Online Branding
Online Branding
A key marketing
challenge in today’s multichannel, multi-device
world is the integration of
digital marketing
opportunities into the
traditional marketing
mix.
Leveraging the capabilities
of the Internet’s network
connectivity and
interactivity to drive
revenue is of paramount
importance to today's
marketer.
MKTG 101: Brands
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What is a brand?
Do we need brands?
Who creates brands?
How do you create a
brand?
• How do you value a
brand?
Branding in the 21st Century
brand immersion
• What is brand immersion?
• Provide and example of any
moment that you felt immersed
in a brand.
Branding in the 21st Century
• What makes a medium or environment
immersive?
Persistent
Interactive
Socially networked
Experiential
Emotional
Affective
What is this?
Immersion via Ambient Communication:
Festivals
Pub talk
Street stunts
Internet chat rooms
3 Main Drivers
• Communities
• Advergaming
• Integration
Fournier on brand community
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Business strategy
Exists to serve the people in it
Strong community = strong brand
Embrace conflict
Mass participation (not opinion leaders)
Online networks just one tool, not a
community strategy
• If done well, it can’t be controlled
Advergaming: turning “brick” brands digital
Why advergaming?
• Advergames blur the distinction between entertainment
and advertising.
– Benefit?
– Web audiences can be drawn in long enough for marketers to
deliver their messages.
– More improtantly, message appears „un-pushed“
• Advergaming used in conjunction with a competition for
prizes and product promotions stimulates a whole new
realm of peer-to-peer marketing.
– Benefit?
– A viral explosion occurs as users share the game competition
with friends and ultimately bring others into contact with your
brand.
What we know of the GameMarketing Link:
Games generate high degree of attention
Games generate comparatively long attention span
Games generate positive emotions which the player associates with the product /
brand
If additional information about the product / brand is offered, it will be received
favorably=> credible source!
 Games decrease the propensity for critical thinking during game-play: the player
will not work up counter-arguments against marketing propositions
 However: Marketing propositions will be remembered longer and in greater detail
if accompanied by hard data.
open questions
• Games as a vehicle for expression
– Relationship with joys of interaction, immersion and gameplay
– BUT do we forget the product? Neopets?
• Gameplay – advertising (tradeoff?)
– Is it possible for the message to get through?
In Sum:
to drive the brand…
…websites need to be more than a communication channel to customers. they
must be a proposition in their own right.
…websites must be an extension of the products and services that a brand
provides to its customers.
…marketers must understand that as soon as content becomes digital,
customers expect more from it.
…you have to allow for co-creation and create “Prosumers”.
The edge boundaries between content, advertising, and application have gone.
GROUP WORK: discuss
discuss
Identify your favorite immersive branded site
Analyze what makes it a powerful brand driver
Present three key learning points of your analysis
But brands are not just online…
• integration
Miller’s Man Laws
• A ridiculous invention
but one that obeys
the branding law of
the 21st century.
Extend Marketing Space
• Healthy Choice has used its online games
to drive people to supermarkets to actually
buy its products, by offering the chance for
customers to print "mystery coupons"
• A Hanes sweepstakes promoted the
apparel company's new "tagless" t-shirt by
using a tag as the virtual game piece:
"Lifting" it with the mouse revealed the
visitor's prize.
turning a digital brand physical
In the 21st century, this is what your
job is all about:
• Find ways to make your brand more experiential and
hence more memorable!
– careful spatial planning
– live, real-time, event-based nature of the brand interaction
• Shift consumers’ perception and practice of what
constitutes a marketing ‘space’.
– Immersion marketing seeks to achieve a much more proximal
relationship between consumers and brands.
• as theorists of the ‘experience economy’ put it:
– ‘the more effectively an experience engages the senses, the more
memorable it will be’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999: 59).
discuss
You have been hired to lead the strategy task force for
digital marketing at Buick. The marketing director is at
a loss because the brand seems to be losing ground
with the 18-35 year old demographic.
Buick
• On a conceptual level, what do you
suggest needs to be done.
• On a concrete level, develop a marketing
mix to achieve the objective of brand
renewal.