Rebranding Branding - The Distility Blog

It is time once again explore the absolutely fascinating subjects of brand and brand strategy. We'll pick up our conversation again with some useful definitions.

Brand. Your company's brand can be thought of as its image in the collective mind of the marketplace - its personality, promise, and position as perceived by your customers and potential customers. Even if you haven't done anything about your brand, you have one. It might be minimal, but it is there. Just as the productivity gurus tell us that not making a decision is a decision in itself, not purposely developing a brand still leaves you with a brand. Your existing brand is influenced by the sum of your public communications - sales calls, web content, emails - plus whatever other material is out there, including press coverage, customer reviews, and competitor propaganda. Obviously your customers won't have read every scrap of information available to them about your company and your product, but what is out there is all they have to go on. They aren't swayed by your good intentions or the content still sitting on your editorial calendar, waiting to be created and released.

Another way of looking at this is to say that your brand is rooted in the past. It is the sum total of all the impressions the public has formed of you up until this moment.

Brand Strategy. Your brand strategy, on the other hand, is all about the future. A brand strategy encompasses aspirational notions of what you would like the marketplace to think of your company. So brand strategy leads, and if it's effective, brand follows. Brand strategy is difficult to do because it must accomplish the trick of being authentic and enduring while at the same time serving your business strategy, which is likely way out in front of the market and will certainly change over time. As brand technologists, we love these sorts of problems, because they cut straight to the core of what a business is all about and solving them tends to require a lot of exciting new thinking. Also, solving these problems keeps us very busy, professionally speaking, which we like a lot.

This is why it's important to know that the Distility 1day1brand workflow won't instantly change your public brand. What it will do is create an internal brand for your employees, and it will also create a brand strategy: a vision that is authentic and compelling and supports your business goals, something that can guide your communications going forward, including design, message, and customer interactions.

For our next post, we'll bring SEO back into the picture and fit it all together.

In our first post on SEO and Branding, we explored how the competing demands of search engine optimization (SEO) and brand strategy can make decisions like naming rather difficult. Here is the basic problem: core branding principles tell us that when naming a company or product, go unique or go home. But some basic mechanics of search engine optimization - having key words in your domain name, content, and incoming links - favour the plain English approach.

On other words, a rose by any other name might smell as sweet but would be impossible to find on Google. 

Here are a few options to help you be in two places at once, along with the pros and cons of each approach.

The do them both strategy. This one may be hard to swallow, because when you've found the perfect company name, you want to have the nice clean URL to go with it. If your new company name is Rawsome Corp., then you want to put Rawsome.com on every business card. But if your company sells deodorant, then RawsomeDeodorant.com is a much better domain name, because it contains what is probably your top keyword. All other things being equal (that is, content, incoming links, SEO hygiene) RawsomeDeodorant.com will rank better than Rawsome.com on any search containing the word deodorant. All you have to do now is put a 301 redirect from Rawsome.com to RawsomeDeodorant.com so that anyone who attempts the obvious won't be left staring at an error page. For this strategy to work, however, it's vital that you use the longer domain name as your main URL. That's the one that will have all the content you want to rank for. If you just put everything on Rawsome.com you get none of the advantages of having the keyword in your domain name.

Pros: Instant Google juice. If your marketing strategy relies heavily on drawing organic search traffic from people researching their deodorant choices, then it may well be worth it to go with the longer name.

Cons: You better be damned sure that you are happy to be in the deodorant business. If, on the other hand, your business strategy and your brand strategy both tell you that long term you want to branch into shampoo and conditioner, then you have a problem. Don't let a short term SEO advantage drive your long term brand strategy.

The plum pudding strategy. A sneaky way to avoid having to choose between plain language and unique names is to embed a prime keyword within your unique name. If your company sells ice, then a name that is unique but contains the word ice within it - say, NicelyDuzIt (come on, this is an example, you can't expect me to come up with names that are actually appealing) - might actually offer some SEO advantages. And hey, if your company eventually branches out from ice into acne medication, NicelyDuzIt.com is already optimized.

Pros: No awkward gluing together of words.

Cons: The temptation to force a keyword into your brand name can result in some pretty terrible brand names. See: NicelyDuzIt.

The don't sweat it strategy.Here's the thing: If your marketing strategy doesn't depend heavily on organic search traffic, then just stick with finding a name that is unique and appealing, and don't worry about the SEO implications. Right now there seems to be a blind rush to embrace SEO as a core marketing strategy. Unfortunately, this is often the case even for companies and products where an inbound marketing strategy makes no sense. If you serve a small, well-defined market where it is possible to easily find your customers, then put all your energy into that. If you have the resources and pocketbook of Procter & Gamble, and you can buy all the attention you want, then have at it, Mr Fancypants. An inbound strategy is great for when your customers want to find you and your business model doesn't support or require a high touch sales model.

Pros: You don't have to worry about SEO now.

Cons: You may have to worry about SEO later, in which case you have some painful choices to make.

So, as you have probably guessed already, there is no single answer to the SEO / brand debate, unless you count "it depends" as a single answer. The choice must be made in the context of overall brand strategy and business strategy. In the mean time, you can fill out our Are You Ready? qualification questionnaire to see if your company would be a good candidate to have Distility help you sort through these difficult brand strategy decisions.

If you have a bit more patience, stick around for the next post in this series, wherein I explore the deeper connections between brand and SEO.

Pete Kloppenburg

Director of Marketing 

Brand has been an important business tool and concept for more than a century. Search engine optimization (SEO), on the other hand, has been a serious concern for scarcely a dozen years. So what's the relationship between the two? This is a surprisingly deep question, so we'll devote a number of blog posts to exploring it.

At one level, SEO and brand are closely related. Brand marketing can be seen as a way of attracting attention to your company that defines it in ways that are authentic and compelling. SEO can be defined as a way of attracting traffic to your web site based on compelling, relevant content. So those are complementary things, right? Good branding supports good SEO, and vice versa, it's tempting to conclude.

Except that when you dig a little deeper, you find that the two are often in conflict. Consider naming, the topic of today's post: the question of naming a new product or business concept. The classic branding approach to naming is to find a trademarkable name that is unique, ownable, memorable, and reflects the personality of the company. One thing you cannot do is pick a descriptive name: that is, something in plain English. Descriptive names cannot be protected with a trademark, and establishing a defensible trademark is one of the prime objectives of branding.

But for SEO purposes, a descriptive name in plain English is far superior. Why? Let's explore an example.

Imagine your company has developed a completely new technology for measuring and improving software usability. Now imagine that you've engaged a branding agency, and that agency has delivered a unique trademarkable name for you: "Usabilification"

[Full disclosure: This word was actually coined by English professor Randy Harris, with whom I had the privilege of studying. Go ahead and Google it - I got one hit, and it's from a 15 year old talk he did with that title. Now I've probably gone and ruined it and added a second result. And yes, the name is entirely ironic - Randy is not only brilliant, but witty as hell too.]

So great - you can go and buy the domain usabilification.com, register the trademark, design a great swoopy logo and print the business cards. Here's the problem, though: nobody has ever heard of "usabilification" (other than my former classmates), so nobody will ever Google it. If they did, you'd rank #1, count on it, but #1 on a search term with approximately zero searches per month, give or take a few.

So to get some SEO juice, you will need to fill your site with a lot of terms that do get searched on, things like "usability" and "tool". But by hitching your wagon to "usabilification", you've missed out on some great SEO opportunities.

The domain name itself. As this post on keywords in domain names from SEOmoz points out, having one or two important keywords right in your domain name gives you instant Google juice - before you even start adding content, you'll be scoring well with Google's search algorithms.

Internal keyword frequency. Your website will probably mention your product name more than once, it's fair to say. If every time you mention it, you've got a made up word like "usabilification", you're simply improving your rank with a search term nobody uses. On the other hand, if your product name includes one or two keywords, every mention and every internal link will boost your SEO strength.

Incoming links. Probably the single most powerful way to boost your Google ranking is to get a lot of links from high quality websites - popular blogs, online newspapers and the like. But not all links are created equal: a link that includes the relevant keyword will deliver more SEO mojo than a link that says click here. Most likely those referring websites will have your product name as the anchor text. So if your product name has the keywords built right into it, then the incoming links will contribute even more to boosting your search engine ranking.

So, that means forget about unique, memorable, and trademarkable? No, all that is still important - you want to build a global brand for the ages still, right?

There are different ways to handle the naming challenge that make for a good brand with good SEO characteristics, but that's for another post.

Posted by Pete Kloppenburg 
Director of Marketing

Branding is ill-defined, usually vacuous, often expensive and totally unpredictable – Seth Godin in Seth's Blog

Incomprehensible Voodoo – Guy Kawasaki in The Art of the Start

We are brand technologists. We love branding and believe in it. But we are here to say that branding is broken. 

Why would we say this? Brands seem bigger than ever. Everywhere we look, we see brands. Brand talk has hit the mainstream. We talk about personal brands, political brands, national brands - everything is a brand and every schoolchild a brand expert.

But branding - the creation and development of brands - is still, as it is most often practiced, a complete and utter mess. Branding is more occult than voodoo, more expensive than yachting, and more dangerous than lawn darts. Branding is slower than rust, more frustrating than roadwork, and has a return on investment somewhat less measurable than prayer. Big agency-style branding is the product of a time when business moved slowly, budgets were big, and television was an exciting new medium. And do-it-yourself branding can be a grand adventure, like going for a drive in the country with no map and a quarter tank of gas. 

But we know there is a better way. Branding can be fast and agile, keeping pace with today's exhilarating speed of business. A good branding process builds on what your team already knows and then helps them clear away the muck of fuzzy thinking to achieve an exciting new understanding. Branding can fit within your schedule and make excellent use of your time, leaving you energized instead of exhausted. When you create or redefine a brand, you can and should see value and progress at every step of the way. Just as your brand must work across all your communications channels to deliver amazing communications, your branding partner should work comfortably with your internal resources and your outside marketing partners to deliver a great service with no gaps or overlaps. Your brand should go beyond a name and a design to encompass a clear, coherent, compelling strategy that has the strength and flexibility to take you wherever you choose to go.

We come not to bury branding but to raise it, up to where it can work with the same flexibility, innovation and energy that you do. Long live the New Brand Age. 

Are you with us? Let us know below. 

I'm pretty blown away by the Adage.com interview with P&G CEO Bob McDonald. His thoughts on brand strategy are in perfectly sync with those of Lisa Bradner. Lisa is the author of Forrester's "Adaptive Brand Marketing" we're big fans of hers. McDonald is taking it to another level here, and his talk about "visualization" and "virtualization" makes me weak in the knees.

Here are some excerpts from the full interview.

You start with the idea now before you even think about a medium, and you take the idea, which is rooted in consumer insight, and only then do you figure out how to use the media, and you use every medium. And then what the marketer needs to be able to do is be able to let go ... And the best ideas were like this warden of the Great Australian Reef, where, rather than running a tourism campaign, the government decided to put a want ad in several papers around the world for a warden for the Australian reef. And they asked for videos, which is another example of what we're doing. And they let it go. So you had this guy in an icebreaker in Greenland talking about how he was the best guy. Another [takeaway] was the ubiquity of social media and how an idea can take off and you don't have to pay for it. What I worry about is that it democratizes scale. It allows the little guy to get scale almost instantaneously. And we've got to make sure we don't give up that opportunity. That's why we're talking about transforming the company through digitization, visualization, virtualization. And that's my job, which is to change the way we work by digitizing the entire company end to end. 

Many analysts covering our company think size is a detriment. They believe in the law of big numbers -- the larger you get, the harder it is to deliver the same percentage growth. Size doesn't matter. What matters is turning size into scale and turning that scale into accelerated growth.

[Another strategy is] simplification. The natural tendency of a company is to become bureaucratic, hierarchical and slow-moving. We're trying to [combat] that through the removal of layers and hierarchy and the use of technology, which frankly fits my engineering background and the fact that I studied computer science. ... We're going to use technology to make this company operate like a $10 billion company rather than an $80 billion one.

In the full interview McDonald talks about the differences between himself and his legendary predecessor, and the awesome challenges facing P&G on the global stage.

Thanks AdAge! 

It is to let you know that big changes are afoot...

> aXle Branding has transformed into a new breed of branding firm - one with a technology twist. Our first patent for a brand development business method and software system is being prepared as you read this.

> MaRS, Toronto's foremost technology center and incubator, invited us into their program. We moved in two months ago.

> We've renamed the company "Distility" because we need a trademark that was unique worldwide.

> We're still working the kinks out of this site (www.distility.com) and you can reach us at 416-413-7777 (lucky sevens!)

If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are a client, friend, partner, member of the team, or one of the many people who were so gracious to be interviewed for our research regarding this transformation. Thank you so much for your support.

Please keep in touch. If you want to be kept in the loop, subscribe to our blog (on the upper left).

All the very best,

 - Axle

 

1. Your target customer
2. Their need
3. Their frame of reference
4. Your point of difference(s)
5. Your reason(s) to believe

The SMS to Toast feature has still got us wondering... how do they do it?