The Brand Gap. Does online branding matter? | Startable - Healy Jones' & Prasad. I was lucky enough to attend a PopSignal event a couple of weeks ago, and was surrounded by a few entrepreneurs who I really respect like the guys over at YouCastr and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot. We got into a pretty heated discussion on naming your startup. In fact, it was so heated that one of us knocked over his drink (that individual will remain anonymous.) We agreed on pretty much two points: naming your company is really hard and you’ve got to be able to purchase the domain name.
But a bigger question that we batted around was how does branding impact your web business? Probably the coolest study I’ve seen on branding and online businesses is the chocolate covered grasshopper campaign that Grasshopper did when they changed their name/branding from GotVmail to Grasshopper. Thanks to the case study published by Grasshopper we can actually see if it did! Online branding campaign results. The tacky techie conundrum. [click picture to enlarge] Our Culture (high and popular) is usually created by people who are happy with the systems the world has given them. Magazine editors don't spend a lot of time wishing for better technology. Opera singers focus more on their singing than on microphone technologies.
Novelists proudly use typewriters. Sure, there are exceptions like Les Paul (who developed the electric guitar) and Mitch Miller (who invented reverb) but these exceptions prove the rule: often, culture is invented by people who are too busy to seek out new technology. (The bottom left corner of the grid shows the tech-phobic culture-phobic contingent.
If you take a look at this chart, you can see the danger anyone who introduces new technology faces. The challenge is in designing structures and transparency that will attract the good guys while burying or repelling those that seek the new technology (because they can't find anywhere else to go). Why It's Time to Do Away With the Brand Manager - Advertising Ag. Zappos. How Vevo Makes Google More Like Coca-Cola - Umair Haque - Harvar. By Umair Haque | 10:28 AM December 11, 2009 They used to be polar opposites. One was the epitome of 20th century business; the other, the textbook example of a better kind of business. By mass-producing, mass-marketing, and relentlessly hard-selling sugar water to kids and the poor, Coca-Cola rose to global prominence and market dominance: thin, artificial value had little better example.
But Google’s rise was powered by exactly the opposite: building a more meaningful media marketplace, that created authentic value for all. That was yesterday. Today, Google is the new Coke. Here’s what I mean by that: Google used to be a “good beats evil” business. Both are less than awesome. What happened? Vevo — Google’s latest JV with record labels — is a perfect mini-case in how, tempted by the booty-shaking devil, Google went from “don’t be evil” to “evil’s OK, if it helps to do a tiny bit of good.”
Here’s why Vevo is Google’s biggest mistake to date — and what you can learn from it. Unnovation. Amazon is The Most Trusted Brand in America – GigaOM. Amazon.com is the top performing brand in the US based on two critical factors – trust and recommendation – according to a new report by market research firm, Millward Brown. The new report, “Beyond Trust: Engaging Consumers in the Post-Recession World” puts Amazon ahead of FedEx, Huggies and Downey. The “Beyond Trust” study used a metric called “TrustR” which as you guessed is about trust and recommendation. The more people trust a brand, the more likely they are going to spend their money with that company.
Amazon’s recent stellar performance during the fourth quarter of 2009 is a testament to that fact. The company saw its sales jump 42 percent over the same quarter in 2008 to $9.5 billion. “We found that the number one “TrustR” brand in each of the 22 countries we researched was nearly seven times more likely to be purchased and consumers were 10 times more likely to have formed a strong bond with these brands,” Eileen Campbell, Global CEO of Millward Brown said in a press release.