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The Online Brand: putting the
consumer first
By David Dawson
David
edits and occasionally writes for the monthly
Teleconomy Newsletter, and can normally be found
threatening, cajoling or bribing Teleconomy
staff into writing articles. |
The Internet is nothing short of revolutionary in
terms of its impact on brand. Gone are the days when
your impression of a brand was based on the occasional
phone call to customer services and a wander around
a high street store once a month. Now we have glamorous,
complex, expensive websites, available 24 hours a
day, to directly influence our appreciation of a company’s
brand.
At least in theory. The reality reveals that, even
though lessons have been learnt, many manufacturers
are still unwilling to treat their websites as anything
more than an electronic brochure. And that can have
a hugely negative impact on brand as visitor’s
expectations grow.
Take online shopping, for example, one of the most
constructive uses for a manufacturer’s website.
Not only can a company sell products without all those
annoying expenses like shop rental, display advertising,
shop assistants, salesmen hovering over your shoulder
and so on, but they can create a single, highly-effective
journey through all their website pages from product
information to purchase. And once the journey is designed,
everyone can use it for every product available. With
a little care and attention, this journey can appear
useful, reliable and add value to the consumer’s
experience to create excellent brand associations
– in other words, provide all those emotional
attachments that people expect a brand to provide.
Trying to buy – or at least research –
the right video recorder yesterday, my first stop
was Panasonic.co.uk. There was an immediate assumption
that I knew what NTSC Playback was. Not to mention
Qasi S-VHS/S-VHS ET Playback, which sounded like a
tactical weapon. After clicking through to read further
information about some of their video players, I was
occasionally offered a link to an online shop: ‘the
eshop.’ Not that the video recorder I was reading
about was actually available to buy in the eshop,
but the thought was there.
The Sony site marches down the same confident route,
because everyone knows what ‘Smart Trilogic’
means don’t they? It also offers connectivity
diagrams to really baffle the novice. However, it
does offer a long, badly laid out glossary of terms
if viewers really insist on understanding what they
are buying, and provides links to dealers that might
sell the product I want (although these dealers, it
turns out, may not have a website).
Running out of brand names I could remember, I tried
the Philips site. This site is under the impression
I should be far more interested in its pension fund
than its products, but some cunning wordplay in the
search engine eventually led me to the shopping area.
Here, the desire to explain the terminology has gone
into overdrive, so much so that each phrase is explained
twice – once on the page, and once on a pointless
extra window that pops up.
So finally I went to Amazon. Of all the retailers
I visited, Amazon's sales process is the single most
important definition of their brand. Amazon’s
brand is unaffected by the quality of the products
they sell. And yet I still got a clearer indication
of the quality of products than on the manufacturers'
websites, with a crisp, succinct summary of each model’s
capabilities without unnecessary jargon, coupled with
actual user opinions about each video player.
Add to this Amazon’s unique ability to line
up all the video players I was interested in on one
page so I could compare them next to each other, and
I had a near-perfect online shopping experience. Of
course, I couldn’t see all the video players
that Amazon didn’t stock, but given the hassle
trying to find out about them – I’d probably
have to use pen and paper, of all things, to make
notes as I went through each website – it really
wasn’t worth the effort.
As the manufacturer websites all equally failed to
consider the customer experience in enough depth,
I was not terribly aware of what brand video recorder
I was purchasing. In the end, I bought a Philips video
recorder because it did exactly what I wanted and
three people said it was reliable – oh no, hang
on, it’s a Panasonic. So much for branding.
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