Stacking Up I-Brands (fw)

[Bala Pillai <bala@malaysia.net>]

Stacking Up I-Brands
http://www.office.com/global/0,2724,6001-16239,FF.html

Everyone wants to know how they measure up against the competition in 
cyberspace.

By Michelle Tirado
for Office.com

Feb. 14, 2000 — Knowing where your brand stands in its industry and in the 
eyes of consumers has always been a challenge. But it's a worthwhile one. 
By benchmarking against those that have a bigger piece of the market share, 
a brand has a better chance of improving and growing.

Now, with the Net-ward rush in full swing, companies want to know how their 
brands measure up in the virtual world.

Learning how your brand stacks up online may not be that difficult now; and 
experts believe that it will get even easier as the tools of the trade 
improve. "The technology is there," says Brad VanAuken, president of 
BrandForward Inc., a Kansas City, Mo., brand equity research firm. "You can 
get a fairly good read on whether a brand is delivering. There are all 
sorts of technologies converging to make that possible. For instance, you 
can merge cookie technology with an online survey."

Third-party marketing researchers are working on different models. In 
January, Total Research Corp., which has built itself a strong brand in the 
benchmarking industry, launched EquiTrend Online, its online brand equity 
product. The Princeton, N.J., company takes a quantitative approach, 
surveying 30,000 Web users on their quality perceptions of 1,200 brands in 
21 categories.

Walden Media, based in Cambridge, Mass., has its Popular Web Benchmark 
Study. The data collected for this study is drawn from the media research 
company's WM Index, a monthly evaluation of 20,000 Web sites. The report, 
priced at $2,500 to $3,000, reveals the scores, based on consumer 
experiences, of sites in 15 primary consumer product categories, such as 
health and beauty, furniture, and pet supplies.

Others are working on online benchmarking models as well. Late this winter, 
VanAuken will begin his own Internet brand equity measurement study. He 
wants to understand the whole online shopping process, how much influence a 
brand has in the purchasing decision process.

Using online consumer surveys, VanAuken will compare many major brands in 
the top e-commerce categories, including Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, 
eToy.com and ToysRUs.com. But he won't be just looking for awareness and 
quality. The battery of questions will probe into accessibility, value, 
relevance, differentiation, emotional connection, vitality, usage, 
preference and loyalty.

VanAuken calls his approach forward-thinking. "The ones most correlated 
with future profitability and market share are really relevance and 
differentiation. Smaller and newer companies, like a lot of dot-coms, may 
be really low in the quality perception or awareness. Both are really built 
by long-term advertising. But they might have a lot of relevance to the 
consumer and tremendous differentiation."



Edmunds.com, a consumer automotive portal, has a pretty good idea how its 
brand stacks up online. The results of a Walden Media study, which was 
highlighted in the Wall Street Journal in December, ranked the site as the 
best in the automotive industry. Making Yahoo!'s Most Incredibly Useful 
Sites list and Entrepreneur Magazine's Top 100 Web Sites for Entrepreneurs 
further highlighted its strong position.

The most reliable source thus far, however, has been Edmunds.com's Town 
Hall, a moderated, threaded discussion area that has already attracted more 
than one million participants. Sure, consumers talk cars — models, prices, 
parts, maintenance, etc. — they're also in there discussing the pros and 
cons of automotive sites.

"The whole discussion area is really unparalleled on the Internet in 
regards to the automotive sector," says Avi Steinlauf, Edmunds.com's vice 
president of marketing. "It's a way of measuring what's going on because 
it's complete consumer feedback. It's a much more qualitative way than 
quantitative."