The Brand
At Business Logs we have been in talks with a couple Silicon Valley startups about design and logo work or what they like to refer to as “branding”. I always find this interesting because although I think many of us agree that quality design and aesthetics can play a major role in the success of your company, is it safe to assume that this is the only thing that makes up your brand?
What a Brand Isn’t
A brand isn’t a logo. A logo is merely a symbol that represents the brand. Your corporate identity, the stuff found on letterheads and signage, isn’t a brand either. A brand isn’t the product or service that you make. So if a brand isn’t all of these things what is a brand?
A brand is how an individual feels about a company. It’s an individual’s feeling because a brand is defined by how an individual feels about the brand, not what the company wants an individual to feel. Sure companies can’t control how an individual feels, but they certainly can influence the feelings of an individual by properly communicating the qualities that make their brand special.
Branding and Web 2.0
First when I say “Web 2.0″ I am only using it to reference this particular period of time in our lives. I will avoid saying that a product or site is a Web 2.0 product and just say that it is happening during this period that many are calling Web 2.0.
With everything being created during this period I am surprised to see the lack of branding involved and how well companies are trying to differentiate themselves from the rest of the field. What is Bloglines to you? How is it different from RSS aggregators #2-#99? How is Bloglines offering an approximate and distinct understanding of their product and service? To me they aren’t and besides the designs of the sites there isn’t that much separating RSS aggregator #1 from agg #87
Brand is Your #1 Asset
It’s perplexing to me why companies don’t spend more time focusing on communicating their qualities to their customers and helping to shape the brand in their customer’s minds. What do you think the general public’s view of Ning and Flock’s brands might be? What’s the message that they are trying to communicate? What are the qualities? I have a hard time answering those questions so I can only imagine what the general public might be thinking.
A major problem with this phase of the web that many people seem to miss isn’t that companies don’t have a business model, it’s that they aren’t doing a great job of communicating their message and their qualities to users. Look at the survivors from the last boom and what separated them from the rest of the field.
Amazon didn’t start off selling everything on the face of the planet like Buy.com or Overstock and it’s a good thing they didn’t because what message could have they communicated? Instead by starting off with books they could brand themselves as the largest bookstore in the world. That’s powerful. When they did start to sell everything under the sun you could argue that they lost some of their brand’s power, but were able to maintain growth due to the sheer size of eyes they were in front of.
What about Odeo? What message are they going to communicate that will make them different from Apple and Yahoo? The problem isn’t that they are competing against larger competitors, the problem is that I don’t have a clear idea of what their message is.
This was a major problem we encountered with the 9rules Network. Our focus from the beginning was always quality content and that was it. Amazing what you can accomplish when you narrow your message down to two words. However, the problem we were encountering was that people were trying to look too deep into what we were trying to do. Instead of just seeing our message for what it was, many expected there to be a catch when there wasn’t one at all. What could we do about this? Simple, we just had to remain consistent and continue to emphasize quality content and I believe many more people now are understanding our message more clearly.
When someone visits a 9rules site or thinks about the Network itself, we want them to have the feeling that they are getting quality. We can’t force them to have those feelings, but we definitely can make sure to communicate those qualities enough to them that hopefully they begin to see them as well. When your competition is Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker Media you have no choice but to place greater emphasis on the brand you are projecting and this is the #1 reason why I feel no other blog networks will really compete with the top 3-5 networks around today (unless the top ones start to lose their focus).
Branding and Pretty Things
With all this talk of communicating your message does that mean you can get away from having to spend money on a quality logo/avatar/design? Most certainly not, because these help to communicate your message as well. I’m sure many of you remember not too long ago when it was tough to go a week without reading an article or column on the death of Apple. No way could they compete in a Windows world as a desktop manufacturer and I think Steve Jobs understood this. He quickly changed Apple from an alternative computer computer to a quality entertainment device company.
What are your feelings when you think of Apple? I think of:
- Quality
- Simplicity
- Beauty
And these ideas are reinforced whenever I encounter something from Apple be it in an ad, their website, their products or even their packaging. Your brand can not occur at just one stage of the user’s experience, it must occur at all stages.
Apple was dying and Linux was thriving. How much talk of Linux/BSD do you hear today in comparison to Apple news? Mac OS X uses BSD as its foundation, an operating system that has been around for some time yet never even had the press or market penetration that OS X is receiving. Why? I’m sure design had a small part to play in its success.
What Does This Do?
Competition on the web is fierce and it seems that to differentiate themselves from the crowd many companies simply add feature X without any regards to their brand. When making any changes/additions to your site, products or services you should always end up asking how will this hurt or help our brand. If it doesn’t help it in anyway why should you proceed with it? It’s very difficult to add a new feature today that your competition can’t add tomorrow. Features aren’t what will separate your company from the crowd, your brand is what will do it.
As you could imagine I could carry on with this topic for quite a bit longer, but I will end it here for now and ask this question. In this era of the web what companies are doing a great job of building and maintaining their brand and what is their brand to you?
I think Google did an excellent job of building their brand. I think we can all argue about how well they are maintaining it. Apple is doing an excellent job of managing their brand (read Wired article about the ROKR, and how Apple used it to protect their market and image, instead of destroy their market and image). 9Rules is doing a nice job of building a brand too, although sometimes I don’t recall who is in/out. I just look for quality, and sometimes I’ll see the little 9rules flower there :) 37 Signals is doing a nice job of building a brand, simple products that get the job done.
I can give a bad example… Reddit. They got a lot of press from Graham’s Y Combinator, but failed to capitalize, I still don’t know why I should use them over digg (which the new redesign helped quite a bit, although I hate the fact it takes two clicks to launch externally in some cases).
By JohnO on October 26, 2005 12:25 pm
A lot of people misunderstand the actual purpose of branding, and you’re right, it’s almost always generalized to be “just a logo.” In my own article (shameless plug), I try to remind people to remember the essense of self, to ask themselves questions they normally ignore, because branding really is an all-encompasing project. A lot of people just do things without asking the whys, hows, the history, etc.
And to answer your last question: Nintendo. It may or may not have hurt sales because of changing tastes in video game culture, but if one thing is for sure, Nintendo has a stranglehold on their brand. Who does not know Mario or Luigi? The theme song is the #1 downloaded cellphone ringtone. The target audience has always been 13-15 year old Japanese boys, and it has never really wavered much. When you think Nintendo, you think fun, quirk games, lots of colours, and some nostalgia. You think innovation. You think children. :-) There’s no mistake when you’re playing a Nintendo game versus one that was tailored for PlayStation. In fact, there’s a clearer picture of what a Nintendo game should be than a PlayStation one.
By Lea on October 26, 2005 12:44 pm
Boiled down to it’s ultimate simplicity, a brand is really nothing more than a promise.
Fulfill that promise consistently, the brand remains strong and gets stronger. Break it, or have one that’s too vague in meaning and you’re either heading for trouble or going to have a real hard time of getting started.
By Mark on October 26, 2005 2:32 pm
So what you are saying Mark is that the Scrivs brand is not strong with the ladies at all anymore?
By Scrivs on October 26, 2005 2:35 pm
You phrase that as if it ever was to begin with.
By Mark on October 26, 2005 2:37 pm
Touche.
By Scrivs on October 26, 2005 2:39 pm
How do you define “quality content”? In terms of branding, and in consideration that a brand is a promise, how do you promise me quality content? Given that quality is subjective?
Wouldn’t a much better brand position and promise be what you have on the badge on BL?
“Connecting readers and writers everywhere”
Now there’s a good brand statement. It’s clear, concise — and most important, true.
Even better, you can deliver that. I’d argue there’s no way you can deliver “quality content”
By Mark on October 26, 2005 3:07 pm
Brand for me is all about building an emotional response. How a product makes me feel.
And 9rules does a great job aesthetically and intellectually. It’s often stimulating both in design, creativity and community. Thats what keeps me coming back.
You mention Flock there, a bird that has me torn. I just looked at their homepage again since the developer release. lol. It tells me nothing about what Flock is at all. I’ve sent them feedback. Odeo, Odeo? It’s only when I made the connection with Odeo=Audio that it makes any sense. Took me forever to learn how it might be useful to me and then went there to use it! They recently sent me an email about their new studio features. I listened to their podcast and then wondered what the hell I do I do now to access those features. lol. Got me annoyed. Tarnished their name.
By craig on October 26, 2005 11:49 pm
Excellent post Scrivs. My thoughts…
As the self-proclaimed Father of Web 2.0 (how’s that for branding!), I think the big Internet companies that have branded well are Google and Yahoo!. Google’s brand is based on technical innovation - that seemingly arrogant “we’re the number 1 technology company and we know it” attitude is all part of their allure. Yahoo!’s brand is the mainstream Internet company - taking care of The People, but making sure everyone knows they’re technically astute too. I find Microsoft’s brand in the Web 2.0 age to be confused - they used to be the number 1 technology company, but in this new world they’re more fast followers than innovators. They’re at least hard on the heels of Google and Yahoo!, and perhaps that’s all they need to be at this point in time (given their huge resources and wealth). You’ve already mentioned Apple and they’re a great brand, no doubt about it. They’re almost above the Web 2.0 world - I once compared them to The Fonz. I think they have that ‘cooler than thou’ attitude that transcends the Web 2.0 meme.
Of the smaller companies, I have to hand it to 37Signals - even though personally I don’t identify much with their brand. I think Feedburner has built up a great brand, as has Adaptive Path.
Of most interest to me is blogging brands and that’s one of the reasons why I joined 9rules - you guys recognize the importance of quality individual blogger brands. Web design is one part of that, but much more important is the blogger’s ‘voice’ and the things they represent. After all, RSS hides a lot of the web design branding from readers - so the voice and community aspects of a blog must shine through in its words.
By Richard MacManus on October 27, 2005 5:21 am
Paul:
I totally agree that many of these new companies do not have great branding. But I think that stems from the fact that most of these same businesses do not really have a well developed business model in the first place. Having a business model means knowing who your customer is, why they will buy from you and how you will reach them. If you know all of these things then branding comes quite naturally.
Also, I think that the fundamental reason the dot com survivors are here is not because of branding, but because of their business model. There were lots of other companies with great branding also. Take Pets.com as an example. They had a very strong brand, but their business model was flawed.
To succeed you clearly need to have a strong brand, but you need a good business model first. My opinion.
Anyway, great piece. I think your idea of narrowing your brand as much as possible is a really important point. Communicating anything about your business to anybody is surprisingly hard. The more narrow your message, the more hope you have of getting it across.
By Charles Jolley on October 27, 2005 8:22 am
Nice article, Scrivs. I couldn’t agree more. The logo and corporate identity should be an outward symbol of your brand, not the brand itself. Few clients every seem to understand this.
I’m also amazed at how many companies look to their web designer or their advertising agency to develop their brand. To me, a brand is something that you can only develop internally. There are brand consultants that can probably help, but ultimately coming up with what you’d like to convey as your “brand” has got to be decided by the company in question. A web designer or ad agency can then attempt to design their product in-line with your brand, but it’s unlikely that they can truly develop your brand for you.
By Jeff Croft on October 27, 2005 11:07 am
Creating the right visual relationship between a web-based brand message and its other, more traditional, media manifestations is the first task for the designer but there is more to branding a web page than merely slapping a logo on it.
As these activities migrate to the comparatively new medium of the web, it is useful to explore how techniques can be leveraged from the more traditional media and how they can be adapted and improved to best advantage in the new environment.
A company or product logo is the “face” by which it is recognised. A “brand” goes deeper than that. It is a persona that is accumulated over time from various “brand values” that have been projected though advertising, promotion and personal experiences. A “branded” web page has to be sympathetic to the brand as a whole, not only visually but in tone-of-voice, attitude and personality.
By Stephanie_R on October 28, 2005 4:05 pm
Nice rephrased summary of the article you CAN read if you scroll to the top of this page.
By Mortum on November 10, 2005 4:33 am
There are plenty of resources to learn to make brand progress.
Often times the issue is that many small business owners are wearing too many hats;
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By Admin on December 25, 2005 1:34 pm