Many of you are probably already fans of one of the web’s most popular video-bloggers, but today is the first time that I’ve felt his brilliant ramblings were on-topic enough to be featured on the site. Ze covers brand identity, recognition, creation and loyalty in this brief video.
The humor and razor-sharp wit are terrific, but there’s a message for businesses and entrepreneurs there, too. A few of the questions that Ze brings up:
- When people think of your brand – is it something they want to be associated with?
- What do they gain from that association?
- Do naming conventions and pre-existing biases work for or against you?
- What can you do to improve these aspects and make your brand more appealing?
The recent schism of Danny Sullivan and Incisive have forced all of us in the search space to examine our brand loyalty – are we loyal to SearchEngineWatch, or to Danny? To the SES conference series, or to their organizer? How has Danny created a brand that is both bigger than himself, and yet inexplicably tied to him and how to we, as passionate fans of that brand, start to separate the two?
This has happened quite a few times in the search space, with everyone from Mike Grehan to Andy Beal to Nick Wilson – in each case, a split forces us to re-define the brand, make a decision about our loyalty and interest and take a course of action. With the SEOmoz brand, I’m in the lucky position of having complete control – Rand & SEOmoz are one entity – building one doesn’t run the risk of hurting the other (but what if I ever wanted to sell SEOmoz?), but with larger firms and more popular brands, separation has to exist. Larry & Sergey aren’t Google, Jerry Yang isn’t Yahoo! and Bill Gates isn’t Microsoft, but Michael Arrington is TechCrunch and Kevin Rose is Digg.
All this begs the obvious question – what direction are you taking with your brand?
p.s. Don’t worry – I’m not selling SEOmoz. I was just using that to illustrate a point.
