BRAND PULSE … Reinventing Web Brands (1 of 3)

> John Rotheray, 2009 MBA Candidate, Center for Brand and Product Management

Note: This is the second piece in what is now a regular and evolving serial feature on this blog -- MBA students in the Center for Brand and Product Management at the Wisconsin School of Business presenting timely perspectives on issues facing the brand world.


Crossing the 'brand canyon' on the Web.

Did you know that Google’s audience skews towards a fairly wealthy, older and more educated audience while Yahoo’s audience is younger and slightly female slanted?

A common misconception is that mainstream Web brands are intended to appeal to anyone and everyone, but in fact, every US Website in the top 100 list skews towards a particular demographic.

In an effort to set the record straight, this article will dispute the sustainability of ‘un-positioning’ strategies on the Web in light of competitive trends and increasingly ego-centric consumers. A secondary objective is to dispel the myth that capturing market share on the Web is largely a technical innovation issue.

Managing a Web brand today requires significant knowledge about who its visitors are and what they want. Cutting-edge technologies and innovations can be a great strategy for winning a motley party of early adopters, but once the launch party is over a community takes shape and brand associations form. The marketing challenge for an established Web brand is similar to brands representing physical products like Coke or Audi, with the twist that revenue generation is often from a continuous stream of repeat visits (frequency) and time spent (attention). So that brings us to our first question …


What are the key drivers behind the success of today’s Web brands?

Three powerful trends are requiring successful branding efforts on the Web to go beyond awareness and into developing deep brand associations and personal connections:

> Specialization

A major trend among Web brands is how the exponential growth in Internet content has caused one-size-fits-all strategies to burst at the seams.

As an example from the offline world, we turn to specialization in the take-out coffee industry – which has enabled independent coffee shops to compete in niches that Starbucks under serves. Most people feared Starbucks would kill indies, but Slate Magazine reporter Taylor Clark writes that Starbucks “offers a very limited menu; you'll never see discounts or punch cards at Starbucks, nor will you see unique, localized fare.” As a result “over the five-year period from 2000 to 2005—long after Starbucks supposedly obliterated indie cafes—the number of mom and pops grew 40 percent, from 9,800 to nearly 14,000 coffeehouses.”

While Google and Yahoo are still the kings of broad search, many Web brands are capitalizing on unmet needs in targeted search by provided better search capabilities in niche categories, ‘mashed-up’ with e-commerce, GIS data, reader comments and related capabilities. Specialized search now exist in categories as diverse as movies, jobs, people and homes. Even the job search category has sub-categories for technical jobs and executive positions. Specialization is a lucrative strategy for e-tailors and information providers alike. Specialized need based sites like Netrition that serve the nutritional needs of body builders and Healthyback that serve people with back pains, compete effectively against general e-commerce Web brands like Amazon.com through specialization.

Key Take-Away: As a result of increased content and competition, brands need to focus on building strong associations ... but within well-defined and manageable categories ... versus trying to be all things to all people.

> Service lifestyle

The Internet is now a bastion for instant gratifiers to fulfill their needs for status through technological empowerment. Care to wonder why the iPhone is such a phenomenon? It is because the iPhone works for me, by empowering me to listen to my music, stay in touch with my friends, check my email, and serve an endless variety of my real-life needs by having access to the Web.

Jennifer Steinhauer illustrates in her article, “When the Joneses wear Jeans,” that “the true measure of upper class today is in the personal services indulged in.” Technology has arguably enabled the average person to keep pace with the upper class by supplanting personal services like travel agents with brands like Expedia and social coordinators with sites like eVite, FaceBook and mySpace.

Tapping into the needs of service lifestyles is a key tactic for attracting and keeping attention, which is easily monetized through advertising and other means. Social interaction between community members further serves to amplify attention by pulling members in and increasing visitation through asynchronous interactions.

Key Take-Away: Websites that generate revenues from advertising need to align their brands with the fulfillment of a social need for status. Examples include the needs for fun, success, fashion and love.

> Personalization

Tom O’Guinn, Marketing Professor at the Wisconsin School of Business and Executive Director for the Center for Brand and Product Management, asserts that consumers also desire to carve out a place for themselves in society. “One thing modernity brought with it was all kinds of identities, the ability for people to choose who you want to be, how you want to decorate yourself, what kind of lifestyle you want, and what you consumer cannot be separated from that.”

The Web has created an environment for anyone to achieve the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Being a highly customizable environment, it is a primary place for self-actualization. Brands that are able to target these needs are able to define a better fit with consumers and form long lasting brand identities.

Key Take-Away: Websites that personalize satisfy the increasing role of Web brands to fulfill personal egos and to define individual identities.


So what should Web brands do to best position themselves given these market trends? Check back here for the next installment, which will examine positioning opportunities for Web brands in an envolving market …