4 Create a new digital brand
It may be necessary to create an entirely new digital brand if the existing offline brand
has negative connotations or is too traditional for the new medium. An example of an
entirely new digital brand was the Egg banking service which is part of Prudential, a
well-established company. Egg can take new approaches without damaging Prudential’s
brand, and at the same time not be inhibited by the Prudential brand. Egg is not an
entirely online brand since it is primarily accessed by phone. Egg now encourages some
of its million-plus customers to perform all their transactions online. Another example
of a new digital brand was the Go portal which was created by Disney, who desired to be
able to ‘own’ some of the many online customers who are loyal to one portal. It was felt
they could achieve this best through using a completely new brand. The Disney brand
might be thought to appeal to a limited younger audience. However, the new brand was
not sufficiently powerful to compete with the existing Yahoo! brand and has now failed.
Some of the characteristics of a successful brand name are suggested by de Chernatony
and McDonald (1992): ideally it should be simple, distinctive, meaningful and compatible
with the product. These principles can be readily applied to web-based brands. Examples
of brands that fulfil most of these characteristics are CDNow, CarPoint, BUY.COM and
e-STEEL. Others suggest that distinctiveness is most important: Amazon, Yahoo!, Expedia,
Quokka.com (extreme sports), E*Trade, and FireandWater (HarperCollins) books.
Ries and Ries (2000) suggest two rules for naming brands. (a) The Law of the
Common Name – they say ‘The kiss of death for an Internet brand is a common name’.
This argues that common names such as Art.com or Advertising.com are poor since they
are not sufficiently distinctive. (b) The Law of the Proper Name – they say ‘Your name
stands alone on the Internet, so you’d better have a good one’. This suggests that proper
names are to be preferred to generic names, e.g. Handbag.com against Woman.com or
Moreover.com against Business.com. The authors suggest that the best names will follow
most of these eight principles: (1) short, (2) simple, (3) suggestive of the category, (4)
unique, (5) alliterative, (6) speakable, (7) shocking and (8) personalised. Although these
are cast as ‘immutable laws’ there will of course be exceptions!
The importance of brand online
The Internet presents a ‘double-edged sword’ to existing brands. We have seen that a
consumer who already has knowledge of a brand is more likely to trust it. However, loy-
alty can be decreased because it encourages consumers to trial other brands. This is
suggested by Figure 5.7. This trial may well lead to purchase of brands that have not
been previously considered.
The BrandNewWorld (2004) survey showed that in some categories, a large propor-
tion of buyers have purchased different brands from those they initially considered for
example:
Large home appliances, 47%
Financial products and services, 39%
Holidays and travel, 31%
Mobile phones, 28%
Cars, 26%.
PRODUCT