Your Online Voice Should be Personal and Fun

The online environment, as we learn more and more every day is the new land of pure creativity in communicating and interacting with the consumer.  Anything goes in marketing a website experience.  Location is no longer a major concern in the purchase decision. Online, one store is as close as the other. The choices in our overabundant society become even more threatening to one brand when the user can navigate to another one as easily as typing a new url. There are no rules in this vast frontier of expression except for the value of the message to those who are listening.

“Talent trumps obedience, imagination trumps knowledge, and empathy trounces logic.” to quote Marty Neumeier in an article he wrote for Business Week. 

The issue does become how to keep an on-going dialogue with significant and engaging information related to your customer’s needs and desires.  The website is a community with the brand as the unifying element.  The brand needs to be an experience online just as it is in-store.  Today we have to think universally about what will intimately touch our customer in order for the customer to want to identify with the brand. 

To quote the author Michael Wolf, we live in an “Entertainment Economy”.  Whether we are delivering financial news or medical breakthroughs, our audience is most receptive when we deliver the message through entertainment.  Video technology has made entertainment almost mandatory in trying to get the consumer’s attention.   And a brand gathers its distinction in the marketplace with the tone of that presentation. 

The online communication is so personal that it becomes invasive if it you are selling too hard.  If we can entertain, we willingly seep into the mind of the consumer. The brand should think in terms of “sponsoring” the experiential content rather than using the editorial content for selling the product.  It’s more impressive to the viewer in capturing attention and gaining acceptance.   

We recognize the necessity of price promotion in a tough economy in our traditional advertising messaging. But an editorial attitude makes the online message more poignant if it can show off the true character of the brand. This editorial approach has impact in all forms of new media, think in-movie advertising for example.  Original content with an editorial tone that crosses over multiple platforms makes the brand substantially more sticky in the consumer’s mind.

Five elements to keep in mind in finding the brand’s editorial voice are:

-       Strategic Partnerships

-       Sincerity and personalized messaging

-       Customizing any form of the Brand’s product line

-       Cause related marketing campaigns

-       Localizing the campaign and the brand presentation

Aspiration has a powerful sway when choice is overwhelmingly plentiful.

So, how are you engaging your customers online?

Joanie Abraham

Comments

[Mark Burgess]

Excellent article on the importance (and power) of a brand's online voice.

[Mike McClure]

Thanks Mark, glad you enjoyed it.
Mike (Tidbits editor)