgated, read, and understood by consumers.

No matter what medium you use, there's no doubt that the choice of channel, message, and timing of delivery is more important to branding success than ever.


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Since e-tailing came upon us in 1995, all sorts of variations on the retail theme have been invented: traditional e-tailers, speciality e-tailers, grocery e-tailers, auction e-tailers, vertical e-tailers, and so on. Now another variety has emerged: luxury e-tailers.

I guess we're all familiar with Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany and Co., and Neiman Marcus. We have an impression of what these companies stand for. But what do you know about eLUXURY.com, ICE.com, or Mondera? These are sites that were launched over the past year. They target the top 0.5 percent of America's population, a group that spends amounts of money that most consumers could only dream of and which most e-tailers can only hope for.

A survey conducted by Forrester Research in May of this year shows that affluent consumers, with assets of $1 million or more, spend $100 per month online. That's double the average online consumer's expenditure. The same study also reveals that the wealthiest web users spend an hour more per week online than the less cashed-up majority of online shoppers. Furthermore, 56 percent of affluent households enjoy Internet access compared with 43 percent of the general population who have online access.

Before continuing, let's review the key reasons for traditional e-tailers' miserable failure: the twin evils of outrageously high fulfillment costs and the lack of brand-name products.

McKinsey Quarterly, in one study among many on the subject, states that a site needs the average consumer to spend more than $100 per visit to survive. Average expenditures less than this target, coupled with consequently high fulfillment costs, make e-tailing profitability impossible, no matter how many people purchase from the site.

These fundamental reasons for e-tailing failure mean the new e-luxury trend makes sense. On these sites consumers spend, on average, between $200 and $700 per visit. That's substantially higher than the average $50 spent on most e-tailing sites.

Neiman Marcus reckons its customers spend as much as $195 per online shopping trip. Interestingly, this is only $35 below what the same consumer spends offline in the Neiman Marcus stores. Saks beats them all. This site's customers spend an average of $350 per online shopping trip. So clearly e-luxury sites represent a sustainable business model. But what about brands?

Let me share a couple of statistics with you. Saks announced an advertising bill of $212 million for the last year. This, however, attracted a revenue of $6.4 billion in 2000. Neiman Marcus spent $125 million in 1999 on advertising, which returned $2.6 billion in revenue. They both dealt in brands that you, I, and our parents have known for decades.

The point?

Luxury products attract the prices they do and the frequent patronage they enjoy because of, yes, their brand names. Brands lead consumer choices, and being able to buy the right brand of product at the right store appeals to consumers. Though brands attract customers for many reasons, including the trustworthiness and promise of reliability they represent, the consumer story is also about image: buying the right brand at the right place and taking the product home in the right carry bag.

I remember walking up and down a fashionable Parisian boulevard, passing by shops that boasted a plethora of luxury brands -- stuff I'd only ever heard about. And as I passed these stylish windows, I brushed by a lot of elegant women, dressed to kill and equipped with their dressed-to-kill shopping bags, emblazoned with killer brand logos such as Louis Vuitton, Versace, and Gucci. Oh, I forgot to mention something important: I was on my morning walk. It was only 8:00 a.m. The shops weren't even open and weren't going to be for another two hours. Where had those carry bags come from?

Luxury brands will be winners in the e-tailing arena just as they are in any other arena. My question is, will the biggest winner be a bricks-to-clicks brand or a dot-com brand? Don't ask me. Competing with click-and-mortar outfits in an anti-dot-com environment is hard enough. Competing with 70-year-old brands buoyed by generations of consumer loyalty is even harder.

But who said that things should be easy?


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It' s time to quit all the rational talk, the clichid graphics, and the "techie" look on today's web sites. Let's turn feminine. And I don't mean this in any clichid, sexist sense. My observations are empirical. Yes, finally women lead the e-commerce race on the Net.

Sixty percent of all people now purchasing products on the Internet are women. And all research indicates that this is just the beginning. Apparently, we will soon see the same purchasing trends online as we are used to seeing offline.

Finally, the feminine side is starting to dominate the Internet. We have reached a level where the quality of what we are saying, how we are saying it, and at what time we are saying it, is beginning to be important-more so than the quantity of sites and pages dominating our assessments.

Still, less than 0.1 percent of all web sites use a professional copywriter; less than 0.009 percent of all web sites use a professional photographer; and less than 0.2 percent of all sites develop a dedicated concept for their sites.

Until now, most sites have appealed to the left side of the brain, the side where rational argument is preferred over emotional response. But the fact is that, over the next five years, we are likely to see a dramatic change in the way web sites look.

Most advertising agencies are including in their communication strategies a psychology to ensure that their clients' web sites (as well as their other media advertisements) talk the language their audiences would like to hear. Until now, such research and testing has seldom been conducted for web sites.

But, if it's true that:


60 percent of all women are now responsible for e-commerce


70 percent of all daily offline purchases are heavily influenced by kids


80 percent of all car choices, in the end, are determined by the woman of the house


Almost 90 percent of all women purchase shavers for men
Doesn't it make sense that we should focus more on the feminine aspects of the Internet?

You'll have to excuse me for blatantly saying I'm sick and tired of seeing clichis on the Net. They're repeated time after time mainly because every one else does it, so that is presumed to be the right way to do it.

What else creates a clichi? I'm convinced that the interactive winners will be those who manage to map, as exactly as possible, how women purchase on the Net, then manage to gratify these analyzed motivations on their web sites.

The human being has never been a purely rational individual. Humans are capable of combining rational thought with emotional response. The battle between the head's judgment and the heart's feeling will ever be. If we were purely rational in everything we did, brands and the role they serve would never have been born.

However, brands have never been more relevant than they are today. As consumers, we depend on them as security nets when faced with the dilemma of selection among millions of possible choices.

So, if brands are alive and kicking, I would be surprised if the core philosophy of branding (i.e. the emotional aspect) didn't find its way onto the Internet through its users. Enter... the feminine side.


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We're all familiar with what copyright is supposed to do: protect intellectual property. The web is introducing a new arena for artistic exposure but, at the same time, is opening a chasm in the safe terrain that copyright ownership should afford creators.

I'm thinking particularly about the music industry. You might feel inclined to scoff at the effect unauthorized copying and publication have on multinational music corporations. But a musician's livelihood is compromised when his or her copyright is violated.

The well-publicized Napster managed to turn the whole business on its head when, almost a year ago, it circulated an offer among university students: access to the world's largest music library . free of charge. The library was available to anyone with Internet access who had downloaded a piece of software from Napster.

Napster lost the first round only a few weeks ago when one of the key players in the music industry sued Napster for breaching copyright law. But will this be the end of a process in which consumers test their new power? Or was the episode the first battle in an endless war?

I think the latter. It is hard for me to imagine that the term "copyright" can survive when so many other terms have been redefined by the web a couple of times during the past decade. So, where will copyright move? Or let me rephrase the question in Valley language: What will the future business model be for the future business model?

You guessed right: branding!

Over the years, music and entertainment industries have established parallel businesses that, in some cases, have grown bigger than their respective parent businesses. Merchandising, which is what I'm referring to, has bigger intentions than adorning cups, T-shirts and postcards with licensed images. Merchandising enhances the product, the music, the musician, the actor. Merchandising is true brand extension.

Pokimon began life with games. Its story ended with collectable cards, films, toys, paintings, CDs, cups, food, candy and even telephones. The brand extension was incredible and a superb example of the creation of a brand that is totally independent of a product. Pokimon could be anything . a cell phone, for instance . and you wouldn't be surprised.

But let's think about Pokimon and marketing. Pokimon started life in a copyright-aware business. The character is similar to whatever new starlets you can think of. Most new stars are presented with as much brand extension wrapped around their core product as Pokimon. And like Pokimon, their product lives through their merchandising, which, in turn, carries the entity through a number of reinventions: from actor to singer, and vice versa, to talk-show hosts and charity leaders. Again, the product is independent of the brand, which is transferable from medium to medium and from business to business.

So where does all this take me? Back to the music industry. Its core product . the song, for example . has historically been difficult to protect. The notion of copyright doesn't prevent people from abusing it either in innocence or otherwise. But the fact is that everything around the song . the merchandising of the personality, for example . isn't digital, so it's difficult to copy. Digital material, on the other hand, is very easy to replicate. Could what is now the core product, because it is so easily copied, end up as a good promotional tool for the rest of the brand's merchandising?

I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, music will come free of charge. And I wouldn't be surprised if the same became true for movies. The first people to listen to the music or watch the film will pay a premium for the premiere. But the rest of us will have free access to the entertainment as the promotional tool for the merchandising that will follow: branded T-shirts, cameras, mobile phones, postcards, posters, stickers... ad infinitum.

It all comes down to the fact that stars are now handled like brands, and they exist in the public perception as distinct from their products (songs, movies, etc). Their brand platform carries their persona to the target market, which is then captive for the merchandising onslaught. So, if what I'm saying turns out to be true, Napster will actually become the music industry's best friend. By distributing the industry's promotional materials . the music . Napster will be giving to stars' brands publicity of value beyond price.


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What's the role of retailing in the Internet marketing future? For many manufacturers, retailers are the only link to their lifeline, the consumer. But in the face of Internet e-tailing possibilities, many manufacturers have spent sleepless nights searching for a way to reconcile their bricks-and-mortar retailing connection with customers vis-`-vis the direct sales potential offered by web marketing. - -

Some manufacturers have stuck with the "safe" bricks-and-mortar arrangement. Others have taken the chance, severed their retailing connection, and found themselves tossing and turning through even more sleepless nights. - -

Only a few manufacturers have taken the step of cutting off their most important revenue channel, the retailer relationship. And the ones that have done this haven't run the risk of losing everything. The story is different if your name is Mercedes-Benz or Lego, when your name represents thousands of dealers all around the world. - -

The issue is that the Internet has introduced potentialities that business has not fully perceived - possibilities that have only partially been acted upon. The cultural, fiscal and infrastructural deviations and revolutions these potentialities demand have often obscured their existence from the view of corporate planners. The potential retail/e-tail relationship demands the total redefinition of the role of distribution channels and the re-education of those who operate them. - -

For example, most cars today are still sold through traditional dealerships. E-tail advocates might claim that the car yard is going to disappear. But can this really be the case?

Sure, CarPoint and Autobytel are successful because their customers already know what they want to buy. And how do they know what they're after? They know what they're buying because they've test-driven the car - at the dealership! - -

So the dealer lost the sale. Yet the deal would never have been made between the customer and the e-tailer without the dealer's having offered the test drive. - -

Now, imagine that all Mercedes-Benz dealerships closed down tomorrow and that the only way you could buy a Mercedes was through auto web sites or via the Mercedes-Benz site. What might have to happen then? - -

A totally new business would have to emerge. One that charges potential buyers for test driving the cars of their choice. Not many people would risk buying a new car without trying it first. - -

The same goes for a whole host of products. You might feel comfortable buying a pair of Nikes on the Net. But 90 percent of all people buying shoes or pants online do so because they've already had the chance to try the product. It's no wonder drugstore.com entered a clicks-and-mortar relationship with Rite Aid. - -

Patently, there is a role for retailers, and there will be for a long time. The losers will be the brands and retailers that think they can compete against the Internet without making any infrastructural and cultural changes. - -

It will be impossible for bricks-and-mortar businesses to compete on price and selection. But where retailers can compete with the Internet is by offering what the Internet can never make available: the metaphorical test drive. - -

Only the retailer can offer the consumer sensory satisfaction: touching, smelling, tasting, and hearing. The future of retailing will be in advanced showrooms without cash registers, without any turnover and without price tags. - -

Retailers will become big entertainment centers - the "Disney Worlds" of shoes, cars, and so on. The retailers' earnings won't depend on sales because they won't make any. Their existence will be determined by the number of visitors they attract, the number of repeat visits those consumers make, and the length of time they spend in the showroom. - -

So that's the future of retail. But will retailers be quick enough to transform their current business practices, making the transition to this new role before someone else occupies this space as well?


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Online shoppers prefer discounts. Forty percent of online shoppers say saving money on the Internet is a priority, according to a survey conducted early this year by e-centives.

So does this mean that the Internet has become a discount paradise? Will products offered at "two for the price of one" or "half price" be the only ones to survive? Should infant brands unable to offer that kind of roller-coaster publicity just forget it?

Well, by digging through a few statistics, it's possible to conclude that discounts do indeed define the form of purchasing closest to the online consumer's heart. Here's the story the numbers tell: 67 percent of Internet users look for a percentage of savings, 25 percent are after free shipping, and 8 percent want a gift included with the purchase.

Expecting More (or Less?)

The interesting question is, Why is this something-for-nothing trend taking place? Why do 40 percent of consumers believe that discounting is the only parameter worth determining how they spend money on the Internet? The answer is simple. The dot-com business community has created the expectation. For six years we've been educating the consumer to expect discounts. What began as a promotional feature, one that underlined for the consumer the clear benefit of shopping online, has now become a prerequisite for online transactions.

First Amazon.com offered a 30 percent discount on all its books. Then barnesandnoble.com followed with a 40 percent discount. Next their competitors followed with 50 percent discounts. This sequence mirrors the experience of mail-order companies that have been compelled to offer special discounts for shopping by mail.

What began as a tactical ploy, a tool for attracting brand-new customers to a brand-new shopping environment, has become an irresistible addiction that forces the whole online shopping industry to continue offering discounts to survive. The alternative is to retract the discounts and watch traffic decrease dramatically.

A Real-World Lesson

Is there a point of return? Or is it too late?

We might be able to learn from the brick-and-mortar brands and retailers. You see, they face this problem every day. They address it by using high-quality brands as attraction points. This pulls customer traffic into the store, but it doesn't mean that the featured articles are being sold at a discount. Once the customers are in, they can see the store's signature products being sold at competitive prices. The result? Consumers feel that the store is a good value because its flagship products are cheap.

Let's look from the brand manufacturer's point of view. At that end of the supply chain, you're in danger of being a real victim of discount wars, especially if your product is selected as the discount lure. The manufacturer's defensive response? To combine discounted and branded products in ways that thwart comparison. For instance, this familiar ploy: Buy Colgate toothpaste and get 20 percent extra toothpaste free.

So, what can we learn from the brick-and-mortar retailer and manufacturer? Don't put too much faith in the "fact" that 40 percent of consumers are looking for a discount deal, that's what.

I'm sure that some retailers' statistics reveal a similarly high figure, but if they respond to it by discounting 100 percent of items, they'd never survive. Just as in retailing, successful e-tailing is about creating a few very good points of attraction and becoming famous for them. It might be that your Star Trek goods are discounted 30 percent to attract traffic and the rest of your products carry prices comparable to those of the rest of the market.

The Internet is like most other businesses: It has to attract and retain customers. Discounting might be a good way of attracting them, but in the long run it's certainly not the best way of retaining them.


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In the good old days, special offers like "Buy three for the price of two," "Buy one and get one free" and "Get an extra 15 percent at no extra cost" were all catch phrases we knew and felt comfortable with. We recognized them and understood their meaning as we saw them in the pages of a local retailer's discount magazine.

Most B2C businesses on the Internet weren't slow to adopt these same tricks. Techniques that had taken marketers decades to develop and refine. But in the Internet world, the word "free" took on another meaning. Suddenly everything was free.

Yesterday, when I opened my email inbox, I found that I had received sixteen "free" offers. They encompassed everything from free email accounts, free Internet access, free website development, free screensavers and free shipment of all sorts of stuff.

Suddenly I could see everything in the consumer/retailer relationship turning upside down. Why pay for anything anymore? It's a perfectly logical question that might spring in any consumer's mind. Internet consumers could conceivably spend quite some time collecting free stuff and accepting offer after offer on the flashy web.

In the face of being plagued by the tremendous problem of creating sustainable revenue models, more and more sites are realizing that the "free" trick can tie a dangerous noose around their income channels.

Not only that, "free" is no longer the great lure that it once was for many consumers. Dot-com companies now find themselves having to offer even more while still battling the revenue-return dilemma. What could possibly mean more to a consumer than "free"? By now, consumers don't expect to pay for any dot-com service, just about...

In retrospect, the trend is familiar. Many manufacturers have been more or less forced to offer free incentives to attract customers when competitors start price wars. When this happens, the focus shifts from brand attributes and brand platforms to pure commodity selling where only the lowest price and best offer are the points of discrimination for the consumer. Most business-to-consumer dot-coms are in the midst of this development as we speak.

So where will all this end if the trend continues? The results of a research study by the Intermarket Group show that Autobytel.com spends $20.40 to acquire a new customer; Amazon.com spends $27.60; Beyond.com $29.30; Priceline.com $32.30; and bn.com outlays $42.00 in the effort. A majority, 61 percent of these online merchants, reported conversion rates of 2 percent or less, while 5 percent of them reported rates in excess of 6 percent.

These figures are dramatically lower than those reported by similar studies conducted in the last two years. These earlier studies evidenced a conversation rate within the same categories of up to 60 percent higher than the Intermaket Group's figures. So, the cost of converting a prospect to a customer has become very expensive, and the indications are that this is just the beginning.

In theory, the costs reported by the Intermarket Group's study are the maximum amounts (probably some percentage less, based on the fixed costs included within these amounts) each e-tailer would be able to afford when offering their customers free services or products. But then what? What would happen if every e-tailer started offering incentives like this?

Nothing! Nobody would be able to increase customer share because everybody would be subject to the same rate of customer acquisition by the incentive focus.

What is the solution? I hate to say it, but once again the old rabbit has to be pulled out of the hat again . the brand building rabbit.

In an Internet world where everyone is fighting to offer their potential customers free services, the only way to avoid heading into a blind alley is to systematically start dedicating money to a brand-building exercise. It's naive to infer loyalty from a customer base developed on free incentives. These customers are only loyal as long as the incentives aren't bettered elsewhere.

But it's easier said than done to avoid the price war in favor of concentrating on brand-building. Most retailers have tried it, and just about the only ones left today are those who ran both horses: brand-building and price offering.

To believe brand-building is taking place via free offerings is like believing you'll leave a hole in a glass of water when you take your finger out of it. Brand-building has never been free, it very seldom works through the use of free incentives, and is, unfortunately, only getting more expensive every day. That is the penalty of "free" offerings on the "free" Net.


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As retailers cut back their outlets and reduce their floor space, and as e-tailers re-evaluate their true market position after yet another tough quarter, a range of conclusions have become clear. Among them is the fact that being a narrow-line retailer is more successful than being a broad-line retailer. And this assumption is interesting because it points to what will and won't work in the future. Let me explain...

Until now, only a few true portals have established a clear presence in our consumer minds. You already know them (so I won't mention them), but if I asked you to name more than five portals, you would probably be struggling.

Running one of those top portals is appealing. Imagine being at the consumer mind's epicenter. You couldn't wish for more, right? But the fact is that the price for entering and staying in that inner circle is too high for the returns the position generates.

To achieve the status of a well-known portal, even if it's only in the USA, you'd have to outlay at least $300 million a year for marketing alone. So what happened to the other portals, the not-so-famous ones? Some died. Others became narrow-lined: They specialized.

Exactly the same trend has developed offline in the retail environment over the past few years. Only a very few new retail brands have established strong market positions. Almost every new retailer that has stayed afloat has been specialized in a niche.

So, the lesson learned is that when e-tailers try to be everything-for-everyone, most of them became nothing-for-nobody. Lack of focus is the problem. Not many broad-line e-tailers have survived, and the ones that have are in that top three category. Quick! Tell me the fourth largest book portal on the Internet. Thought so... You can't, eh? The future for e-tailers will be all about narrow-line e-tailing: focusing on one group of products and becoming the best within that category. Successful examples of narrow-line e-tailing are numerous.

Basically, the trick is to gain first-mover advantage (FMA) in your choice of product category, or to ensure your brand is one of the three. If you're number four, you're dead. So, if you can't make your way up the ladder, create a new category and conquer it.

Today's trend is clear. The narrow focus has become a part of our lives almost without even realizing it. And the Internet supports this trend more than any other medium. Creating the smallest, most narrow-lined e-tail store in the city, in the country, or even in the world won't stop you from becoming successful. It means that your market no longer remains local. It becomes global. Retailers realized this, not because their markets became global, but because they capitalized on catalog ordering on one hand, and the consumer's apparent willingness to drive miles for the best selection on the other.

E-tailers still haven't figured this out yet. Are they too narrow-minded to go narrow-line?


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It's amazing, isn't it?! The World Wide Web as we know it today came into being just five years ago. Would you have been able to predict the Internet's maturation into a global information, commercial, and social tool? Probably not! And nor would I. What's more, would you have predicted the astounding rise in Internet real estate values?

Internet real estate prices have increased dramatically, and the inflation trend continues on high-traffic sites. One result has been the squeezing of more and more information into less and less space. The apparently unstoppable rise in cyber real estate values is forcing brands into increasingly smaller arenas wherein they play out the contest for consumer patronage and loyalty.

Think of Yahoo!, Excite, AOL, cnn.com, and Lycos. They've developed and refined the sophisticated art of optimizing page space so that every fraction of every inch of all their pages is used to optimal effect. And to think that, just five years ago, the Internet's hot promise to brand builders was one of an almost free, practically unlimited, communication facility.

So, let's consider this reality. With the inexorable inflation in Internet property values, how can we get the best out of small and costly space?

The old-fashioned banner ad remains one of the poorest uses of space on the screen, with click-throughs falling from a high of just 5 percent to less than 0.3 percent today. The inadequate results gleaned by banner ads should signal to us the inappropriateness of offline promotional techniques to the online environment.

Consumers are as skeptical online as they are offline, and a simple banner ad offers canny consumers no brand knowledge, no potential for product comparison, and no means of suggesting any relevance to their needs. Why? Because the banner ad simply doesn't work online: It isn't interactive. And interactivity is the Internet's operating asset.

Obvious? Of course. But let's not start taking interactivity for granted. It's a magnificent function and one that brand builders are only just starting to really capitalize on. The potential for addressing consumers individually is a priceless gift, beyond the old-world marketer's dreams. But are we keeping our collective eye firmly on this capacity?

One-to-one communication proves its effectiveness again and again. I'm hammering the point because there's much to be made of this important concept and its key manifestation: relevance.

We are receptive to messages of relevance to our own situations. If you're casually surfing the Net and typing in key words, and you're presented with marketing material that's been triggered by your evident interests and needs, you're likely to give the message the time of day and likely to act upon its suggestions. Search engines like Looksmart, Excite, and AltaVista have detected an up-to-25 percent click-through rate in such cases.

Brand builders need to concentrate on optimizing Net space now and that means achieving targeted, relevant marketing. The space challenges will become increasingly crucial as the Internet turns mobile and screen space collapses.

Don't underestimate the importance of communicating directly with consumers or, as Martha Rogers and Don Peppers would put it, marketing 1to1. Unfortunately, this principle still seems to be lost in the world of clichi where truths often lie dormant.

Of course the cost of communicating one to one is still substantially higher than broadcast advertising. But the brand-building canvas is shrinking, and the irrefutable need for targeted promotion is growing. Target messaging is the only way to go if you want to communicate and build your brand.


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We've all been there: impulse buying. How often do you go to the supermarket for milk and bread and come out with a cartload of groceries?

The supermarket's aisles are filled with everyday necessities and tempting luxuries that are irresistible to even the most disciplined shoppers. The full-to-overflowing shelves inspire product purchases. By the time you've reached the cash register, you find yourself paying for a bunch of items you didn't intend to buy.

The grocery store recognized, decades ago, that not only was self-service more efficient, it could be more profitable. In pre-supermarket days, an attendant behind the counter fetched the goods on your shopping list and packed them into your basket for you. But the advent of the supermarket heralded a new generation of shopping habits.

Market research shows that almost 60 percent of all products bought at the supermarket were not premeditated purchases. "It was there. It just happened!" might be the cry heard when a shopper is asked to justify the acquisition of yet another half-gallon of ice cream.

But did it "just happen"?

Research confirms that supermarket owners are able to predict with 90 percent accuracy what decisions shoppers are likely to make in the aisles of their stores. It's no accident that you have to pass by the vegetables first and the candy selection last - right by the cash register, where you have to spend some time waiting, with the goodies displayed right at kid height. The strategy ensures that sweet treats, irresistible to kids, gain maximum exposure to their most ardent consumers.

This represents a well-known and long-used methodology called space management. A methodology that's been totally ignored on the web.
Many e-commerce fanatics forget that one of the most important differentiators between clicks-based retail and the more traditional bricks-and-mortar kind is the opportunity the latter gives shoppers to browse through thousands of products without confusion, make a selection, and purchase.

If you try to emulate this experience on your computer by visiting Amazon.com, for example, you'll notice that it's not possible to parallel the browse, choose, and buy process. Scrolling through hundreds of books doesn't allow for satisfactory perusal. And books are probably the most Internet-friendly of products on the Net. The shopping experience is even more confusing if you're trying to buy clothes.

The real-world shopping experience has not yet been translated to the Internet - the experience that makes walking from shop to shop an enjoyable pastime, even a passion for some.

E-commerce's next priority must be to harness this passion and mold it into an Internet formula: to create a structure that inspires the user to enjoy Internet shopping, to browse frequently, and to buy extra.

We are seeing signs of this awareness. If you're buying a book about computers, for instance, the item might be accompanied by a special offer on software. But the psychology behind shopping is much deeper. At the supermarket, the shelves on your right might carry sauces while those on the left might accommodate cleaning articles. This isn't necessarily a confusing juxtaposition in a real-life supermarket. But imagine buying flowers from a web site and being prompted to pick up a bottle of ketchup. The liaison wouldn't work.

It has taken major brands decades to develop planograms that enable them to control every inch of shelf space. And every inch in establishments like Toys R Us, Marks and Spencer and Nordstrom is planned. Every step you take in the store is planned. Even every minute you wait in the queue.

So now, the same planning is needed on the Internet. The race for mapping the human "shopping DNA" is on. E-commerce is faced with the task of connecting products, brands and categories with each other and with the consumer. And this is not necessarily a logical science.

The human shopping DNA may be an elusive concept to interpret, but once the blueprint has been drawn up, the true shopping portal will be achieved. A portal that enables e-tailers to cross-reference and up-sell all product categories with each other, without confusing the consumer, and achieving the same 60 percent success rate that bricks-and-mortar retailers boast.

Even though the Internet is our most modern communication tool, in many ways its sales service hasn't advanced beyond pre-war practices, when the customer was attended to by the grocer behind the counter. That's the type of service the Net offers now. It's called "searching," but its function is just as basic as the grocer's was.


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Some months ago, I wrote about the brand value of national reputation. Nations can be brands themselves, and the value set attached to these concepts can be used by brand builders. A key example was Switzerland. Let's rethink the Swiss brand in light of recent events.
In the U.S., first it was Pan Am, now it's TWA. Both once-formidable airline brands are now pages in history books. Three weeks ago, Swissair went into bankruptcy. This wasn't a major shock. It had been in the cards for months, if not years. But Swissair's demise was nevertheless unsettling. This consumer perception was underscored by the fact that this wasn't any national airline, it was the Swiss one. Swiss coverage of the saga would lead you to believe that the Swiss view this as the biggest national image catastrophe since World War II.

Why the drama? The demise of an Australian carrier, Ansett Australia, happened unremarkably a few weeks before Swissair's announcement. The widespread astonishment at Swissair's collapse is because it is perceived to be evidence of weakness in the formerly unassailable Swiss brand.

Consider Switzerland. You form associations -- the Swiss Army Knife, Swatch watches, the Red Cross, Nestlé, Rolex, UBS, Credit Suisse -- a host of high-quality brands. They have reputations built on impeccable quality, stability, reliability, and integrity. A Swiss-branded item exacts your trust at a premium price. You pay that price because you appreciate the quality, because you believe nothing will go wrong.

On October 5, something went wrong. Swissair grounded its fleet when UBS and Credit Suisse First Boston said they would not aid their fellow brand. Thousands of Swissair passengers were stranded around the world. Many told the media their reason for flying Swissair was that, in turbulent, volatile times, it was the only airline they trusted. Loyal customers were stranded, their tickets worth less than the paper they were printed on. That Friday was every brand's nightmare.

Swissair's fate makes consumers, particularly in Europe, reconsider what Switzerland as a brand means. A friend recently joked that my Rolex watch probably never worked. If the Swiss can't keep an airline aloft, how can they make a decent watch? A throwaway joke -- but perhaps a new interpretation of the Swiss brand.

The Swissair collapse caused damage not only for the airline but also for other Swiss brands. Other European brands may also be adversely affected. Could many quality European products, once regarded as paragons of stability and quality, lose their hold on consumer trust?

Consumer belief in stability is shaken. Life is mutable, so trusting a brand for life may no longer be possible. Even the strongest brands, ones that seem to be part of life's fabric, can disappear.

Swissair received a bailout last week from the government, Novartis, and Nestlé, enabling it to resume operations. But Crossair, a Swissair subsidiary, is taking over the bulk of its parent's operations under its banner. The Crossair logo is almost identical to Swissair's -- both echo the national flag. Has this "Red Cross" first aid come too late to bolster the national brand? Time will tell.


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Trust is an indispensable goal in online and offline operating strategies. Consumers need to know who they can trust, but Net-born brands are behind the eight ball when it comes to enjoying consumer trust.

Consumer trust in dot-coms is falling at just about the same rate as Internet business is expanding. A study conducted by Cheskin Research in July 2000 shows that only 10 percent of consumers perceived little or no risk when purchasing on the web; 23 percent of users felt threatened by hackers; and 16 percent were concerned about unauthorized acquisition and abuse of their personal information. A study conducted by CNN/Time in March 1999 showed that only 13 percent of kids between the ages of 13 and 17 trust the Internet.

It's clear that establishing consumer trust in the e-tailer is a fundamental objective if consumers are to be convinced to buy online. So how do e-tailers inspire trust? Combining offline with online enterprise is clearly beneficial for online brands that are still trying to cultivate consumer trust.

Alliances between established offline retailers and online e-tailers can add credibility to the online business. Hence, more and more online brands are establishing unions with brick-and-mortar businesses to leverage the solid market position of the offline brands.

Well-established real-world operators who've been around for years not only have a physical presence for their customers, but they also have an intellectual, even emotional, one as well. The store is represented by the real people that constitute its staff; it's patronized by real people in the form of friends and family who've shopped there as long as they and the store owner can remember. This familiarity is described as "transparency," a quality that helps build trust. Companies with a nontransparent image are unfamiliar, unseen, and, therefore, distrusted. Consumers trust what they know, what they can see, and what they understand fully.

Online and offline businesses are reassessing this concept of transparency. It's an asset that has come to be treated blithely by the brick-and-mortar retailers that possess it. Yet consumer trust should be cultivated and nurtured with extreme care. Far too many web sites tarnish their brand's image by bombarding consumers with information they neither want nor need. This is crazy when companies instead could be systematically using information from their sites to tailor messages and restrict communications to only information that is relevant.

Since 1998, sites such as TRUSTe, VeriSign, and BBB OnLine have been established to donate trustworthiness to the web sites they "endorse." What's really interesting about the emergence of these sites is that they're educating consumers to value their own personal data and teaching them to be skeptical and careful when choosing transaction partners, both online and in the real world.

You can't buy goodwill and trust. These assets are earned over time. Considering that no online brand has existed for more than a few years, consumer trust has been earned by a mere handful of Net-born brands. To maintain and extend consumer trust, established brands have realized they need to apply the same principles from their offline brand management to their online efforts. Primary among these principles is respect for the customer.

Consumers may know and respect an online brand, but their trust in that brand is what keeps them coming back to the site -- and to the brand. Maintaining your consumers' trust in your brand requires respect for consumer privacy and guaranteeing that the consumers' inboxes won't be packed with superfluous emails once they hand over private information. The personal and behavioral data revealed in every transaction is a valuable commodity to e-commerce operators. And canny consumers are learning not to give it away.


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Twenty-four hours after New York City lost one of its most famous landmarks, Amazon.com had removed all of its usual promotions and publicity material from its home page, extended condolences to the American population, and announced a program to donate money from purchases made on the site to the victims of the horrendous attack.
Amazon.com wasn't the only Internet enterprise to offer support to victims of the world-shattering catastrophe. Several sites around the globe established similar support programs within hours of the attack.

First of all, fantastic. "Well done" to those brands that not only reacted speedily to events but also managed to exhibit the humanity in their value platforms. There's no doubt that Amazon's timing was crucial to this success. The terrible event was a tragedy not just for New York City or America. This was a global event that touched every cognizant human being. Imagine an event so uniting in its horror that more than 20 countries across Europe paused together for three minutes' silence three days after the attack.

Within just 12 hours, Amazon had collected more than $600,000. But aside from these financial results, the brand has collected much more. In demonstrating its human face, Amazon has garnered kudos that might otherwise have taken years to establish, at a cost of millions of dollars. The fact that Amazon was the first global brand to react, to articulate a clear position -- to spend time and money on the site's responsive development and management --