Marketing

When you think of the following product and service categories, which brand first comes to you mind?

You answers reveal how well branded a consumer you are. I am sure your list looks something like this

The reason why these brand names have come to your mind when you thought of the product category is simply because the brands have been embedded in your consumer psyche. This is what all marketers hope to accomplish with their brands.

A brand is more than a logo. It encompasses the total experience a customer has with a company or simply defined, the brand is the immediate image, emotion or message people experience when they think of a company or a product. If the customer experiences a positive feeling about the brand then the customer accepts this brand and again and again will be ready to spend money on it. If the experience is not positive the customer will stay away from it. Creating a strong ‘brand name’ for any product or service is thus crucial because when people need a product or service, they always refer to something familiar and nice that they have shared earlier with a particular brand.

The marketers usually employ a combination of persuasive, emotional advertising campaigns and public relations to encourage a link between a positive ‘feeling’ and a ‘brand’. The newspapers, FM stations, magazines, hoardings, sponsorships of programs are the usual tools that the marketers use in their brand building exercise. But as you might have noticed, the older mass media of TV and print are becoming more and more fragmented and crowded and except for few with really strong brand names, their ability to build brands needs to be questioned. At the same time, more and more people, especially the younger generations, are spending more of their time on Internet. Especially in case of the students studying in the more expensive institutions of the valley, they are seen to be cutting more and more of their time in the media like TV or newspapers and spending more of their time on the Internet. They are growing up with the net and net is becoming a part of their life just like the television. The markets thus need to realize that as this generation matures no marketer will be able to ignore one of their favorite media – Internet – for long. The reason being that their consumers will be spending much of their time on the net and the brand that can be recognized on the net will be the one that will become stronger than its competitors.

Branding on the net however is not an easy task. Getting consumers to recall you from memory for your particular product or service is a daunting task. The challenge facing you is to build enough unaided brand awareness of your brand to your customers and prospects. Especially for companies whose businesses are based on only on the Internet, forging a recognized brand name is even more important. With nothing to pick up or to touch and hundred of similar-sounding sites to choose from, online consumers have little to go on besides a familiar name. In cyberspace, anyone with enough resources to rent space on a server and build some buzz for their brand is a potentially dangerous competitor.

Just as the need to build brands on the Internet is spiking, there is a growing recognition among marketers that the tactics that work so well on TV simply don’t woo viewers in cyberspace. One cannot imagine a net surfer viewing the popular advertisement of the Lux Soap on the net just because it appeared while he was visiting a particular website. Unlike the viewers of television who might wait for popular serial resume after a commercial break, the net surfers would leave the site in one click of the mouse in case of a slight disturbance. The established methods of Internet advertising too don’t do much better. Interstitials, advertisements that just pops up on the screen are tagged as annoying interruptions to the online experience and it is found that the online banners too are ignored most of the time by the visitors.

"In net advertising/branding the customer is in charge". This means that the marketers set on building their brands in the online world have to persuade consumers to participate in their marketing activities. The latest theory of how to do that involves something called ‘Rational Branding’. The idea is to marry the emotional sell of traditional brand marketing –the pitch that links "Cadbury’ with ‘Milk chocolate’ or ‘Close up ‘ with ‘Freshness – with concrete service offered only online.

Rational branding strives both to move and help the online consumer at the same time. In essence, the advertiser pays the consumers to endure the brand message by performing some kind of service. Internet users are on the net for more practical reasons than entertainment. So rational branding effort reflect the goal to satisfy the customer’s reason for being on the net. An example of the company that is practicing the rational branding approach in its web marketing is MasterCard International Inc. In search of a rational branding plan, it has transformed its web marketing from one that simply hypes the card to one that offers a helping hand to the online shopper by promoting Shop Smart, a sort of MasterCard seal of approval given to E-commerce sites that use advanced credit-card security systems. As result of which, it has been able to promote its image of ‘security, trust and service’ on the net.

The marketers of the consumer goods too have tried the rational branding approach. For instance Coca-Cola Co, recognizing its slick TV commercials wouldn’t play well on the Net, tried a different tactic—one that works beautifully in the real world. It acted as sponsor for entertainment. For example, the company rigged its www.Cherrycoke.com site as an entertainment gateway, filled with links to interesting sites around the Internet. Others like Proctor and Gamble offer the Stain Detective at www.tide.com; Unilever’s Ragu brand has a popular site filled with recipes; and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s Clairol site allows consumers to scan in a personal photograph and experiment with different hair colors. The idea is to let consumers ‘’try on’’ a brand "online". Perhaps influenced by their success in drawing traffic, manufacturing companies in Nepal too have started to think about strengthening their image by building up their brand on the net. The first consumer products manufacturing company in Nepal to aggressively promote its web marketing program perhaps is Nepal Lever which through a popular contest site of India called www.contests2win.com offered prizes to those who correctly answered the question about its brands like Lux, Liril, Fair and Lovely etc. The idea of the program was to educate the visitors of the site about their brands. Similar program was followed by Bajaj Saffire, which also offered prizes and an opportunity for a test ride of the newly launched scooter. Some of the other brands like Carlsberg and Mayos noodles too seem to be adopting the rational branding approach and have more to offer the visitors than just putting up the information about their products on their websites.

The challenge before of the marketers at present is thus to develop a strong rational branding approach to strengthen the image of their brand in the online world. As the next net friendly consumer generation grows up, the marketers cannot simply ignore the net in the future. The brands that are stronger in the net will then be the ones that will be stronger in the offline world as well. Therefore despite current difficulties in marketing online, it’s important that the marketers start being on the net and start experimenting with what works and what doesn’t, trying to find ways to make the relationship between their brands and the visitors stronger on the net.

Branding on the Net