Beyond that First Burst of Awareness

Brandweek,  May 29, 2000  by Brett Shevack

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While much dot-com advertising is extremely inventive, it's like a huge crowd of musclebound poseurs at a bodybuilding contest desperately calling attention to themselves. The difference is: bodybuilders aren't spending billions of dollars doing it.

The agencies love it. The production companies love it. The media love it. But sadly for most of these marketers (and investors who didn't cash out early), this period is likely to go down as the biggest waste of money in the history of advertising. Yes, even bigger than Burger King's "Herb" fiasco.

And when the dust settles, the real winners will be the brands that have built a strong "emotional bond" with consumers. These marketers realized that the most important targets aren't our eyes, ears and mind, but our left and right ventricles.

While the success stories of America Online, Amazon, eBay and Yahoo are proof of the importance of targeting our collective hearts and being integral parts of our lives, a majority of others will never make it beyond the front lobe of consciousness into our hearts. Their marketing money will not pay the kind of long-term dividends that major brand franchises earn.

These "dot-com dollars" are doing little to build residual emotional value. Worse, they end up helping their competitors. For if you are not building a brand, you are merely building the generic awareness of the category for someone else to own.

In this mad frenzy to instant credibility and morning-after "hits," most forget that building a brand is not a sprint, but a marathon. And while "brand awareness" is important, building lasting "brand meaning" is essential, a process that requires carefully managing the distinct lifecycle stages each brand goes through. For dot-coms, the lifecycle is so compressed it can run just from one Super Bowl to the next.

Cycle 1: "Newness is everything." In this cycle, the first recognized brands think E-trade and eBay--have the advantage of being truly linked with the category But, as with traditional categories, only a few brands tend to benefit because at a certain point the new technology or concept is no longer new Enduring brands will need to own something deeper or risk losing their customers to the new dot-com brand on the block.

Almost from the beginning, smart marketers are preparing to make the transition to Cycle 2.

Cycle 2: "Differentiation is everything." Once a category is defined--say buying low-priced airline tickets online--each brand has to be defined by what it oes and what differentiates it from competitors. In this make-or-break cycle, first-in brands that grew with uniqueness must protect their turf, moving beyond commodity ideas and benefits to something more in both real and emotional terms.

The guys I'd be worried about aren't the next dot.com companies, but the established brands that have already targeted our heart and mind. These sleeping giants have a deep inner brand meaning to draw upon as they gear up technologically. That's why I'd bet on toysrus.com over etoys.com.

Cycle 3: "Thrive, survive or demise." By now, the category is segmented into a few thriving elite brands, a group with a loyal and profitable core base, and the even greater number that arise one morning and realize they are in big doo-doo-dot-com. The latter see their business "corridor"--which they played a major role in building--has matured. They're now losing market share to lower-cost providers or technological innovators. Or, worse, they are no longer relevant and need to retool.

They're in trouble because they can't draw upon an emotional "brand bank" because they never invested in it. Steve Jobs knows what it means to "own the heart." If Apple didn't own something beyond technology it would be history today.

A good example of Cycle 3 marketing is found in online investing, where pioneering brands are rapidly moving to developing value-added relationships with customers: Schwab promoting a smarter kind of investor; E-trade selling investing with the same aspirational message as Nike.

These dot-com marketers know what their rivals may learn the hard way: Long-term brand success has less to do with targeting the left and right brain than with appealing to the left and right ventricles.

Brett Shevack is president of Wolf Group Integrated Communications, New York.

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