A Lesson in Online Branding

How do you create and implement a successful online branding campaign? Then, how do you measure it? While we're at it, how do you solve a problem like Maria?

There’s an article in Ad Age that pinpoints the commonalities among the eight best online branding campaigns of 2006, as determined by Dynamic Logic. They measured success by awareness, persuasiveness, and positive brand impact. Let me ask one more time: How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? In other words, how do you measure these things? With a click-through report? I think not. Let's table that issue for one moment and move onto the "things" themselves. (How very Imagist of me.)

They found that “the right ingredients for online ads” were:
Simple and visual. There’s too much else going on to try and compete with crazy graphics and complicated text.
Front and center. No little tricks, we’re not clever enough to figure these out. More likely, our ADD kicks into high gear when we’re online and we just don’t have the time to mess around with gimmicks.
Align online and offline campaigns. Does this mean putting your website on a billboard, or using a banner to direct consumers to an offline promotion? Probably.
Incorporate video and rich media. Spinning McShakers, dunking Oreos: put your message into motion.
Add interactivity. Duh.
But wait, how duh is that? We’re always talking about “interactivity this” and “interactivity that” but will someone please tell me what that means? Am I really going to be excited about being able to virtually add my Crystal Light On the Go to a bottle of water? Well, yes. Herein may lie the secret to that little thing that we don’t like to talk about: connecting the dots, Pee-wee Herman style, between user engagement, interactivity, emotion, and (drum roll please) Brand Experience. In holistic terms, “brand energy.” Oh yes, a concept so new that Wikipedia has yet to create a definition for it.

Here is their first draft:

The energy that flows throughout the system that links businesses and all their stakeholders and which is manifested in the way these stakeholders think, feel and behave towards the business and its products or services.

Stakeholders? What about customers? The concept is that a brand is experiential, and that businesses create value through all transactions, i.e. “meaningful experiences.” But in order for the value to be created, “people first have to have positive associations with the business and/or its products and services and be energized to behave positively towards them.”

This is getting way trippy.

What they are trying to say, in New Age terms, is that online branding campaigns are about building an emotional connection, and you can’t measure emotion. How do I love thee, asked Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And even she couldn’t come up with a quantifiable metric. (Maybe she should have spent less time with Pope's Homeric translations and more time with her web analytics textbook.)

As Jack Gordon explains in “Which is Declining – Brands, or Branding?”

how consumers feel about your brand is more important than what they think about your brand. It is precisely this emotional reaction to the brand that leads to consumers spending more money for a particular product. Understanding and reinforcing the brand’s emotional appeal is every bit as important as understanding its functional benefits.

So, turn on the charm and get the consumer to love you. Then “count the ways.” If you run out of fingers and toes, try Lovemarks.