September 2008 from Steven Donaldson and Michael Zinke, the Brand Guys
Creating One Brand in a multi-channel world—web, retail, and print
Radiant sends these brand "bites" to give you insights and tips on building value, uniqueness and loyalty for your brand. Your brand's critical differentiation helps customers find you in the marketplace, remember you and come back to you.
In this issue:
Online and Offline Branding: Can retailers create the same experience in both worlds? And do they need to? Comparing Crate & Barrel, New Egg and Woodland Hills Wine Company…
Radiant Work: Avanceon: New name and brand for an global company. Radiant worked with Advanced Automation to launch them in the global market…
Online and Offline Branding
Can retailers create the same experience in both worlds? And do they need to?
Successful brick and mortar stores cultivate a specific experience — a look and feel to their stores and the shopping experience — that's unique to their brand. How can this translate into an online experience that builds the brand? Shopping is a physical, visual and emotional interactive experience with product and brand. You start shopping with expectations, begin exploring and then make choices — or not. Here are three takes on the need for online and offline brands and how they can maximize brand loyalty.
Crate & Barrel — When you think of Crate & Barrel, it's about value and informality in home furnishings, an experience cultivated through their 160 stores nationwide. This retailer started in 1962 with a brick and mortar store in Chicago, focusing on a non-traditional shopping and browsing experience — an unpretentious display of items right out of the "crate and barrel". "We skip the middleman and bring you good deals from around the world". They extended this experience to their catalog in 1967, which is still a big part of their business with 150 million distributed annually. In 1999 C&B launched its online store, and has carefully extended the same consistent brand experience. They understood that how you experience the brand — store, catalog or online — affects the buying decision. And, it's critical that these channels deliver interconnected brand experiences.
The online brand comes alive by allowing you to easily browse, compare and select products as though you were in a store. And, if you went online because of a catalog, you can view that catalog, find the exact product and make an online purchase or find a store near you.
Easy navigation between categories and promotional displays of accessory products links the experience to the store environments, where furniture is right next to housewares. Mixing up the experience supports their brand goal — allowing customers to find stylish, quality housewares through an unpretentious shopping experience.
Integration of the brand experience across catalog, online and brick and mortar is critical for the Crate & Barrel brand. C&B clearly understands that consumers exist in multiple shopping worlds and wants to deliver a consistent, positive shopping experience wherever the customer is.
New Egg — Founded in 2001 and offering over 25,000 computer hardware and software and consumer electronics products, they dedicated themselves to being the best online store out there with the fastest shipping, easy shopping and check out and, they claim, superior customer service. New Egg says they are the store for "anyone desiring a comprehensive digital lifestyle". Judging by their sales — $1.5 billion (exceeding Crate & Barrel's $1.4 billion) — they have done something right by the consumer.
Go to the New Egg site — you'll see that their brand experience is built on how people shop for electronics — allowing easy navigation through product category, price, features, and brand and, most critically, feature comparisons and customer reviews. Their execution has been so flawless because they know their customer and how to serve them. This is the key to good branding and to consumer loyalty.
New Egg could only exist online. No other shopping experience could support such a depth of product and ease of purchase. New Egg probably shows more products, compares more features and guides the consumer to final selection faster than any other consumer electronics site online. That's why they grew faster than any other privately held company in six years.
Woodland Hills Wine Company — Founded in 1968 as a brick and mortar store in the San Fernando Valley/Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles, the store became one of the top wine warehouse retailers in the L.A./Orange County metro area by 2005. With over 25,000 SKUs of wine and some unique European purchases, they have an overwhelming selection of quality wines at below market prices. In addition they carry wines from the $10-$200 range catering to a broad demographic of wine consumers.
In tandem with developing their online ecommerce presence, Woodland Hills wanted a new face to their brand both in the store and online. They launched a complete rebranding of the Woodland Hills Wine Company experience.
Their ecommerce site incorporated a highly sophisticated wine discovery and selection process that allows consumers to shop by price, varietal, region, winery, type, rating and recommendations by other buyers. The branded design of the site and ease of shopping was translated into the physical store environment with new signage and a computer kiosk in the store, enabling the customer to search and select wine online for purchase in the store.
Woodland Hills realized that their ecommerce site could help them reach out to the substantial L.A. regional market to drive traffic to the store, and allow them to sell nationwide. It's clear that their online store is independent from their brick and mortar presence but it also supports their original business model and brand.
Online &mdash offline, does it matter where brands exist? Yes, they must operate the way consumers operate. There are few boundaries on when and how customers shop. Retailers need to pay attention to what their brand says to their customer and how it can enhance and follow their consumer's choices.
5 ways to build brand loyalty online and off
Know your market; your customers and competition.
Define your customer personas. Profile the 4-5 main customer types; what they want, how they think, what they feel.
Be consistent, highly visible and relevant — deliver what your customer is looking for.
Define your brand experience. Make sure your customer's experience matches your brand promise, at every touchpoint.
Build relationships at all customer touchpoints; catalog, store, online
Radiant Work: Avanceon
Rebranding and Naming for an International Market
Challenge: Advanced Automation, a Pennsylvania-based process engineering company, designs and builds integrated complex assembly lines for Fortune 500 pharma, food and beverage companies in the U.S. They were merging into a larger global company with a Pakistani engineering counterpart and Dubai investors. The challenge was to take this company from a North American focus to a global market presence and keep the loyalty of the current customer base.
Solution: RadiantBrands used its naming methodology and branding approach to focus on the unique attributes of the company and differentiation in their new and expanding markets. Radiant developed a long and short list of names based on strategic company attributes and value, and trademark and web domain name viability. Name candidates and company branding options went through a rigorous selection and approval process which culminated in the decision to move ahead with "Avanceon".
Result: A new name, brand messaging and brand identity system that launched Avanceon into the global market as a leader in process engineering systems.
