What is digital branding?

A traditional view of branding says that a brand is: ‘Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers’ (American Marketing Association Dictionary, 2013). In fact, the word brand is derived from the Old Norse word brandr, meaning ‘to burn’, and was used in reference to marking cattle by burning the owner’s brand onto them. This idea of branding has been developed over the years to factor in a far more extensive set of considerations. As well as this idea of visual identity we may also consider the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, experiences, beliefs, attitudes and so on that are associated with a brand. This set of considerations builds up our brand image, and we may also talk about our experience of a brand as our brand experience. The best way of thinking about it, in my opinion, is that brand is the personality of something.

How digital has changed branding

If you could only get a feel for someone’s personality by them telling you things about themselves, we may end up with a very shallow understanding of them. We may also have difficulty believing in the personality that has been constructed – and we may start to question the motivations behind what they are telling us about themselves. That is exactly the situation of commercial branding that uses broadcast channels such as TV. A personality is sculpted and then we are told what the personality is. We don’t get to discuss, engage with and really understand the true personality.

Digital media now means, however, that the conversation is no longer one way. I can challenge, ask questions and develop a truer picture of the brand. I can see through a sculpted brand and start to see it for what it truly is. This can be a scary thing for many traditional brands. It can also be a huge opportunity.

Global soapbox

If brand is essentially the personality of something, digital media gives us the ability and opportunity to understand the true personality of something. We can then use that understanding to help guide us in our decision-making processes.

This is a great opportunity from a customer point of view. For example, it means that instead of being put on hold for an hour when phoning a call centre and having little choice but to tolerate it, I can now go straight to one of many social media channels and make my frustrations very clear and very visible. I now have a global soapbox with access to all of the other potential customers out there, and I can impact a global organization’s brand in a way that was not possible before (or, at least, was incredibly difficult). That highly visible complaint then becomes part of other people’s brand perception (fairly or not) and suddenly the years of building a brand can be tumbled very quickly. This is a very much changed environment for businesses to operate in – if they ignore this change then it can lead to problems.

This ability to engage with and research into a brand can also be looked at from an even simpler point of view. Perhaps I am researching buying a car or a B2B service. I can now do a lot of research and inform my decision before I speak to the car dealership or service vendor. When I do make this final step I am far more informed and have developed a fairly in-depth perception of the brand before I engage directly with them. In fact, from information I glean online I may have opted out from even considering certain brands. That information may have been on a third party website in the form of a review or comment from someone I have never met, but I may trust it over the voice of the brand itself.

Social media fail

This fast-changing environment and the slow pace of businesses to adapt to it is leading the social media disaster stories that we see on a daily basis on the internet. Some of those stories will be highlighted later in the post in order to see what we can learn from them, but they generally have a number of things in common. Most social media disasters demonstrate a lack of knowledge of how to practically use a particular social media strategy, or show a belief that the brand can manipulate the channel in some way and get away from this need for authenticity and transparency. The other common theme is that of failing to understand the changed role of the brand in this two-way conversation. All of these themes will be explored in Part Two when we look at social media.

Traditional brand metrics

Traditionally, brand has been measured by asking questions and trying to judge what someone thinks of a brand, and trying to work out what this means in regard to potential sales.

There is a wide range of different ways of looking at this, but generally we would take some sort of sample survey of our audience and see what their attitudes were before and after exposure to some form of marketing. This survey would ask a range of questions, and there are lots of different approaches, but fundamentally we would look to answer the following questions:

• Are you aware of the brand?
• Do you like the brand?
• Do you intend to buy the brand?
• If you have purchased, do you intend to do it again?

Essentially we are assuming that if we can get more people to answer positively to each of these questions, we are likely to get more sales.

Sum of all experiences

Essentially, digital branding is the personality of our organization, service or product created by the sum of all experiences that an individual has with that brand. This still includes things such as visual identity, but now also includes much more important and influential touchpoints such as social media interactions and online reviews. Your logo may make you recognizable, but it is your overall brand that decides what I remember you for.

Clarifying touchpoints

If we are defining digital branding as the sum of all experiences that an individual has with a brand, it seems straightforward to use the term ‘touchpoint’ to refer to one of these experiences (as we already have done). We do need to be careful, however, of the definition of a touchpoint. A touchpoint is often interpreted as some sort of engagement or experience with a marketing channel created by the brand. This idea of a marketing channel can be expanded to include everything from packaging to telephone calls. Clarification is needed, though, when we go beyond these brand-controlled experiences to things like word of mouth and evaluating social media strategy. Very often these types of touchpoints will have no involvement with the brand at all, for example when a consumer reads an online review. Yet this is still a touchpoint and probably one of the most important of all touchpoints.