Rogier Bikker - Articles

Eyeballs don’t equal sales

Because online media consumption is skyrocketing it is no wonder that brands are eagerly looking for the most effective ways to spend their money online. ¹ But reaching customers online isn’t that easy, unless you’re Avril Lavigne it’s unlikely that a brand reaches over a 100 million views on Youtube ², let alone a brands’ website. Brands should realize that eyeballs don’t equal sales, and a viral video or campaign micro-site doesn’t translate directly into loyal customers. ³

In context

Let’s first take a look at the context of brand awareness. Brand awareness is seen as the foundation of a brands’ equity model with all other brand objectives build on top of it, as shown in the image below. ⁴. Although brand equity is intangible, it is the primary source of competitive advantage and future earnings. ⁵ As said, brand awareness is the foundation; it’s the level of brand recognition that consumers have of a particular brand and its specific product category. ⁶ There are 3 common ways to measure brand awareness: top of mind (i.e. first brand recalled in a product category), spontaneous (i.e. unprompted recall of the brand name) and aided awareness (i.e. recognition of the brand name when prompted). ⁷

Model as defined by SMART ⁸ and photo by mleak from Flickr.

Traditional methods

Event sponsorships and billboard advertising are common offline ways to improve brand awareness. ⁹ But those traditional media are often based on push rather then pull marketing. They are about transactions of static messages through a set of touch points to a pre-defined target group. But this simply doesn’t apply anymore, or at least not in the online world. According to John Grant, author of 4 successful books on new marketing, brand building should be about building authentic relationships through dynamic experiences created by an engaged community. ¹⁰ The internet is the perfect platform to facilitate this because it’s a pull medium that allows two way symmetric communication. In other words; brands and customers have the ability to interact with each other . ¹¹

Cool micro-sites

Creating online brand awareness is a whole different ball game then creating brand awareness in the real world. Many brands rely on so called campaign micro-sites created with one clear marketing message and call to action. ¹² The question is whether creating multiple websites for one brand or company is the right way to go. Nick Holmes a Court from online influence agency Shiftedpixels argues that “Wanting to cram everything you provide into one website aimed at every interested audience only creates clutter and confusion. […] A campaign or brand-specific alternative marketing site gets right to the point…”.¹³ He doesn’t seem to be the only one agreeing on this. A 2007 survey conducted by MarketingSherpa under experienced viral marketers shows that ‘cool micro-sites’ are the number 1 viral marketing tactic for reaching great results, as shown below. ¹⁴

Start committing

But the problem with those micro-sites is that there often a translation of the offline push-based campaigns and fall short in creating a two-way conversation between costumers and brands. In order to truly make potential customers aware of a brand and turn these customers into loyal ambassadors, brands should stop campaigning and start committing, says Paul Isakson, strategic planner at space150. He states that “Campaigning is about changing your core brand message to fit what you think people need or want to hear today so that they buy your product. Where as committing is about building your brand on core principles that never change. […] Start looking at your marketing as a progressive story instead of quarterly campaigns.”. ¹⁵ David Armano, VP of Critical Mass, agrees that “…the internet is littered with thousands of them [micro-sites], and the majority are either promotional in nature, designed to win awards vs. serving up value or simply provide no incentive to ever return to them. […] The reason micro-sites have come under fire is because amateurs have provided more compelling experiences in many ways. […] If you Google a product name, it’s not uncommon to come across a blog which has reviewed that product and is ranked higher than the professionally produced micro-site.”. ¹⁶

The prosumer

David Armano argues that micro-sites provide us with a lot of bells and whistles, but don’t reward us for our time. This reminded me of the term prosumer, a portmanteau of producer/professional and consumer, coined by futurist Alvin Toffler in 1980. ¹⁷ This notion of consumers becoming producers has proved itself with the current web 2.0 trend, over 25 years later. The web is becoming a matter of interacting, combining, remixing, uploading, changing and customizing, all done for free by regular consumers turned prosumers. ¹⁸ Online based start-ups without brick and mortar stores are on the front line of these trends and create more social and open websites. At the same time offline corporations have a hard time catching up and are worrying about their online branding ¹⁹ and tend to stick to micro-sites instead.

Merge!

The point is that the web is becoming more social and open ²⁰ and micro-sites in their current form are missing the bandwagon if they keep providing closed individual experiences ²¹. Micro-sites in their current form may be the number one viral marketing tactic in 2007 ²², that doesn’t mean this will be best tactic in the online landscape of the future. When it comes to creating online brand awareness, my opinion is that the experiences delivered on micro-sites need to merge with the social and open characteristics of web 2.0. And thus using the best of both worlds in the quest to ultimate online brand awareness.

This article was written for my study Communication and Multimedia design at the Rotterdam University. Being quite new to the subject of online brand awareness, I would love to hear any comments regarding the topic. You can leave a comment below the list of references.

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