Building Brand into Your Product or Web Site

by Kasia Novak, Quill Contributor

This is a brief summary of the STC telephone workshop, "Building Brand into Your Product or Web Site", presented by Robert Barlow-Busch. The target audience for this workshop included:

• Technical Communicators
• Interface Designers
• Information Architects
• Design and Usability Specialists
• Marketing

What is brand?

A brand represents all information about a product or service that distinguish it from other products or services. It consists of a name, identifying mark, logo, visual images or symbols, or mental concepts. Marketers think of a brand as a set of aligned expectations in the mind of its stakeholders—from its consumers, to its distribution channels, to the people and companies who supply the products and services they make.

Brand is connecting a buyer with a seller

Why is brand important? A successful brand proves that you know your audience. When you know your audience, your company's promises meet your customers' expectations. Have you noticed how people choose a car? If a car is for a male driver, he probably chose a standard transmission. A female driver would choose an automatic. Why? Because of our "user experience"—men like to be in control, women like comfort.

The term "user experience" refers to a concept that places the end-user at the focal point of design and development efforts. The user experience is subjective and may be positive, negative, or neutral. Brand has a huge impact on the bottom line and provides the Return on Investment. How do you convince others of the value added by the brand? The answer is through user experience. Brand creation is an expensive, time-consuming task, meant to generate an emotional response from the intended audience. If it is successful, customers not only recognize the brand but can also recite its attributes. The brand may be described as comfortable, safe, or reliable.

Brand as a promise to deliver the same value consistently

Brand is marketed through mass communication to persuade consumers to buy a specific brand. It is used as a promise to deliver a certain quality product every time and all the time. Consider these three brands: Disney, Sony, and Adidas. Disney promises consumers a magical experience in family entertainment. Sony promises consumers a status quo through high-tech, quality products. Adidas sells a promise of achievement through high quality sporting goods. The brand experience is the marketing promise that is build into the product during its development.

Designing a product around brand

A mantra for technical communicators: know your audience. Is product documentation supporting marketing's mantra for branding? What kind of experience are we delivering to our customers? Look at product requirements—business, technical, brand, and user. A brand is described by attributes, such as simplifying, engaging (users feel engaged when they use a product), connecting, unencumbered (we offer what they need and no more). As technical communicators, do we know what product attributes we should be supporting and how do we reinforce them? If we do not know the brand, it is time to talk to marketing.

Discover what users think about your product

Supporting a brand goes beyond the usability test that aims to reveal what is wrong with the product. Brand is telling customers what is good for them. As technical communicators, let's think beyond function and aim for values.

A mantra for usability specialists: understand your audience and design for them. Look beyond function and explore how the user experience creates meaning. Use projective techniques that present ambiguous situations, which elicit people's assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences.

Use the following projective techniques:

• Brand families
• Thought bubbles (cartoons characters with call-outs to fill out the conversation bubbles)
• Sentence completion (to avoid assumptions)
• Product transformation (if our product were a car, what kind of car would it be?)
• Obituary (imagine the product/company died .... )
• Photo collage (helpful technique for visual people). Give participants a stack of photos of people, objects, places, scenes, and so on. Have them build a collage by selecting photos that, in their minds, describe an organization or product. Discuss the photos and ask what the reasons were behind the selection. Using this technique you can determine your brand's promise.

Checking if a brand keeps the promise

Before a usability test, have participants do a photo collage on their expectations of the brand. After performing the usability test, have participants do a photo collage on their experience with the product they tested. Compare the results and explore the disconnects between the expectation of the brand and the true experience of the brand.

Designing for brand—the brand ladder

A brand is intangible and exists in the mind of the consumer. This definition helps us understand the idea of brand loyalty and the 'loyalty ladder.' Different people have different perceptions of a product or service, which places them at different points on the loyalty ladder. A brand is built through the total experience that it offers.

The Michelin Tires Brand Ladder

• Values (a selection of attributes inherent to the brand or held by customers). Michelin's message: Be a good parent.
• Customer Benefit (An implicit or explicit benefit that supports the customer's pursuit of goals). Michelin's message: Safety.
• Product Benefit (An implicit or explicit benefit offered by the product). Michelin's message: Improved traction.
• Feature (An objectively observable function, detail, attribute, or quality of the product). Michelin's message: Shape of the thread.

Repeat the mantra: know your audience

If brand is defined as a user experience, you must think beyond the function of the product and aim for the values. Go beyond fixing what is broken. Celebrate what is different and reinforce what is great.

Do you know what your company brand means? If not, it is time to talk to your marketing department.

About Kasia Novak

Kasia is an editor at Raytheon Canada Limited, a supplier of Air Traffic Management Systems. In her previous positions, she was a technical writer at CheckFree i-Solutions and MKS. Born in Poland, Kasia's interest in books, languages, and technology brought her into the fascinating field of technical communication.