Victory Branding President David Vazdauskas on the task of making a national brand truly local in flavor.
At one point or another, we've all been nabbed by the brand police-- the people whose job it is to ensure branding consistency among product lines, throughout stores and across channels. These enforcers penalize for a wayward logo and castigate for a font faux pas. The brand, they say, should be constant. The brand should speak with one voice. The brand should not be interpreted, or finessed.
Of course, the internet in its early days became a thorn in the side of the brand police. Brands were constantly trying to get sexy with the internet-- trying to break out of their bricks-and-mortar personas and offer a side that we've never seen before. That is, until they were nabbed by the brand police and told to go back to their rooms. Due to the tenacity of the brand police, we have brands that are staid extensions of their offline identities.
Which is just fine for those businesses that were born on the internet. These brands realized from the get-go that their connection with the consumer had to be an emotional, one-on-one bond-- and a flexible one at that. Your experience with eBay, or Yahoo!, or Amazon is probably different than mine. Not necessarily better or worse, but just different. Personalization on these sites wasn't just a neat feature. In many cases it was an invitation for the consumer to "finish" the brand-- to add the final attributes that made the brand sticky.
Traditional brands are now starting to get it. For example, many old-school retailers are allowing consumers to shape their own brand experience by offering preference-based content and promotions and recognizing the unique behaviors of their registered users. And to the great dismay of the branding police, some enterprises are actually encouraging their sales people and other staff to post their own blogs on the company website.
This brand decentralization will revive tired brands stuck in a one-dimensional world as they try to compete on a multi-channel, intensely dynamic playing field. Brands -- national, global, ubiquitous brands -- will get local. The term "brand localization" until now has been used to describe whether and how global brands should reflect the culture and mores of the individual nations in which they market. I use the term to describe how brands should engage with individual communities-- not of the virtual kind, but of the place-based variety.
Think of the difference between eBay and craigslist. Communities formed through eBay are usually based on objects of desire. For example, the eBay "Cowboy Up" group, currently with 35 members, is a community of individuals with a hankering for cowboy and western collectibles. These members may reside all over the globe and most likely will never meet.
Craigslist builds a different kind of community. Visitors are immediately prompted to select a city -- as opposed to an interest or object -- and are transported to a geographic "Main Street." Within this community, face-to-face connections are encouraged, whether their purpose is to find a partner, get rid of an old sofa, or list a rideshare. Visitors can find a bassist for their new band or a job at the local coffee emporium.
Craigslist has accomplished the difficult task of making a national brand truly local in flavor. Of course, the craigslist brand was created with the localization concept as its core. It didn't have to reposition itself or shed a one-size-fits-all image.
But why haven't other established, more traditional brands recognized and seized the power of brand localization? The brand police certainly share some responsibility. The last thing the marketing EVP wants is a bunch of local store managers putting their own local spin on store design, or worse, creating their store's own local website.
A more cynical view is that corporate folks don't think local store managers are capable of translating the brand to the local experience. Corporate elite keep the brand at arm's length for the same reason store managers never see the three-year corporate marketing plan-- there's no use distracting them from more important responsibilities like executing the planogram.
Yet, store managers have a unique if not exclusive insight into the local manifestation of a brand. They know who the strongest local competitors are. They can gauge local trends and tap into local influencers. In an environment where many big box stores are facing increasing community scrutiny, store managers can identify how the brand can play an active and relevant community role.
The internet makes the lack of brand localization even more glaring. Most consumers are now multi-channel shoppers. While they may use each channel in a different way -- for example, using the internet for information and the store for transactions (or vice versa) -- they participate in the shopping experience while in the midst of a local community.
Imagine the scene at a national specialty retailer's local store. A shopper enjoys being recognized by a sales clerk, chats about the upcoming snowstorm and the need for a good parka, and enquires about potential employment opportunities at the store. It must be jarring for that same customer to visit that retailer's website and be treated as Anyperson in Anytown, USA.
Most retailers have a store locator on their website, where customers may find a local store's address, hours of operation and contact information. Some retailers even list events at the store. But few create a true local environment-- an environment that rewards a website visitor who, by virtue of their search for a store, is raising their hand and saying, "I'm here-- in Boston! In a snowstorm!" They're craving local relevance, not an efficient directory.
Ironically, many retailers have nailed personalization. Based on my behavior on their site and my stated preferences, they can deliver information or products that I might need. But the dynamic layer between total anonymity and personalization is most often missing. Localization creates another dimension of the brand experience. It grounds the experience by recognizing a brand's role not just in a virtual space, but in the community radius where I spend the majority of my activities.
Localization has certainly not been ignored by other, non-retail players on the internet. Local search is the new killer app. Search engines are making the results of my search for pizza more relevant, recognizing it as an inherently local need. Local online advertising -- the ad dollars spent by local businesses on the internet -- is one of the fastest growing advertising categories in the United States. Borrell Associates estimates that local online advertising totaled $4.1 billion in 2005, an increase of over fifty percent from 2004, according to the research firm.
Localization solutions providers -- companies that help national brands create a local presence on the internet -- have in the ASP space. While enterprise content management (ECN) firms focus on helping clients manage content on an enterprise-wide level, a localization ASP helps companies establish and manage local content and local marketing messages on the web.
For example, Local Thunder, a Portland-Maine-based solutions provider, recently introduced a Web localization application for the retail industry. Their solution incorporates a local micro-site template that is accessed from the retailer's main site. Corporate marketing staff can use the template to upload specific marketing messages to a local store's micro-site, test-market a product in a specific store, or promote an item that has particular local relevance, for example, the aforementioned parka in the midst of a Boston snowstorm. A local store manager can also upload information about the store's local sponsorships, classes or events, or employment opportunities.
The template features consistent branding elements and can be centrally monitored and controlled, which should assuage the concerns of the branding police. Jim Boutin, Local Thunder's executive vice president and COO, thinks that the retail industry is ready to tackle website localization. "Retailers are becoming more sophisticated about how they look at the interaction between their website and bricks-and-mortar stores," said Boutin. "The Local Thunder platform helps create a seamless brand experience for shoppers who use both channels and it recognizes and leverages the presence that strong brands have in communities."
The company also offers a localization platform tailored to local media. Recognizing that most local television and radio station websites are heavily oriented to news and programming content, the Local Thunder media solution provides a turnkey platform allowing local stations to also sell content and feature-rich display advertising on their website.
"Most television stations have very strong local brands which, when it comes to local advertising, are under-leveraged on the internet," said Boutin. "The Local Thunder platform helps stations increase ad revenues by allowing them to offer new advertising opportunities to current and new clients-- even those who don't use television."
The platform features ad page building software that enables the local advertiser to upload content such as photographs, graphics text and other information about the business. A file sharing feature allows restaurants to post menus or health clubs to post a brochure. The platform also includes electronic gift certificate technology, which stations may use to sell local business gift certificates as trade for advertising.
"The platform creates an online commerce community for local businesses under a recognized, trusted local brand [the television or radio station]," said Boutin.
Local Thunder has clearly set its sights on localization, betting that it will indeed become the next Internet buzzword. It is ironic that the Internet, once touted as a gateway to a vast universe, may now be leveraged by smart marketers as a way to create dynamic local connections.
Localization initiatives may even open up a whole new way to approach sub-branding as a geo-targeting tool-- long a vexing challenge for strong brands.
Pepsi/Boston, anyone?
David Vazdauskas is president of Victory Branding, a brand strategy consultancy based just north of Portland, Maine. The firm has worked with large, established brands, technology start-ups and companies in the midst of brand realignment. Recently, Victory Branding partnered with Lexington, Massachusetts-based SanCorp LLC to launch the Dynamic Channel Matrix analytics tool - an approach that helps companies predict channel migration and tailor messages to customer segments at key migration moments.