Rebranding Branding - The Distility Blog

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

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

Together they give us a positioning statement such as the one I've intuited for the Motorola Droid:

For the technology leader who needs the latest and greatest device, the Motorola Droid is the iphone killer, with a giant screen and the ability to run multiple applications with ease.

This week, I'd like to breakdown the statement components, starting with...

The customer
Of course it all starts with getting the customer right! And this is where all too often it goes wrong, especially in B2B branding, where targeting a job title is very helpful.

Can you describe the customer?
Ask yourself, "How well does your firm know the customer?"

Can your team describe the customer clearly with a good sense of their age, education, aspirations and pains? Can you easily find real examples of your "typical" customer? You may not have the budget of Motorola, but that doesn't excuse your team from doing their homework.

Does the customer have a pain or desire you resolve?
Although the target customer's pain or desire is not explicitly mentioned in the positioning statement, it is very important that it exist. A customer that has no pain or desire for your solution is the wrong customer. A vegan is not a good target customer for a brand that is made out of meat. In the case of the Motorola Droid, they know that iphone super-users can be pained by the lack of multi-tasking. They know that while it isn't a pain, a larger screen is something they desire.

Are you really sure?
Ask your team: "Have we missed the blindingly obvious?" For instance, if you are developing a solution for routine laboratory analysis, is the primary target audience the laboratory technician who uses the solution? Or is it the laboratory manager who makes the buying decision? If you aren't sure, you must figure it out before you do any further branding.

What about Motorola? They have targeted a tiny market - disaffected iPhone users. Why wouldn't they copy Apple? After all, when Apple introduced the iPhone, they originally took great pains to sell it as a... phone. Apple didn't want to scare people away by being technologic out the gate. But in the case of the Droid, the choice of this niche customer was conscientious and in keeping with technology marketing best practices when introducing a cutting edge device in a highly competitive market - they targeted the early-adopters, the super influencers. And since - secretly - Motorola knows it can't kill the iPhone, it is actually trying to make the early adopters evangelists for the Droid brand, effectively pushing the desirability of Blackberry, Palm, Windows, Nokia and others down in the mind of the market.

It is key to remember that positioning must be adaptive. Unlike a brand promise or personality which should be designed to endure, positioning should change as it needs in reaction to, and anticipation of changes with the customers, competitors, and the brand's own capabilities. Motorola will soon expand its positioning to bring more customers into the fold.

 

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