Brand names on the Web -- a raging success story

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass, and is also available as RealAudio at www.thereport.com

It was prompted by reading Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout, who will be a guest on our chat program, Thursday, May 18. For details on the chat program and edited transcripts of previous sessions, check www.samizdat.com/chat.html To read an excerpt from that book, check www.samizdat.com/diff.html

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Many people confuse brand with graphics and advertising; when in fact brand is what sticks in the mind of customers, the opinion they form of the content and service of a Web site -- if they form any opinion at all.

Back in December 1995, Digital Equipment launched AltaVista as a research project, not a business. It was a no-frills, no-advertising, extremely fast search engine, with a very large index. The response was overwhelming. Soon millions of people used that search engine on a regular basis and the name became associated in their minds with speed, accuracy, efficiency, search power.

According to focus groups, within a few months, the AltaVista brand was far better known and better thought of than "Digital." And no advertising money at all had been spent to build the AltaVista brand, while the company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of more than a decade to build the Digital brand.

Suddenly, this research project became the target of intense internal political wrangling. A new group that was slated to focus on software succeeded in winning the prize and relabelled itself the AltaVista Group. Trying to hitch a ride on the AltaVista brand, they renamed all their software products: AltaVista firewalls, AltaVista forums, AltaVista whatever they wanted to sell.

The outcome was just what Jack Trout, author of Differentiate or Die, would have predicted -- they confused the marketplace and diluted the brand. The products never took off. And money spent on print and television advertising for the total AltaVista line probably hurt rather than helped the image of the search site.

Soon they sold banner advertising and, in pace with the competition, added fancy graphics and new services. Over time, AltaVista and its direct competitors evolved into portals -- trying to serve every imaginable audience, and providing an immense and array of choices. And except to the expert, all those sites looked and felt the same.

All along, AltaVista let users choose a non-graphics version, which was simple and fast to load. But because very few people knew they could make that choice, new search engines like Google and Alltheweb were able to position themselves as the fast and simple alternative.

Then, last week, a new search site appeared: Raging Search, www.raging.com, catering to a set of people that the more established search engines had abandoned -- search enthusiasts: people who want quick answers to particular questions, who know what they want, can be very specific, and just want to get to the Web page with the most relevant content, without distractions.

While this is a new domain name and a new brand, it is actually the same search engine as AltaVista, stripped of all the banner ads and portal-style parphenalia. It's the same crawler, the same index, the same query language -- just a different brand, focused at a difference audience.

The look and feel is very much like the original, non-commercial AltaVista, but with the current huge index and all the power and precision of five years of investment in search-related technology.

This is a very interesting twist. In the past, business managers had taken an excellent name and diluted it by trying to apply it to unrelated products. And in the past, the whole concept of a search site had become blurred as all well-trafficked sites dressed themselves up as "portals." Now, AltaVista was launching a new search-only site and giving it its own separate name and identity.

The old AltaVista is still there, serving its loyal audience of millions of users.

But Raging.com is also available, serving a new niche audience, competing with the likes of Google and AlltheWeb, differentiating itself based on performance, and building a reputation of its own.

This is right along the lines of what Jack Trout, author of Differentiate or Die, would have advised, and it looks like it will be a raging success.

Please send your comments and related suggestions to seltzer@samizdat.com
Excerpt from Differentiate or Die
Other book reviews

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

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