The brand as a social benchmark
The development of the internet since its early days has seen a constant redefining of the role of businesses and brands on it. To begin with, on a web in which content was still created by a few, brands’ thinking was to be there so as to be found, in the same way as somebody who places an advertisement or prints a leaflet. Corporate web pages were either a way of showing how modern the company was, or were a way to impress, to give the impression that the company was bigger than it really was, an approach based on a mistaken comparison with the way that television works.
The next phase saw more and more brands attracted by transactionality: the idea that the web was a bidirectional environment in which users could buy things prompted many companies to move into e-commerce, setting up virtual shops to sell their goods. The idea makes sense, but it meant dealing with a slow take off due to the public’s reluctance to embrace online shipping, along with logistics problems of all kinds, channel conflicts, security, and any number of related problems.
Today, brands’ presence on the web responds to different needs. Obviously, they have to be there, but not just for the sake of being there, but also as a way of creating value for the brand. Selling is also an option, but sales now respond to notably different rules.
The progressive importance of search engines has led brands to realize that they now have to compete for visibility, to show up in searches based on key words defining what they do. Indexing has become a nightmare for many brands, while the evidence shows that once a few basic rules have been understood, most of them common sense and that are rapidly adjusting to the times we live in (with the exception of a few monopolistic tendencies), optimizing one’s presence on search engines is more and more about how relevant a brand is to users.
Increasingly, the value that the web can offer a brand is based on its ability to establish it as what we might call a social benchmark. A web site is of no use unless it is socially relevant, if it is not constantly creating content, and if users do not reference that content as it is created, building conversations around the brand and its market sector in the process. A brand cannot survive by remaining static, because the web demands dynamism, the ability to answer questions, to provide a service, and to interact, to generate communities; and those communities do not need to be large: in the case of most brands, it makes no sense whatsoever to have some vast community attached to it.
The idea is that only those who need to be involved are members of the community, and their participation needs to be organized around the brand in such a way that there is a clear value proposition from being part of it. Anybody who participates in a brand community within a product category, whether occasionally or habitually, ends up associating it with a value based on its social benchmark, and which, in the final analysis, will positively influence their decision to buy at some stage.
There are many factors at play in making a brand a social benchmark, and a web presence is just one of them. It’s not about having the right people developing your web presence, so much as the whole company thinking in terms of the web. More and more companies need to move onto the web. Information about the product or service needs to be accessible online, and to be permanently updated, while directors need to be seen as benchmarks in the company’s sphere of activity, and be vocal proponents of the web. Everybody in the company needs to display a vocation for communication, which in turn must be transparent, while the relationship between brand and user must be carried out along sustainable principles. The web is shifting from being just one aspect of business activity to being the mirror for all activities. How many brands do you know whose web presence reflects this approach?
(En español, aquí)
