Branding, what is it?

It is the most important factor in positioning any business ahead of the pack.

It is the Holy Grail of all marketing programs.

It is why some people buy only Fords and others buy only Chevrolets or Hondas - and why those same people's children and grandchildren frequently buy only Fords or Chevrolets or Hondas.

It's the reason why the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel became, unrealistically enough, beloved icons to smokers and hot-button issues to anti-smoking crusaders.

Branding, it's made Harley-Davidson and Coca Cola the best known trademarks on earth.

More important to those of us who don't own and operate internationally branded companies like IBM, FedEx and eBay, successfully establishing a brand - even in a limited way - can substantially help reduce our dependence on search engines to generate orders.

To be truthful, branding an online business is more difficult than doing the same thing for a brick-and-mortar company. The reason is inherent in the way the Web works - to successfully establish a brand on the Web, you must embed your address as well as your name in the minds of customers and prospective customers.

Consider Henry Ford sitting in his little - by auto exec standards - office hanging over the factory floor at River Rogue. What does he do to brand his new car company? He buys magazine ads, he buys billboards, he insists his dealers make the Ford name and logo the most prominent element on their signs, newspaper ads, and even their business cards.

One thing he doesn't concern himself with is promoting his address or that of his dealers. If people want a Ford car they will probably already have seen the big, blue, oval Ford logo looming over a dealership. If not, they'll find a dealer in the Yellow Pages.

Things aren't that simple on the Web. There's all those little suffixes -- .com, .net, .info, .org, .tv, etc. - to make things difficult.

Forget Henry Ford for a moment. Think about Jeff Bezos instead. It's 1993 and he's deep in discussions about how to best brand his soon-to-launch online bookstore. Various ideas are put forward, discussed, and accepted or rejected. One factor is not debated: The brand that will be seared into consumer consciousness will not be Amazon, it will be Amazon.com.

Mr. Bezos and his associates wanted to make sure that as many people as possible reached their store by typing www.amazon.com into their browser's address line. They didn't want consumers to type "Amazon" into a search engine. That would produce all kinds of returns that had nothing to do with books.

OK, but how many people looking for a copy of "The World According to Garp" would just type "Amazon" into a search engine? Wouldn't they search for "Amazon books?" Probably they would - and they'd get returns that included thousands of pages related to books about the Amazon River. Even worse, they'd probably get links to sharp operators trying to hitch a free ride on Amazon.com's multimillion-dollar marketing campaign by putting up sites with names like "amazonbookstoo.net" or "amazonbookstore.com" or "amazononlinebooks.com."

No, the founders of Amazon well understood that the brand they had to establish was Amazon.com.

The lesson here is simplicity itself, the more direct the line between Point A (a customer) and Point B (your business), the less likely the possibility the customer will be hijacked by one of your competitors along the way.

A quick example, we buy all of our blank DVDs and CDs from a company called Americal. Whenever we need more, we type Americal.com into the browser address line and place the order. (we could use a bookmark, but we rarely bother.) What if Americal.com hadn't established its brand with us? We'd have to do a search and would most likely never find them again.

By having a brand name and web address that we can remember, Americal gets all our business regardless of whether they turn up on search engine return page 1 or page 100. Since we're never exposed to any competitors' sites, they get our business even if another site happens to be offering a 75 percent discount that day.

Establishing a brand isn't something that happens overnight. Somewhat like the multiplication table or the alphabet, the name and domain address of your company drift into people's memories through frequent repetition. In terms of the Web, that means that the more page impressions of your name and domain people see, the more likely they are to remember you.

This leads to a list of "dos" that seem basic, but are often overlooked.

-- Do incorporate both the name of your company and its Web address into a distinctive, but easily readable logo.

-- Do display the full name of your site (xyz-usa.com) and/or your logo prominently on each and every page of your site.

-- Do work your company name and domain address into the text on your site wherever appropriate and try to tie it into your site's content. If you sell Audio DVDs, for example, instead of an "About Us" page that says "We believe Audio DVDs are the future of music … ", consider saying "Here at xyz-us.com, we believe Audio DVDs are the future of music …"

-- Do try to your integrate your site's name and domain into the anchor text on your incoming links.

-- Do make sure your site's name, address and a blurb telling what you do is included in every communication you send in response to general inquiries and tech-support requests. Surprisingly, many companies don't put their names and addresses in the text of their e-mails. Haven't we all received e-mails something like this?

Dear Customer.

Thanks for your interest. At the current time, 27 recording companies are supporting the Audio DVD format.

Brad.

You can of course pick the address out of the message header, but you probably won't. You'll either hit "reply" to respond to "Brad." Or you'll consider your question answered and delete the message. In either case, you have not been exposed to "xyz-us.com's" name and address and the exchange of posts hasn't done a thing to further xyz's branding efforts.

If you haven't done so yet, use your e-mail program to create an automatic signature that contains your site name, address, and a brief - five-to-eight word - description of what you do.

Dear Customer.

Thanks for your interest. At the current time, 27 recording companies are supporting the Audio DVD format.

Brad.
xyz-us.com, #1 in Audio DVD Sales

Things like phone numbers, snail-mail addresses, and hot links to your site are optional (though we would recommend against hot links since many anti-spam programs assume messages with links are junk.)

And, finally, let's bring Henry Ford back for a moment -

Not that many decades ago -- before Chrysler was thrown under the Mercedes bus by a less-than-stellar management team and GM and Ford were driven to the brink of bankruptcy by equally dismal decision makers - there was something known as the "Big Three auto makers."

The "Big Three" was the world General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler inhabited. It was their 'hood. And the fact that it was perceived as a good neighborhood -- the best neighborhood, actually - is one of the reasons why the Big Three lived long and prospered while the Studebakers and American Motors and Packards of the less-than-best neighborhoods withered and died.

Which brings up one of the key elements of branding: Businesses are judged by the company they keep.

In the brick-and-mortar world, the quality of the brand is impacted - positively or negatively - by the nature of the media they advertise in and the ability of the people who produce those ads.

On the Web, one of the crucial factors that defines your brand to the public and supports your brand recognition is the quality, relevancy, and freshness of the sites you exchange links with.

Make no mistake about it, links are the currency of the World Wide Web - always have been and almost certainly always will be. They are the roadmap to cyberspace - the only roadmap to cyberspace - and a page filled with dead links or links that lead people where they really would rather not go (obsolete or irrelevant sites) will severely and negatively effect your brand image.

Keeping your links on the internet high road, never detouring through bad neighborhoods, avoiding the temptations of unethical shortcuts, and following linking guidelines similar to those we use at LinksManager are some of the best things you can do to enhance your brand's image with the holy trinity of customers, potential customers, and search engines.

Discuss this article in the LinkPartners.com Discussion Forums