Search brand management - managing brand value through search

Eli Feldblum says that branding is dead … almost. Every now and then someone comes out of the woodwork and beats up on branding. It seems to be a rite of passage for some online marketers. There is a theory that holds if you beat up on someone else or their pet idea you’ll attract some attention and become newsworthy.

He has argued that it’s good for social media when SEOs spam their linking resources. He speaks at conferences. Barry Schwartz has blogged about him. He once worked for Did-It (shades of Dave Pasternack!).

I don’t agree with Eli’s assessment of branding’s value. He doesn’t seem to have much of a brand in search (you don’t really find anything useful or interesting when you search on his name — just lots of sites that mention him for various reasons). Then again, there are many opinions about what constitutes a brand so I don’t blame Eli for being confused on the topic. You just have to love the Ickipedia definition about brand being a “customer experience represented by a collection of images and ideas”.

Hm.

Branding is not about the customer experience. It’s about identifying yourself, your company, and/or your products and services with a value that is distinguished from other valued people, companies, products, and services. There is only one Michael Martinez who writes about SEO Theory but there are other Michael Martinezes out there — including a photographer in Houston, a couple of political science professors, some other bloggers, even a couple of other published authors (not to mention at least one professional athlete and a journalist). All those other Michaels have shaped brands around themselves just as I have shaped a brand around me.

My brand is not about customer experience. It’s not about images and logos. It’s really not even about ideas (through the years I have built readerships by writing on Xena/Hercules, J.R.R. Tolkien, Business Basic programming, and SEO Theory) — as I didn’t initiate or assume any formal leadership roles for those ideas. Most people are more likely to have heard of Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey than they are to have heard of me (and he has probably sold more books, although with over 1,000,000 downloads my eBook Parma Endorion puts me in the respectably widely read category).

My brand is me. If you’re familiar with me you have a pretty good idea of what to expect regardless of what I’m writing about. I had a personal blog for over a year where I shared all sorts of random thoughts (including some personal viewpoints I probably should have kept to myself) in what some people call my “trademark conversational tone”. I don’t control search engine optimization so my brand is not search engine optimization (nor does it belong to anyone else).

If there is a definitive online authority for branding, it may be BrandWeek but they don’t actually offer a glossary for people to use. They don’t provide any tutorials or introductions to branding. You either know what it is or you don’t.

A brand raises expectations, creates visibility, and carves out a niche. Canon may or may not make better copiers but Xerox is the photocopying company. When most people think of photocopy brand names, they are more likely to suggest Xerox than Canon. Xerox invented the process and devoted millions of dollars to conditioning writers and journalists to use “photocopy” or similar words instead of “xerox” when speaking about the process because they wanted to associate different expectations with the name Xerox than photocopy.

Actually, they were just trying to hang on to a trademark and in the process lost the majority share of the photocopier market. I guess they achieved their goals as they still own the Xerox trademark, so bully for Xerox.

Personally, I’d rather be known as those copier guys who control 80% of the market. Back in the 1990s, when “open standards” and “open source” were still dirty words in the Microsoft-dominated world of business computing, UNIX advocates took great delight in pointing out that Microsoft Windows was a proprietary operating system. I distinctly recall one Microsoft advocate posting an “interesting” follow up to an email discussion list where I pointed out the proprietary nature of Microsoft’s systems. He was in the process of adopting the buzzwords “open source” and kept associating them with Microsoft.

That’s the value of brand. Microsoft’s loyal business partners often thought of Microsoft’s applications as being open simply because so many people were using Microsoft products. Microsoft set the standard, although Microsoft did not define the standard.

Fortunately for the business community UNIX systems have become much more affordable and there are now many people who have some ability to support UNIX systems (although UNIX is not nearly as fault-laden as Microsoft’s proprietary software).

But I digress. If you think about SEO theory you’ll more than likely think of this blog. If you search for “seo theory” on search engines you’ll more than likely find this blog listed at the top or near the top. I’ve built a lot of brand value for this blog in the “seo theory” name space. That was intentional because branding works so well in search.

When you create brand value, people search for variations on the brand. SEO Theory’s search referrals include many variations on the expression “seo theory”. They represent a growing field of inquiries into a topic that languished as an occasional category post on a few SEO blogs until I decided to take on the challenge of writing solely (or almost solely) about search engine optimization theory. Of course, one might reasonably ask what those searchers expect to find. In some cases it’s clear they expect to find this blog (or a specific post from this blog). In other cases, it appears to me that people are just searching to find more information on the topic.

Establishing search brand value doesn’t have to mean controlling a name space entirely. But it does mean you have to establish a clearly identifiable presence in that name space. When people associate the name space with you, that’s great; to brand successfully, however, you have to associate the name space with yourself before others will do it. It’s better to be the first one to stake out a niche in a name space than to wait until the competition has become fierce.

Yet even when a niche has become hyperoptimized you can look for opportunities in the secondary niches that are spawned by growing interest in a topic. That is, ten years ago there was relatively little search interest in “seo” compared to today (we have to extrapolate from relatively recent trend data). And there was no interest in the topic of “seo theory”. But now there is growing search interest in “seo basics”, “seo forums”, “seo theory”, “seo career”, and many other related topics.

The pattern is repeated across many industries, many topics. You start out with a single topic and as interest in the topic builds up new topics are spawned in a search cascade effect. Each new query space can potentially spawn other related query spaces. The process extends over years but it tends to reinforce the value of a brand rather than diffuse or diminish that value. Since there is no specific “SEO” brand the brand belongs to the industry (think of “steel”, “fishing”, “mining”, and even “brand”).

Converting an industry brand to a private brand is virtually impossible. Few if any people have ever succeeded in doing that, and the process is certainly not consistently replicable. It would be resource-intensive and not worthwhile. But hanging private brands off of industry brands is economically feasible and it works well in the search channels. There is a new world of opportunity that the SEO industry is only just beginning to glimpse. Search brand management may in fact become a buzzword by the end of 2008 or 2009 (or some very similar expression).

Note: Hitwise used the expression “search brand management” in a 2006 white paper. They rank pretty well for the expression “search brand management” but it remains a relatively uncompetitive name space.

It’s up to you and me to decide whether that remains the case.