Brand Building

New branding methods for a new medium

Brand building in conventional customer delivery channels is a well-known and extensively researched discipline. It was assumed that these traditional principles could be easily extended into virtual product delivery systems thereby extending brand strength in the virtual setting. However, research is now showing that well established, high profile brands from traditional channels can and do fail in screen-based delivery systems, even if the brand building process models from the traditional channels are rigorously applied to the online delivery system. The reasons for such failures are beginning to be understood. Research is showing that creating an effective online brand is far more complex than the application of line-extension methods. What is needed is a new brand development process model that is based on the concept of "interactive" brand development and related cognitive models. Brand building on the web is an entirely different experience.

Aspects of a well-formed brand in traditional delivery channels include: brand name awareness, perceived quality, positive brand associations, and brand loyalty. These customer touch-points combine to build a good brand presence. However, screen-based delivery adds a new level of complexity to the problem. For the first time customers are interacting in machine-mediated experiences as opposed to human-mediated. How can marketers effectively brand this user-driven, interactive media? How can a machine be made to express a company's positive brand attributes, like respect and reliability, the same way a person does? Time-tested cognitive models are the key to the development of new branding methods.

Early customer behavior models prove incorrect
It was widely held that customers shopping and executing transactions on the web would respond only to offers of lower prices based on the concept of real-time price comparison. Research shows clearly that this model is not a primary predictor of on-line customer behavior. According to the 2001 Shopper Report by Chain Store Age/Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, customers are not searching the web for the lowest prices. Instead, customers are looking for the same "respect, honesty, courtesy, and quality" online that they value at their favorite stores. These are all important aspects of a brand identity. It is clear that branding is as essential to e-commerce as it is to brick-and-mortars.

Offline branding vs. Online branding
Let's be clear about this, when approaching interactive brand building, it is not necessary to throw out years of traditional branding experience and methods. There are essential elements common to both traditional media and new screen-based systems. A successful brand, online or off, represents an entire customer experience. In a brick-and-mortar environment this includes: how the customer is welcomed into the store, how products are packaged and presented, and how clerks and customers interact. These elements can be translated to the online shopping experience to include: the e-tailer's home or welcome page, web site design, and page navigation and online support. An effective visual identity is still important online, as is a memorable domain name. Even the best web site will be overlooked if users cannot remember where to find it.

Despite these commonalties, online branding differs in important ways from traditional branding and must be approached differently. Traditional branding relies on the creation of a carefully designed image to be consumed passively by the public, as a commercial or billboard, for instance. On the other hand, the web, a user-driven media, cannot rely on traditional methods alone. It demands new branding solutions. Customers either enjoy a web site and stay, or they don't. A company's entire character, identity, products, and services, can be communicated in seconds on the web and customers make judgments just as fast.

E-businesses have complex "interactive" branding needs
An "interactive" brand can either be virtual or an extension of existing delivery systems (Amazon.com vs. Barnes and Noble, for example). These two firms have similar needs but the virtual brand must be far more aggressive in brand attribute definition and product delivery innovation because it has no other channel to build a brand except customer call centers and advertising, both weak brand building systems for online commerce. On the web, there are no employees or managers and often no customer support representatives to mediate the customer's experience with the company. The immediate customer experience is far more important to online branding. For an online business, the look and feel of its website and the quality of the interface is the most important way to communicate its brand. Therefore, the aspects of an online customer experience must be very carefully designed and maintained if the core attributes of the corporation's brand are to be effectively conveyed.

Effective online branding: Designing the brand
Because the customer experience is so important online, branding strategies must be far more carefully designed, especially for businesses that exist only online. Core brand attributes must be clearly identified for the development of design solutions that deliver measurable brand attribute conveyance. When creating a list of brand attributes, it is always tempting to try to associate a brand with several attributes so that no selling argument or market segment is ignored. However, a positioning strategy that involves too many product attributes can result in a fuzzy, sometimes contradictory, confused image. In part, the problem is that the motivation and ability of the audience to process a message involving multiple attributes is limited. On the other hand, the use of several attributes can work well when they support each other. Therefore, it is often helpful to create composite brand variables by grouping together attributes that are correlated.

After identifying the brand attributes, they must be translated into design features that lead to user interactions that increase brand awareness and create strong associations between the attributes and the design elements. For instance, a brand that is considered reliable, positive, and engaging would want its web site to have a quick response time and up-to-date links, positive images and color-schemes, and interactive elements that provide personalized feedback.

The future: measuring brand attribute strength
Much of the literature that investigates branding is based on indirect measurement: investment-to-profit returns, consumer ratings, and comparative market-position analysis, to name a few. While these are useful, defining the specific attributes of a brand that make it effective in the marketplace has received less attention. New techniques are being developed that will measure and analyze the effectiveness of brand attribute conveyance in screen-based delivery systems. Currently, MauroNewMedia and other leading interactive customer testing agencies are working with several online research technologies in the development of interactive brand attribute testing. Preliminary research in this area has been very promising.

Cognitive modeling is one solution.
Much of the work in consumer psychology examines how consumers process information and form judgments and how memory and judgment affect decision-making. Cognitive models are used to understand information processing and decision-making in user-interface design. For example, the encoding of information from a visual display is, in general, classified as a visual inspection task. A visual inspection task contains two phases: search and decision. In the search phase, eye movements occur from location to location on the screen. These movements continue until the observer notices something unusual or informative. At this point, the observer fixes his eyes on the area of the screen in question. The greatest amount of information enters the visual system when the observer's eyes are fixed. The decision phase of visual inspection occurs when objects in the visual field are recognized and compared with objects in memory. A decision is then made about the information in question and what action to take next. A customer may go through this process hundreds of times while browsing a web site. Adapting these cognitive models to study online customer psychology and brand strength will lead to more accurate and effective interactive brand definition and building.