Creating a Bomb-Proof Brand Identity
On the web, everything moves faster. One misstep and you're toast. This session focused on how to avoid major mistakes in brand identity on the web. Moderated by Laura Lang, President of Digitas, the panel included three online strategists. Scott Hornstein of Hornstein Associates, a consultant on marketing strategy, research and implementation; Mark Silva, founder of Real Branding, which does online brand strategy for blue-chip clients; and Seana Mulcahy, President of Brand Truth, a digital media and marketing consultancy.
Scott Hornstein started out by observing that your brand is built or destroyed with EVERY customer interaction. Each customer interaction reinforces or destroys the brand. Customers increasingly view marketing with irritation and distrust. According to Yankelovich, 64% of customers are concerned about the motives and practices of advertising and 61% say advertising is out of control. A recent Accenture survey of telephone and internet customers showed that 61% of those interviewed changed a service provider in the last year.
The problem is that for most companies, customer interactions are expensive, messy, and a cost to be controlled. In an annual survey of e-mail policies, companies were asked "what is your corporate policy on turnarounds of e-mails to customer service?" The best were the State of Connecticut, the IRS, Gateway and LL Bean. The worst? US Airways, AMA, Procter & Gamble, and Intel. According to Hornstein, P&G refuses to even send a reply unless you give them your age...
In 2005:
- 42% of companies that responded do so within 24 hours. This was a 33% decline vs. year ago.
- 36% of companies didn't even respond at all. This was a 50% increase vs. year ago.
This year's trend isn't looking good.
On the web, bad news travels like wildfire. A Google search of "Dell sucks" will yield 2.7 million hits, including such gems as www.ihatedell.com and www.dellsucks.net. According to Hornstein, benchmark studies prove that Dell sucks, and support the concept of "NBD": Never Buy Dell. Clearly a scenario to avoid.
There are three steps to build a bomb-proof brand:
1. Customer relations IS the strategy.
2. The interaction must be specific to your customers' wants and needs, not yours.
3. The customer sees one company, so behave as one.
Mark Silva began by showing the Lipton Tea 360 degree campaign. DDB developed "Tea Can Do That", a creative platform to dramatize the healthful benefits of Lipton Tea and inspire a reappraisal of tea. Online consumers explore the range of the brand promise via a website and distributed media unit (an ad on Oprah). According to Silva, this campaign had over a 90% interaction rate. Phenomenal. So how does one get this kind of result? Here are some best practices for integration:
- make it a "client lead mandatory"
- enable the process, budget and events
- recognize and reward integration efforts by your team
- use one brief for the whole thing, not separate briefs
- set the tone
- minimize competition between agencies
- have a master contact list
- allow your agencies to showcase the results.
Crisis communication is often ignored until it's desperately needed. Silva talked about the infamous "Polo: small but tough" campaign in which a terrorist sets off a bomb in front of a peaceful street café, but his Polo completely contains the blast. Remember that one? The campaign was developed by a small UK agency with no ties to VW to showcase their creative talent to VW, but it set off a firestorm of criticism. Fortunately, VW got lucky: according to Todd Riley of VW USA, "our owner base defended us". But it could have gone otherwise. So envision your worst case scenario and build media to support it:
- imagine the unthinkable and plan for it
- create contingency PR
- prepare statements and creative for the website and ads.
Key to successful branding is putting the interactive into the interactive medium. Silva told us to look at the Mycoke.com website to emulate best practices. One example he gave: Mycoke.com established hours of operation and closes the site after a certain time, like 2 a.m. Parents everywhere are grateful.
Next was Seana Mulcahy, President of Brand Truth. She maintains that today's landscape is full of fear and discomfort, the result of:
- ID fraud
- spam
- phishing
- pharming
- adware/spyware, etc.
Users overestimate awareness and preparedness when asked. For example, consumers were asked things like "have you installed a firewall"? Many said "yes" when in fact they hadn't, or it was misconfigured and didn't work. E-mail users now seem more resigned to spam, but 61% of users view spyware as a major threat.
According to Mulcahy, brand loyalty is:
- biased
- behavioral
- expressed over time, and
- competitive
Clutter doesn't always lead to coping. Minds are limited and saturated. Perceptions and memory are selective. There's a real need for clarity.
During the Q&A session, some more good tips were given:
- online chat (customer service via chat) was seen as denigrating the brand, so avoid it
- spend time brainstorming your worst case scenario
- when faced with an offensive domain name like "dellsucks.com", making it a non-issue is the best strategy-- unless, of course, it's picked up by the Times.
