Branding – Fire up the Iron.
Branding used to be when a cowboy would burn his mark into his cattle to identify which he owned. It was a simple mark, unique to the rank which owned the cattle, and was instantly recognisable when the cattle was being driven across country, along with other herds, or when it was taken for slaughter.
The modern concept of branding is not different to the old concept. It is a means of differentiating your product from other, often similar, products. It is also one of the most powerful business constructs you will ever have. A brand has value far beyond any of the other assets you own, and yet it is intangible. There are many books and sites on how to build a brand, one that I can personally recommend is Creating Passion Brands by Helen Edwards which you can buy here at Amazon.
This book focuses on build emotional connections to customers, and as such is suited to the web based branding which we are predominately interested. Also there are many sites which have loads of information on Branding; one great site is utalkmarketing which has a great section on online branding here.
Do some wider research and you will begin to see that there is more to the branding process than a cool name and great logo (although these are important) To explore the brand as a construct a bit more I am going to use two very well known brands, one old, Hoover, and one new Google.
Hoover makes vacuum cleaners, not Hoovers, but we call them Hoovers anyway. The brand is so synonymous with vacuum cleaners we naturally refer to them as such. The word has, by dint of Hoover dominating the market from an early stage and a consistent marketing campaign, entered common usage. There can be no more powerful brand than this, it is all that a brand should be, when we think vacuum cleaner, we think Hoover. How does this happen? Many experts agree that the cultural linking of a products name with its general product area, like Hoover, takes a consistent and lengthy process, but many detractors argue that the web has changed this and now it can be managed in a matter of years, and not decades. This is due to the sophistication of the consumer, we can distinguish between products because there are simply more products, but also we are more used to marketing than two generations ago. We are Brand Sceptical, and we accept trusted brands quickly, but also discard them quickly if they fail to meet our specific needs.
Google built a brand on excellence, they were simply the best product available to the mass market, and as such Google has become the big player. The name (in fact a spelling mistake) is synonymous with internet searching, and this was achieved in less than a decade. However they only stay on top due to continued improvement of their services, if a diligent programmer were to hit upon a better way to search the internet, it is entirely feasible that Google could be dominated by it (Think Internet Explorer and Firefox, IE looked unassailable from a conventional business standpoint.) Brands, although potent, do not command the same loyalty as even ten years ago and the only way to maintain the superiority of your site or product is by through constant innovation.
