Digital Design Blog

Digital Darwinism

September 28th, 2007 by Garrick Schmitt    
Tags: Digital Branding

An experiment you can do right this minute: Click on over to Amazon.com and do a book search for the word “brand.” You will be presented with almost 240,000 books on the topic. There are books on the history of branding, the economics of branding, the sociology of brands, branding in retail, in environmental design, in politics. You’ll even get “how to” books about branding and cattle, but I suspect that involves red-hot pokers. Since everyone and their mother have apparently been meditating for decades on the topic of brands, you would think that the subject would be all sorted out by now.

You would be wrong. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I humbly suggest that brands and branding and brand strategy and brand identity are in a bigger and more confusing mess than ever before. Just to put a fine point on it: The world of branding is a complete goat rodeo at the moment. And to be honest, I think it’s your fault.

And by “you” I mean you who use the Internet for an increasing amount of time each day. (And spends way less time watching network TV.) You who, this year, will probably buy more clothes or books or music online than in a “real” store. You who can’t remember the last time you had a face-to-face conversation with a bank teller or a customer service employee. You who is YouTubing and blogging and Flickring and SMSing and Tivoing and Shaving Everywhere and maybe even having a Second Life. And especially you who’s posting all those damn Mentos Fountain videos. Would you cut it out already?

Yes, you are a pain in the increasingly sagging butt of brands, and you are personally wrecking the whole grand and graceful evolutionary procession of branding from “Drink Coca Cola” to “Welcome to the Coke Side of Life.” You, Citizen of Web 2.0, are to brands what the hungry saber-toothed tiger was to our proto-human ancestors back on the African veldt: A sharp-toothed force of nature who is forcing a massive and unprecedented and extremely inconvenient mutation. And unless we want our brands to end up as meat, it’s time for us—as brand professionals—to remove our opposable thumbs from…somewhere unpleasant…and use some new tools.

What follows, then, is a kind of Darwinian Cookbook for branders—an owner’s manual for intelligent brands in the era of the New! Improved! User-Controlled Internet.

Brands Are Dead! Long Live Brands!
So what’s the big deal about brands, anyway? A lot of people think that brands don’t matter today. They think that the power of “brand” in shaping consumer opinion or perception or buying decisions is on the retreat. A lot of people voted for George Bush, too. And those people are considerably less opinionated at parties these days.

As it turns out, the power of brands is not diminishing, it’s increasing.

While small brands and new brands—think MySpace—can come out of nowhere to capture market share and spark the fringe imagination, you underestimate the power of a blockbuster brand at your peril.

Top-selling name brands still rule, and brand preferences are fickle creatures. This year, in fact, consumers were less willing to switch brands than last year.

In an increasingly complicated and atomized world—where brands are multiplying like bunnies and appealing to impossibly narrow niches—the curatorial power of brands is more important than ever.

And On the Sixth Day There Was Broadband
Just how did we arrive at this peculiar evolutionary state of affairs: Where brands remain central to our lives in ways we cannot quite pin down, yet we are more instrumental than ever before in influencing those brands? Perhaps a short history lesson will clear things up.

Once upon a time there was dial up…. Remember, say, 1999? Just pause for a moment, close your eyes, and recall what it that was like to watch a Web site load onto your computer screen chunk…by…chunk…by…this better be worth it….chunk. Now shake it off. Can you imagine trying to fool around with Subservient Chicken on a 14K modem? Or watch Lonely Girl ramble on about, well, anything, on anything slower than DSL? Inconceivable.

Broadband, and the unprecedented tidal wave of innovation that followed it, changed everything—most especially, human behavior online. A thumbnail sketch:

Broadband fueled filesharing, downloading of music and movies, video and audio streaming, and Internet telephony. A super-fast connection is the main engine driving the Web from a place where people complete tasks, to a place where they seek entertainment, form communities, express themselves (and complete tasks). And if history is any guide, this progression will pick up speed.

Net net: Broadband has put Moore’s Law (which refers to the doubling of data every 18 months) on steroids, and the online population has followed suit up the very steep incline of the hockey stick. The Internet user of 1999 was roughly the equivalent of a chimpanzee, and you are, well, TIME’s Person of the Year.

Hop in the Wayback Machine for just one more minute. Dial it back to the year 2000. You’ve been given the task of planning and executing a big family vacation somewhere exotic. What would you do, circa 2000? Hmmm. Call a friend (on a land line, probably) to get a referral for a travel agent? Spend some time buying guidebooks at a couple of bookstores? Pick up a bunch of magazines? And that would take how many hours or days? And what was your confidence level that your trip was well planned and fairly priced? And what would have been your recourse if the trip was a horrendous mess? Or a smashing success? Now—bang—back to today. Walk yourself through the same scenario.

As it turns out, the tools and attitudes that make travel planning efficient—or maybe even fun—in 2007 are the weapons that we also use to assess and destroy ignorant, monolithic, slow-moving brands. The Broadband Web is the most ruthlessly Darwinian medium in history—a channel that demands brands to innovate or die at the hands of more nimble competitors, or be pecked to death by ducks in the blogosphere. Within the user-centered world of Web 2.0, it’s survival of the fittest.

And to put brands on even more dangerous ice, the Web is also the thinnest of the thin-slicing media—where consumers are only a “back” button away from the exit. In fact, Dr. Gitte Lindgaard, a researcher from Carleton University in Ontario, did an extensive study of how rapidly Web users formed impressions of home pages*. She and her team found that impressions about brand credibility, usability, visual appeal, and—ultimately—buying intentions are determined in fifty milliseconds.

Fifty milliseconds is not a long time. It is about one frame of a video or half as long as the blink of a human eye. But that is all that it takes for a visitor to a Web site to decide how appealing the site is. The study shows that people not only make up their minds about the quality of a Web site in an eye-blink, but they subsequently stick to these first impressions.

As depressing as it seems to those of us who spend months building Web sites, people make an immediate, intuitive decision whether they like a digital experience or not, without reading one word of content. And from this first snippet of experience on, the entire interaction with that site is colored by that first impression.

Most brands have a strategic structure that looks pretty much like this. And I will bet you a chocolate shake that if you mess around with brands for a living, you have a document—or five—somewhere on your hard drive that contains a variation on this theme. And that is fine.Once upon a time, say, five years ago, this structure was sufficient for guiding companies, and maybe even great for building brands around floor wax or dessert toppings. But it doesn’t quite cover the subject in a world where one of the biggest TV spots of the year was shot for Doritos by a 21-year old amateur who did his dolly shot using rollerblades and made the whole commercial for $12.79. Not including the price of the bag of Doritos.

Like it or not, users—that would be you, again—are in control of brands to an extent never before imaginable. And you like it. And my bet is that you are never going back to the farm. So how can brands join you, rather than beat you over the head with Wanna-Be Big Ideas and TV spots that you never see because you Tivo’d them into oblivion?

Those Genes Make You Look Hot
As an agency, Avenue A | Razorfish has spent a great deal of time thinking about what makes great online experiences. It’s the water we swim in every day. We’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the best brands in the world—and we’ve done our time trying to push rocks up hills, too. As a result, we have identified seven core characteristics of brands that “get it” online. Think of these as Digital Genes, sort of like knobs on the brand dashboard that you can dial up or dial down depending on the customer group, the industry, or the competitive environment.

Fresh – Does it inspire a feeling or emotion? Is the brand’s digital home new, current, beautiful, smart, fearless, impactful?

Adaptive – Does it respond to your involvement? Is the brand’s behavior mutable, intuitive, quick, interactive, Web-native, data-savvy?

Relevant – Is it useful or appealing to you specifically? Is the site or campaign tailored, meaningful, useful, targeted?

Transformative – Does it raise your expectations of the brand, or the Web? Is the digital experience disruptive, innovative, surprising, memorable, pioneering?

Social – Is it worth borrowing, sharing or contributing to?
Is the brand designed to be modular, portable, engaging, communal, shareable, buzz-worthy, newsy, democratic?

Immersive – Do you lose track of time?
Is the experience seamless, involving, entertaining, usable, convenient, multi-sensory?

Authentic – Does it seem genuine?
Does the brand feel transparent, coherent, consistent, humane?

We think that every modern brand, when it makes the leap onto the Post-Broadband Web, should possess each of these attributes in some measure. And we think that truly great brands must exhibit these characteristics in abundance.

You can use these Brand Genes as a kind of litmus test. Whether you’re helping your clients sell more shampoo or sneakers or credit cards, what would your team’s work score? If your scores are high, chances are you’ve hatched a truly digital brand experience. If your scores are low, I would bet there’s room to push the experience to a more interesting place.

As a road test, we decided to harness the wisdom of crowds: We asked almost 800 Avenue A | Razorfish staff, from multiple disciplines, to rank 20 “household name” brands using the Digital Genes Scorecard. Here’s what we learned:

Digital Gene Scorecard
Interbrand’s Top 10 brands compared with Avenue A | Razorfish’s Digital Top 10 brands by their cumulative Digital Gene Score.

Interbrand Top 10 brands compared with Digital Top 10 brands compared by each attribute.

CREDITS:
The following extremely big-yet-nimble brains contributed to this article: Ana Andjelic, Andy Pimentel, Brook Lundy, Dimitri Ehrlich, Dave Van Hook, and Alex Snell.

By Joseph Crump