Looking for the Geo-Center of the Corporate Brands - July 2001

In my last article, I discussed the importance of logo for online brands and their strategic significance. In the last few months, with dot coms going bust one after the other, questions are doing the rounds about the viability and validity of web as a brand building media.

Despite the dot com projections crashing down, the Internet will keep evolving as a powerful medium to get your message across. And as things stand, in near future Internet might be the preferred medium to start the brand building exercise.

Even now, when a company comes into the people space and is able to raise some curiosity, the web present the most viable media where you look for information about it. A look at the website, forms an image in the mind of the visitor, the kind of brand it is or gonna be. These people might be reaching out to your brand in the virtual space but they are as real as flesh and blood. They include your present as well as potential customers, employees, partners, or even financiers. It's their first impression about your brand and it will influence all future decisions about that company.

Whether in the offline or on the web, the branding exercise begins with the first exposure and the very first impression it creates on the mind of the consumers. And brands are required to spend millions to erase that first impression by bombarding the consumers with image building advertising campaigns.

With more and more people getting online and the web providing access when and where one requires, it is increasingly becoming the preferred media for seeking information. It is now common place to find people flocking to the Yahoos and Googles to find information about a brand or company, which they might have come across somewhere. For despite its ubiquitous quality, Web is primarily the media where people come to seek unique and specific information, and not undiscriminated information, which they get from the more traditional media i.e. Print and Television. The tremendous success and popularity of the search engines bears testimony to the fact.

We have almost entered the age, where not having a web presence gives a company or an organization an image, of still being rooted in the industrial age. And what, if the company do have a web presence but its all blotched up. I suppose some self generated bad public relation. Whom will you blame for not putting your company's website in shape?

I believe in near futuer, websites will be at the centre of every corporate communication strategy and lifeline of corporate brands. An entity, which will drive the corporate identity, present a universal image and be the centre of communication with its different public. With email becoming the preferred mode of communication the world over, communication will become more and more dependent on the email id provided on your corporate website. A sales inquiry here, a job application there.

In fact, it's not a very pleasant time to be in if you don't have a good strategy. Badly served customer getting more aggrieved at the late reply to the inquiry email he shot to the company. We all along had the famed "the sun down policy" in the service sectors, wherein you should reply to a call before the sun goes down for the day.

It needs improvement. Baby! Its Internet age.