Call it the brand paradox. On the one hand, new media makes a strong brand essential to any business. Companies without one will simply be lost in the torrents of information now surging across the world's networks. On the other hand, new media also pulls apart the traditional building blocks of the brand. Today's brands offer the customer a way of becoming informed about products, embracing a lifestyle, joining a community and entering into a relationship, all wrapped up together. New media changes the way in which customers approach all of these things so dramatically that building - or even maintaining - traditional brands becomes next to impossible.
Just a quick brush with the Web demonstrates that brand advertising does not translate from old media into new. Even if the Web had sufficient bandwidth to carry video to every PC in the world, television advertise-ments could still only be put onto Web sites as ironic comment. The shouting, jingle-chanting and brand-name blasting needed to imprint information on the brain of a couch potato wondering where his next snack will come from just sound ridiculous when presented to a mouse-clicking netsurfer. Even relatively weighty corporate brochures look trivial, boring and unconvincing on-screen, particularly when compared to the masses of fast-changing information on the Web.
It's not really surprising that advertising should fail to translate. Brands were created for producers, to enable factory builders and assembly-line innovators to tout the virtues of their newly mass-produced wares to the mass markets they hoped and prayed were waiting to receive them. The Web, by contrast, was created for consumers, to provide a way of picking through - and making individual sense of - masses of information and goods. Not only does the new medium imply a change of viewpoint, but it also, by definition, enables a complete change in the way in which brand advertising carries out its various functions.
Existing media force brand-builders to mix together information and persuasion, fact and emotion, community building and customer service all into a single, compact piece of work. New media provides more room to manoeuvre, and more tools to manoeuvre with. Indeed, the first act in the process of re-inventing the brand is to deconstruct it. Only by breaking brands into constituent parts can marketers give each part the depth required to make a success in this world of new media.
In effect, the Web unbundles advertising. Webvertising must provide real answers to real questions, not canned information; it must offer interactions that satisfy real needs, not blanket persuasions; it must create communities that actually speak to one another, not just content itself with aspirations. And these processes do not necessarily, or ideally, all take place together. Sites that provide information about a product's features and benefits have to be separated from those that attempt to satisfy consumers' aspirations by building a community around the brand for the like-minded to join. Both further distinguish themselves from sites that try to create a direct relationship between buyers and sellers, and from sites that take a multimedia approach to enhancing a brand's image.
The complete brand environment
Eventually, the various constituents of brand-building should logically recombine. Instead of an advertising campaign, the Web offers ways to build a complete brand environment - one which combines product information, a stylish image, community-building and a direct relationship to the producer, all packaged in a way that resonates with the values and style of the brand itself. But that is still a long way off for most brands, and not all products will need all of these constituent elements.In the meantime, would-be Web brand builders need to ask themselves what would do most to help sell their product now. More information about the product's technical features and the benefits of using it? A direct relationship between company and customer? Intimations that the product will help the consumer to join a community of attractive people? Or just some bright, breezy imagery to remind would-be buyers of the brand's emotional values? The following examples show how pushing the possibilities along only one of these dimensions can transform a brand.
Beer, chocolate and jeans
Carling lager is not, at first glance, the brand most likely to prosper on the Web. After all, putting screens- full of information about the brewing process on to the Web is unlikely to convince the lads to pour more lager down their necks. So Carling's Web site tries to build a community of lager drinkers, and it does so by focusing on the beer drinker's favourite pastime: football.Carling's ability to talk football is bolstered by the fact that it sponsors the Premier League, so it can get teams from the League to participate in its site. Indeed, the teams provide much of the information on the site, which is full of facts about players, results of games and news of the League; there's little mention of lager. Fans can swap football opinions in electronic discussion groups. They can also order football merchandise. The result is a Web site that identifies Carling with some of its drinkers' favourite pursuits.
Confectionery company Mars also decided to build community around shared interests with the Snickers site . As chocolate eaters are less easy to stereotype than lager drinkers, the company encourages them to define themselves. According to the developer, Hyperinteractive, 90% of the content for the site is generated by users submitting reviews and opinions. Most of the recent conversation concerned cinema and football, although the section of silly recipes (Snickers Kiev?!) was presumably part of the sponsor's 10%. Publication is speedy; once a visitor has sent an email about a movie or soccer game, for example, it's moderated and online within 30 minutes. Surprisingly, people seem quite willing to gather around a chocolate bar for a natter, and the discussion fora are relatively lively - even if the comments are glib.
Diesel and Levi's show the possibilities of the Web for building brand image. Both brands have focused much of their conventional advertising on creating a personality for their products. And both have tried to bring that personality to the Web. Levi's uses the Web as an extension of television advertising (it has a US site with different ad campaigns). The overall design maintains the style of the advertising: sinuous young jeans wearer arrives as if from outer space and causes jaws to drop with his sheer, surreal beauty. One of the attractions of the site is an introduction to the cool young models who play cool young Levi's wearers on the advertisements.
Diesel adds more irony to its site to appeal to a younger, hipper, more British audience. It promises "beautiful, dysfunctional cheerleaders", and illustrates the site with the same striking graphics and postmodern lounge lizards that populate its advertisements. Overall, the strength of Diesel's graphics makes it the more compelling site, which suggests a lesson for would-be image builders: speak loudly or not at all.
The total brand experience
Of all the constituents of brand building, though, image creation takes least advantage of the interactivity of the Web. Few sites have translated image into experience, so image building on the Web is still largely a passive experience. One of the sites that has gone the furthest toward interactivity is Tango, whose Web sites have offered bizarre interactive games in keeping with the orange drink's Monty Python-meets-Laurel and Hardy television advertising. Despite favourable reviews, the site has been allowed to languish and URLs are no longer placed in Tango ads in other media. If nothing else, measuring the payoffs of image building is extremely difficult, adding to the problems of justifying Web sites which try to do just that.Information-oriented sites, by contrast, automatically provide market research to those companies smart enough to gather it. By tracking the information that surfers request, companies can improve their knowledge of would-be customers' concerns. The most obvious candidates for information-oriented Web support are companies with complicated products. Computers and software, both of which are complicated, are obvious candidates for Web sites - and most high-tech firms already tell you everything you might want to know about their products via the Web.
But it's also possible to add information to a product that might not at first glance seem to call for it. When we at AKQA built a site for Durex condoms, we stressed information about sex. Today, smart sex is safer sex, and vice versa. So the Durex site is set up to answer questions about sexual health and contraception, often anonymously.
The site's sex counsellor receives around 30 emails a day. Answering questions via email is relatively cost-effective, and in the process of making people feel better informed about sex, Durex also makes them feel more comfortable with the brand. At the same time, the site also helps Durex become better informed about its customers; it has already received over 8,000 replies to a sex survey it carried out over the Web.
The classic customer-service site is Federal Express. Some 15,000 FedEx customers visit the site each day to locate parcels in transit with FedEx; type in your tracking number and the site queries FedEx's computers to find out where it is. FedEx wins three ways from the site.
It saves around US$2 million (£1.3 million) a year by getting customers to query the computer directly instead of telephoning a FedEx employee. By making its internal processes more visible, it boosts its reputation for quality. And it has improved the service itself: companies can reassure dubious customers that the cheque really is in the post by pointing them to the Web site.
BMW's Web site , another AKQA development, also focuses on customer service. It allows a customer to locate his local BMW dealer by typing in his postcode, and it searches BMW's nationwide list of used cars. Customers can also book a test drive or send off for brochures. BMW tracks the sales leads that the site generates; in the first few months of operation, sales of cars to custom-ers who came to BMW via the Web site more than repaid the investment required to create it.
At BMW, though, customer service doesn't stand alone. The site also has to maintain the car's luxury image, and to provide product details for a wide range of models. To do this it has tried to bring together on the site some of the other brand-building functions, to begin to create a total brand experience. As a start towards community-building, for instance, the site features competitions to win a day racing with BMW at Brands Hatch or at the British Touring Car Championship. Eventually, BMW hopes to expand the site into a complete environment for the BMW brand.
Using the Web - not vice versa
As the sheer diversity of the above examples shows, there's no single formula for a successful Web site. What successful sites do have in common, though, is that they focus on the brand, not on the Web.Executives often find the Web's vast possibilities seductive, and are tempted to stray from their own business into some form of publishing. Given that most publishers are themselves struggling to make sense of the economics of Web publishing, this can only lead to disappointment. Successful webvertisers, by contrast, have asked not what they can do on the Web, but what the Web can do for them - be it providing information, creating a relationship with the customer, building community or just boosting the brand's image.
And they have measured it. The interactivity of the Web offers more than just new ways of communicating a brand's own message. For those smart enough to listen - and it can be surprisingly hard to convince marketing executives to do so, given the assumption they've inherited from old media that brand building is an output-only exercise - interactivity provides a way of measuring customers' own expectations of the brand and the way they react to it. At the very least, this interaction can show whether or not a Web site is paying its way. More ambitiously, interactivity will make advertising an integral part of the products themselves; brand advertising and the experience of using the product will merge.
This change will require companies to define more clearly the values that underlie the brand, and to instill them throughout the firm - since everyone who interacts with a customer will effectively become part of the brand. But in approaching the Web, executives have to start asking the question that will remain at the top of their agendas throughout this transformation: what new capabilities and services will enhance the value of our branded product to our customers? That is the ultimate lesson of the Web. It's not what sounds good or looks cool that ultimately matters - it's what works.
Ajaz Ahmed is managing partner of AKQA, a communications company specialising in new media.