VIEW POP UP CHART - SORRY THIS CHART IS NO LONGER AVAILABLENEW YORK - While the web is a great place to sell stuff like books and CDs, it's failed completely as a forum for creating familiar and desirable brands. Advertising, after all, is a marketer's most potent branding tool, and most consumer-goods marketers say the Net will never be an advertising medium until broadband takes hold. For now, TV commercials and print ads continue to be the most effective ways to deliver a message to consumers.
But when it comes to promotional marketing, big brands are beginning to recognize the Web's charms. Promotions are the short-term nonadvertising strategies for boosting sales or building consumer loyalty. They run the gamut from one-off sponsorships to sweepstakes [see chart below].
The clicks are what make the Web especially attractive; companies can monitor the results of their efforts. It's called "accountability."
"If you think of the Internet as a branding medium, you are going to get lost in the forest pretty fast, but it is unquestionably the most accountable promotional medium," says Becky Saeger, executive VP of brand marketing at Visa, the credit card association that helped pioneer Internet advertising.
"Right now, the Web is terrific if you are trying to get consumers to take a definitive action," says Mark Blecher, VP of marketing and sales at EA.com, a games site, and the former marketing VP for its offline division, Electronic Arts (ERTS). That's why a host of major marketers have seized the Web as a means of promoting their brands.
Consider the image makeover the Coca-Cola Co. recently engineered for its Sprite brand. First the company spent big bucks on TV ads that mocked sports-star endorsements ("Obey Your Thirst") and helped lift Sprite's share of the soda market by 2.5 points since 1993, an astonishing feat in a market in which even infinitesimal gains are cause for celebration. With the onetime 7Up wannabe securely repositioned as a hip, young drink, Coca-Cola is buttressing its effort with its largest Internet marketing effort to date [see sidebar].
"It's more cost effective than going out and talking to teens on a one-to-one basis," says Sprite brand manager Dick Patton.
The comparatively low upfront costs alone might be enough to get big brands to use the Internet more. Pepsi's catalog for its Pepsi Stuff frequency-loyalty program cost more than $4 million to produce in print. Online, the same catalog cost less than $1 million to design and produce, and the promotion has lifted sales 5 percent since its launch in September.
"We don't have any interest in selling soda online, but I have never seen a more effective way to reach our consumers where they live and build relationships that mean they'll buy more soda," says John Vail, director of digital media and marketing at Pepsi. "And your ability to tweak your message daily according to how well it's working is a marketer's dream."
Kraft has run on- and offline contests designed to lure consumers to register for its interactive kitchen, which recommends recipes to a person with nothing in the house but chicken, cheese and rice. The online contests yielded a far higher number of registered users than did the offline version. The online promotion's real value for Kraft is the database it assembled; Kraft will be able to return to its list of registered users over and over to test new products and campaigns. In exchange, the company will send its customers e-coupons and other offers. "This is not something I could do by direct mail, because of the cost," says Jeff Shirley, who heads Kraft's e-promotions group.
So, given the Web's effectiveness in promotion, and failure - so far - as a branding medium, why do so many agencies and Web publishers keep trying to get clients to incorporate the Net in their branding strategies?
It's all about money. Interactive agencies are pushing branding on clients because marketers that control the brand also control
