How To Brand Your
Web Site
by Said
Rouhani
What's your
favorite search engine?
Mine used
to be Infoseek. For a while Infoseek was the only search engine
I used, and the name "Infoseek" was fixed on my mind
as the place to go whenever I wanted to find something on the
Internet.
But I could
care less about Infoseek nowadays.
I never
use it anymore.
After Disney
bought Infoseek in 1998, they changed the name to Go.com. "Alright",
you might say, "can't you take a name change?" Well,
problem is, it wasn't just a name change, it was a total elimination
of the Infoseek brand.
The whole
visuals of the site were changed, and what's even worse, the
Go.com site became an entertainment oriented search engine.
It was still a search engine, but it neither looked nor felt
the same as good old Infoseek (and the search results were not
the same as before).
Infoseek
was struggling, which is why Disney bought it. But it was still
a heck of a brand name, an asset which Disney completely neglected.
The result is that a lot of people who used Infoseek before
have now switched to other search engines.
In fact,
the brand kill was so destructive that Go.com doesn't maintain
its own index anymore (it serves results from GoTo.com). Infoseek/Go.com
is as good as dead, and the brand change by Disney had without
a doubt a profound role in the failure.
What can
be learnt from this? Well, first point: branding is very important.
It can make or break a business venture.
Second point:
branding is psychological. It exists in the minds of customers
and prospects. When I say, "Image is nothing. Thirst is
everything", I can bet that the name of a popular fizzy
lemonade will pop up in your mind. That's the power of branding
for you.
And third
point: repeated exposure to the brand is vital to producing
a successful brand. When the Infoseek brand was gone, the search
engine somehow lost its "meaning".
And just
to make it absolutely clear what Web branding really is, here's
a short definition:
The purpose
of branding is to get people to recall your company/product/service
from memory. The ultimate aim is to get people to trust you
more than the competition, and to think of your Web site before
they think of the competition's Web site.
Branding
isn't just for the big companies. It's just as important to
the small business entrepreneur, especially online business
owners. With cutthroat competition on the Web, those who don't
brand will probably go out of business.
Here are
several hands-on branding strategies for you to apply to your
own Web site, using your business name and your own name...
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