Left Hand, Right Brand

The one thing harder than creating an online brand is leveraging an existing one to do so. Conventional wisdom holds that the more channels in which a consumer experiences your brand, the better. Maybe so for retailers. But for media companies, the task is more complex. The web is not just another delivery channel - it is an entirely new product platform with its own house rules for attracting audiences and making money. And that is more of a headache than an aspirin for companies with longstanding mastheads to defend.

If we learned anything from the halycon days of dotcom decadence, it was that blowing your IPO millions on marketing is great for building ego, but pretty lousy at building brand. As it turns out, building powerful web brands is pretty tough. Some of the best known brands such as Amazon, eBay, Google or Craigslist actually do very little in the way of traditional brand advertising. But what they do very successfully, is cultivate a clear story for consumers about why they exist and what they do well. eBay doesn’t waste time by trying to offer consumers a multichannel print and online classifieds solution. Its brand positioning is much simpler and more effective – it is an easy way to buy and sell online.

The challenge of positioning is why media companies with an existing panoply of brands have an uphill battle with new mediums. Brand awareness alone is useless. There is a ‘weight’ of pre-existing associations that consumers attach to a media brand. Sure, lots of people have heard of the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times but do they imagine a print newspaper or an abstract financial content company. Media executives cling to the illusion that it is the latter, and they will seamlessly be able to migrate their audiences to new platforms with their existing brands. Not so.

A new medium, whether it is the Web, mobile or even some kind of portable device like an iPod or Sony PSP – requires not only tailored content formats but a unique reason for people to listen to what you have to say. Success on one platform does not equate to domination on all. What would you prefer to use – Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com, Netflix or Blockbuster.com, Google or Yellowpages.com? That is not to say that every publisher should ignore the value of its brand heritage. What it does mean, is that in many cases media companies are better off creating new brands for new platforms, which are merely fed by existing brands rather than relying on them.

Sounds easy, but in reality, that is bitter medicine for most empire builders to swallow. If you have a few newspapers, TV and radio networks up your sleeve – your natural response to new media platforms is going to be defensive. Instead of asking, how do customers want to entertain and inform themselves in the future, many companies ask, how will I defend my existing circulation and advertising revenues? Bad idea. Carefully constructed cross platform plays may make sense to media executives and appease divisional company politics. But rarely do they translate into intelligible value propositions for customers.

Ultimately, the media brand debate is not so different from the innovation issues that all companies face. Best explored by Clayton Christensen in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, most big corporations are so focused on sustaining existing products and customer bases, that they miss the disruptive changes that at first seem tangential, but ultimately overwhelm their current business. Fortunately, when you are a big company, tapping into external innovation is nothing that an open mind and a large chequebook can’t resolve.

The true value behind many of the world’s great media empires is not the intangible value locked in their distribution channel brands, but in business system for creating thousands of content sub brands that are far more relevant to audiences and will survive translation on multiple platforms. Perhaps the newspaper masthead or television network you know today will cease to exist as a brand identity. But chances are the process for sourcing and writing material, creating and distributing hit shows or feature articles, packaging advertising and attracting talent will be very similar. After all, a rose by any other name smells as sweet. 

Comments

[Ben Still]

Great article Mike!

[Dean Collins]

Wow interesting comments coming from where you are and where you have been Mike.

I agree with you in some ways though.

Do you think however it is because they try to run both channels as the same animal that they fail?

Is there not one example (content provider preferably) who utilises it's back end supply as just raw product but successfully manages to deliver via two disparate channels successfully?

I think there would be plenty, and when you look at why you will find they have good strong management in each channel that have a free hand to reign their divisions, in effect creating three companies Supply (or raw product),Web and traditional Print/Radio/TV.

Just run them as separate industries, as totally different animals and it’s pretty much basic Business 101, remember just because Ray Croc had some cow skins left over he didn’t think about opening a shoe store.

Cheers,
Dean

[Greg Tingle]

Nice piece Mike.

New media / internet is always going to be only part of a media package.

The internet is connected to just about every other form of media and advertising these days, whether we like it or not.

[David Brennan]

Interesting article that highlights an issue that is possibly more relevant to Australia than some other developed media markets. In my view, this is in large part down to the traditional protection from competitive forces that Australian media brands have received via government regulation and competition rules; if you are a free to air broadcaster, for example, why not concentrate your efforts on defending your (highly lucrative)patch when you are protected from 'invaders' even as digital technologies make real competition possible? Of course, that is a short term solution, as recent mutterings from Helen Coonan suggest the government might not attempt to stem the tide for too much longer, but it is a far cry from my experiences in Europe and the USA, where media brands have tended to adopt a fully integrated multi-channel strategy out of competitive neccessity; not always successfully but I predict that those that have survived so far will be in better shape to face the shifting competitive landscape than many major Australian media brands

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