Wednesday, January 06, 2010

What’s Your Brand’s Major Hurdle and What Can You Do About It?

Every brand has challenges. The best brands—actually, the people behind the best brands—know this, identify the challenges, and come up with solutions to at least minimize them and at best overcome them. Mediocre brands endure a perennial state of a problem’s existing but being ignored in the hopes it will somehow take care of itself or that people—read, audiences—won’t mind too much.

When a brand problem occurs on its public-facing website, it’s a big deal because websites obviously represent such a crucial touchpoint. Following are issues on all too many brand websites:

• failure to state up front what the brand or company is and does, and/or to explain this enough,
• insistence on brand features to the exclusion of benefits,
• presenting in a bland, cold, or otherwise unappealing tone,
• overestimation of the amount of time users want to spend on the site,
• failure to address audiences’ needs, manifested in non-user-centric navigation and/or site behaviour, aka ...
• designing the site according to internal understanding of the brand/company and not according to what audiences want to learn and find.

All of these mistakes are very easy to make, and again, they’re commonly allowed to persist because they’re “not dealbreakers.” Says who? Certainly not the visitors who walk away because of them, since they’re not talking—they’re gone.

Does your website suffer from any of them? We’ll be reviewing ours over the next few months to see where we can improve (do let us know if you have suggestions), but in the meantime, here are a couple of examples of brands that have taken the challenge of confronting—and we think, solving—a major issue they faced.

Brand: Bookriff (currently in closed BETA)
Challenge: Convey a very cool but rather complicated idea as simply as possible so visitors don’t lose interest/get confused/feel it’s too complicated and navigate away from the site.
Solution: Main benefit is written in bold—“build your own book”—with clear explanatory text right below. But most importantly, they include a prominent link to a high-quality how-to video for visitors who would rather learn audio-visually, as well as a link allowing them to try out the concept. We’re excited about Bookriff!

Brand: VisionCritical
Challenge: Bring humanity, energy, and warmth to what could be a very cold, impersonal site (VisionCritical is an online panel research and interactive technology company). Market research sites are often plagued by jargon and boring language.
Solution: On balance, ambitious and interesting copy and content. Lots and lots of video with employees talking like people really do (not canned) about what moves them and excites them. Sometimes the language gets carried away, but for the most part it’s way, way above average for its sector. Take the following for example:

With Vision Critical, grassroots insight is always on, poised to deliver when you need it. Discover and amplify what moves your biggest fans. Find out what your customers want right now. Find out what little touches keep them loyal. See trendsetting customers for what they are: a wealth of winning strategy waiting to be tapped.

Our interactive technology, strategic research and global panels turn customer groundswell into authentic, resonant brands that move with confidence.

Right now.

Because when your customers take the lead, so does your brand.

What comes across with VisionCritical is passion—and that’s a huge achievement considering how dryly the brand could have come across with another treatment. Another nice touch is their interview series: check one out at http://j.mp/6atLaN

So what’s your branding challenge?

And what will you do about it?