Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
While I was growing up, building a brand name was done in the traditional sense. Tons and tons of clever advertising. I remember the Norelco santa around Christmas time, the Coca Cola singers in the 70s, Joe Camel, Mr. Clean, the Exxon tiger, Tony the Tiger, and even the Koala from Quantas? - some airline.
Building a brand took lots of money and some clever ad writers. You needed to write and produce something memorable - even print ads needed to be memorable - which was much harder unless you were willing to be very bold and step outside of the conservative corporate mentality.
I think it's harder still on the web. With a brick and mortar presence people get to meet you and can associate your company's name with you and therefore are more likely to remember you even if you didn't do any advertising.
But on the web - it's a different ballgame. What does it take exactly? Success stories are few and far between if you're a web presence only sort of store. Amazon and Google come to mind but not many others.
We all know that building a brand means the audience needs to see the brand and associate it with your products in a favorable way many, many, many, times. Think of Paul Rand and how long it took for his creations to become easily recoginzed household icons (logos for IBM and Westinghouse).
So it seems to me that in order for an online business to both sell products and achieve brand recognition - it needs traffic and lots of it. And not only traffic but repeat traffic and lots of it.
This lead me to a few theorums:
1. An online business must sell in order to survive.
2. In order to sell products, an online business must have traffic.
3. In order to get traffic, an online business must either achieve great position in the SERPs and/or use paid advertisement (electronic, print, radio, or TV).
4. In order to acquire and maintain a loyal customer base an online business must be able to provide quality goods and services such that the customer has a good reason to visit in the first place and then to return over and over again.
This pretty much follows the traditional way of building brand. But what about on the web? What does the web offer us as an advantage and how can we capitolize on it in this new market place? Surely there must be some advantages in this medium that we can use to help us build brand recognition such that it can be used to our advantage in whatever medium we choose.
Our other brand however is an "online" type brand - which people associate as having lower costs and hence cheaper pricing. This site must work by being 100% efficient as its mainly all new traffic to begin with. Most of the traffic is via search engines (but it could easily be ppc) - it simply must make more than it costs.
To make it a brand we remind people of the company/website name everywhere. We don't say "we provide..." on our site every - only "brandname provides...". We also specify on the site our unique selling points (making the site stand out from others). It must look like a respectable brand (high quality images etc). My gut feeling is that if it looks and acts shamelessly like its a well known brand, people will start assumming that it is!
