The Auctioneer-the official blog of Auction.ph

I opened my Friendster today and found a Nike wallpaper on what used to be clean white space. Last weekend, I joined a contingent of bloggers in a tour of the Marlboro plant. Unilever has been quite active (and interactive) marketing their brands online which include a Rexona Friendster app and Axe viral videos which should be launched soon. As mentioned in an earlier article, the web 2.0 boom not only unleashed a glut of online services, it also fomented the rise of the Internet as a compelling form of new media. While consumer brands play around with this new media, the worldwide web is also, as a matter of fact, fertile grounds for cultivating a new brand form: the website brand.

Handling a website brand should bear subtle similarities to marketing a media brand. In contrast to consumer brands which serve essentially basic needs, like the need to take a bath or the need to have dry armpits, most website brands provide services. Building a consumer brand is a completely different animal. Comparing the two actually borders on irrationality but the striking differences should crystallize important frameworks. Success of a consumer brand, especially here in the Philippines, is all about leaving a footprint in the collective consciousness and sub-consciousness of the masses. More and more, buying behavior for basic commodities is becoming a function of mental reflex rather than deliberate decision-making.

The website brand, fortunately and unfortunately, falls outside the paradigm of consumer brand building. Fortunately, because it doesn’t require a lot of money, and unfortunately, because success is largely dependent on timing.

The most successful website brands in history had its humble beginnings by passively, or to an extent, even privately, providing a unique service. Yahoo offered free emails. Napster programmed an online music sharing service intended originally for friends. Facebook started as a community site for Ivy League students.

The landscape has long changed since. With the promise of profit potential in the Internet, website branding is steadily becoming a marketing ballgame. While competing website brands expend budgets on gaining mindshare and traffic, the market, however, is yet to change its mindset as far as websites are concerned. For the website brand markets, it’s hardly about brand image but largely about brand service. For them it’s not yet about what you can offer but who offered it first.

For website brands, timing can spell the difference between success and failure. The general masses, mostly uninitiated in the myriad facets of the Internet, still rely on top of mind as far as basic Internet services are concerned. Top of mind was established not by extravagant marketing campaigns but by timing. And for the first wave of website brands, their timing was impeccable, launching it right after the web 2.0 big bang. It was the perfect milieu for the introduction of online services. Pioneering website brands logically became first in mind which translated somehow into capturing top of mind. They retained top of mind by maintaining and improving the quality of their core services which by the way, still remain mostly free.

For website brands who rode the second wave, it is going to be extremely difficult to snatch a portion of mindshare. Most website brands nowadays are reiterations of the basic services made available after the web 2.0 boom. Facebook, in a way, was successful in snatching a lion’s share of the market in spite of its derivative nature. Before Facebook, there were other community sites enjoying tremendous global success. In 2005, MySpace was ranked number 7 overall, the only SNS site landing a spot in the top ten. Three years later, MySpace moves up a notch to number 6 followed closely by Facebook at number 7.

How did a late derivative suddenly become a major threat in seizing SNS supremacy?

The Internet Trend Report published by Morgan Stanley points out that the reason why Facebook is gaining on MySpace is because “(it) offers a social network that is both standardized + self-controlled/flexible – a highly personalized first-stop portal for online connectivity – users can program their pages with a growing number of drag-and-drop applications.”

In the Philippines, users acclimated to Friendster would find Facebook’s high learning curve a tad needless. More Internet savvy users, on the other hand, found Facebook applications as exciting new features which Friendster has been lacking all this time. If Facebook continues to add sticky apps through open API, while Friendster in the Philippines may find its membership base more or less secure, it might find its traffic slipping further downwards.

In a marketing digest about consumer trends in 2007, one of the trends cited was the need to go ‘hyperlocal.’ As stated earlier, Facebook started as a community site for Ivy League students. What started with two-thirds of Harvard students in 2004 exploded to 19 million registered users three years later. Considering the website’s origins, the Ivy League community should be generally conducive for a “tipping point” phenomenon.

In many ways, going hyperlocal has worked for a handful of website brands. In Russia, Yandex is more popular than Google. In Korea, Naver outranks Yahoo. The phenomenon is common in countries with advanced Internet experience and stronger cultural backgrounds. More than the language barrier, local websites have a better understanding of local culture which is possibly why they have more appeal. That understanding is reflected on the website’s look and feel, on how it generally operates, and how it fits the unique Internet needs and demands of a specific ethnicity.

Building a website brand is still a relatively new discipline. Some local website brands became successful in terms of traffic and online reputation by sheer personality. For some local websites, it wasn’t about the profit potential at first but it was, at least in my opinion, for altruistic intentions. It may be changing now but the basic foundation of having a clear mission still hold. Google, for instance, remain focused and unwavering to their goal– “to organize the world’s information and make it accessible”—something like that. In the pursuit of that single, straightforward mission statement is a clever revenue-generating mechanism.

Right now, building a website brand is not about getting global traffic but affirming local loyalty. Building a website brand is not yet about profitability but more about personalization and personality.

Views expressed in this post are opinions of the writer. Please feel free to post a comment if you wish to express your own opinions.