Don’t you wish you could just get one consistent line of advice about how best to market in the digital world that you could then learn, understand, master, and use like Ron Popiel’s Rotisserie Oven (“Just set it and forget it!”) Yeah, me, too. But, that is not going to happen.
This is the real life of marketing in the modern world. People are fickle. They are fickle about what they want. They are fickle about how they figure out what they want. The majority of them now use online search to do it, but online searchers are fickle, from moment to moment, about how they find and use your website. And do not even get me started about how Google and the rest of the search engines change their algorithms faster, but with a frequency that seems much more often, than the average couple’s sexual encounter. But I digress.
We are discussing in this series of posts cultural branding and today we are wondering if you can culturally brand on your website. If we look at the websites of the cultural branding examples discussed in Holt’s literature (see the prior posts for details), we see some cultural branding going on in some of them.
The best example is Dove soap. http://Dove.com It’s “Real Beauty” campaign is right there, front and center on the home page. You see that real, but very pleasant looking woman and you want to read what she has to say. Your click the “Read more” and get drawn into the issue, wanting to read more. You click the big circle to find out people’s answers to their survey of “beauty bias.” When you are done, if you are looking for a comforting, caring, friend who “gets you, really gets you” and loves you for all you both are and are not, you can’t wait to go out and pull a bar of the grocery store shelf on aisle 7, halfway down on the right, just are eye level.
For Chipotle, http://chipotle.com, you have to hit the “Food with integrity” button on their top menu, but then you are sucked into Chipotle’s commitment to cook up a better world with every burrito they wrap or bowl they fill. They love their pigs right up to the point they kill them …. But I digress. They even link you out at the bottom of their long culture page to their self-produced comedy series, Farmed and Dangerous. I couldn’t get the first episode to run on my MacBook Pro and gave up after looking at a black box in the middle of my screen for two minutes. Nonetheless, Chipotle has cultural branding there.
Axe, http://www.axe.com/us/en/home.html has much better cultural branding than does Old Spice, https://oldspice.com/en . Compare the two and you will see the obvious differences. Panera, https://www.panerabread.com/en-us/home.html, has it’s 100% clean food success front and center on the first page of its active and interest-grabbing slider.
But, no one, NO ONE, does cultural branding than Starbuck’s, https://www.starbucks.com. Like the others, they make you click their top menu’s “Responsibility” button to find it, but when you do, you are immersed in a multi-media extravaganza about Starbuck’s egalitarian bonding with everyone, while disparaging no one.
There are a ton of examples of both good and bad cultural marketing on websites. But almost all of them are professionally produced with really HUUUUUGE financial budgets behind them. Which brings us to the question driving this post, “Can you culturally brand using your website?”
The answer is definitely, yes, but you have to use your own POWER and proceed only with every resource you have in order to do it. You have to invest at least some of each of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to ring the bell with your website. Websites are, however, the major marketing media used by small businesses and you have to leverage your resources to make yours work for you effectively and efficiently.
Come back tomorrow and we will talk more about how.
[reminder]How much of your resources are you investing in online marketing?[/reminder]