Keller & Swaminathan

Branding in the Digital Era

Additional reference: “Digital Brand Management: A Company and Consumer

Perspective”
Lotta Bäck, Edward Ingman, Dilip Lalwani, Marie Müller, Caroline Sørensen-
Behm and Carl-Johan Rosenbröijer

Arcada Working Papers 1/2018

ISSN 2342-3064
ISBN 978-952-5260-89-2
Branding in a digital environment has its
own distinctive dynamics that need to be
understood to be able to select effective
branding tactics and strategies.

With the rise of digital media, brand

building has become multi- directional and
interconnected
Digitalization becomes part of our daily
routines and it has changed the traditional
ways in which consumers and business
interact with each other.

Digitalization, specifically social media has

claimed to have transformed consumer
behavior ,with significant consequences for
brands .
Consumers increasingly spend more time on
online services to browse, store, play, email,
access Facebook, Twitter and other social
apps through connected devices i.e., tablets,
smartphones, laptops and in this way
transforming the way internet is used.
Mobile internet and social media have
created new technology based channels or
routes for organizations to communicate
with their customers, labelled as “digital
channels”, leading to digital
transformation.
A brand is a set of marketing and
communication methods that help to
distinguish a company from competitors,
and create a lasting impression in the minds
of customers.
From a customer point of view, a brand is in
essence a promise to the customer of long
term security, and consistent delivery of
functional and emotional benefits.

The concept of branding is the same as 20

years ago, but the opportunities and
channels are on another level due to the
digitalization in the 21st century.
 The traditional landscape embodied brand managers relying
on mass media channels, such traidtional adveritsing to
communicate with the taget market. The communication
was one-way communication from the provider to the end-
user with limited feedback. The audience was passive.

 In an interactive era, the focus began on customerization in

terms of one-to one communication.
 With further development in interactivity, the contemporary
approach followed is many-to-many communication.
Through social media platforms, customers are engaged in
a two-way communication dialogue with providers. This
led to the increase in touchpoints and data availability.
Touchpoints
 The growth in digital marketing and social media channels
and consumers’ ability to communicate with one another
have fuled a sharp increase in the number of toucpoints that
brand managers have at their disposal to engage with and
communicate with their consumers.

 Social media platforms have outweighed mass media in terms

of communication. This increase in media channels imposes
on brand managers a systematic management to orrganize
various channels taking into cosndieration the complexity of
the landscape. An important aspect is to focus on the
cosnistency of channels, and to understand which channels
are producing the greatest returns on ads expednitures.
Increase in Data Availability
 The growth in digital channels resulted in vast
amounts of data including clickstream data on
users’ browsing behaviour on webpages and data
on advertising matrics to information regarding
the number of unique visitors to a brand’s website.
This information is used to customize needs.
 Another important aspect is the huge amount of
data available through conversations taking place
on social media platforms.
 One challenge is the constant privacy violations ,
which can lower consumers’ trust in the brand.
Dynamic Pricing
 The same brand can become available at different
pricing based on expressed customer interests. This
tactic is called dynamic pricing.

 Various online retailers have invested in extensive

analytics that allow companies to explicitly target
individual consumers with varying offers to
ensure that they complete the purchase.

 For
instance, an airline will shift seat prices
based on seat type, number of remaining
seats, and time until the flight.
Digital branding allowed for micro-targeting.
This targeting takes into account demographic and
psychograpghic variables.

Again, digital personalization might alarm some

receivers against privacy violations.

Anlaytics engine may trigger important nuggets of

information, such as a new job or new location for
the relevant customer, these nuggets can be
leveraged to taget specfic offers to customers.
Consumers have become co-creators of
brand meaning through social media
stories and experiences shared. This
decreases for marketers the ability to
control the message.

Brand meaning is co-produced by three

different forces:
1. Firm-generated brand meaning: online
and offline marketing tactics.
2. Consumer-generated branding
meaning: consumer-to-consumer stories
through social media
3. Media and cultural influences: a variety
of new entities and channels contribute to
co-creating brand meaning.
User Expereince
Creating interface that consumers can easily
navigate is one aspect of maximizing user
experience.

Another aspect is that consumers can easily

switch from one device to another.

Apple has worked tirelessly to create an

ecosystem such that its hardware, software, and
peripherals are integrated into a single system that
works perfectly.
The definition to digital branding is:

"Digital channels and assets, that are used to

communicate a brand’s positioning as part
of multichannel brand communication or
engagement programs".
Therefore digital branding could be renamed
to Digital communication, which centres
around business strategy and brand
planning.
97% of consumers turn to a search engine
like Google when buying a product
96%of consumers look up product
information using their phones
95% of millennials (1981-2000) expect
Facebook pages for their brands
89% of consumers do online search
before buying in-store
Brand management should address the
voluminous online channels across
various decision-making stages.
Decision-making stages include:
Problem recognition
Information search
Identifying alternatives
Purchase
Post-purchase evaluation
 Brand mangers should encourage engagement with the
brand post-purchase and provide positive referrals of the
brand.

 Today, we are witnessing a growth in online retailing.

 60% of Americans for instance prefer to shop online to

avoid malls crowdedness.

 71% believe they will get better deals online.

 Amazon alone accounts for 5% online retailing. Thus,

brand managers should optimize for online presence.
The changes in IMC are impacted by the
digital era in branding.

Advertising expenditures online increased

tremendously by comparison to TV
advertising ($117 billion for digital ads vs.
$ 78 for TV ads in 2020.)
Digital Strategic Branding

Modern brand building is much more of a

consumer-centric approach. In many
businesses it is about putting the customer in
the center of the brand experience.

The overall aim should consist of total brand

experience that is aligned with the brand ́s
strategy, positioning and purpose.
In the digital world, spread of information
and awareness can occur across numerous
channels such as the blogosphere, YouTube,
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest,
and a variety of other platforms.
Pass-on publications via hyper-accelerating,
which leads to the diffusion of information.

Today, brands do not need intermediaries in

order to have a direct interaction with customers.

Digital branding is about creating and establishing

the brand’s story and presence in the digital space,
and in turn interact with customers.
Internet business are further impacted with
the introduction of cloud computing, big
data and responsive web designing, thus
drastically altering the way we share
information.
In order to create the appropriate strategy to
market and attract the desired attention
through a “two-way-conversation”, the
content, besides being shareable, should
have the ingredients to trigger discussions
and encourage followers to participate by
commenting
Digital Consumer Behaviour
Analytics
Understanding online consumer properly
and doing necessary improvements and
moves based on analytics gathered from the
consumers' online behaviors, is a must in
today's competitive world.
Analytics and especially advanced analytics
give the companies the ability to get vital
real-time insight about their customers

More importantly, it allows the possibility to

react upon this collected data, with
offering for instance personalized options
for its clients
With proper tools for advanced analytics, an
online retail company can for instance easily
map the whole purchase journey of their
customer and with this insight optimize their
operations and overall performance.

This valuable insight should also be a

crucial part of the company's decision
making process.
An effective and commonly used tool is
Google Analytics, which easily gives the
companies valuable insight about the online
activities.

The tool tracks all the website traffic and

transforms this data into reports, that the
company can follow, and based on that
insight make smart decisions.
 Online review site Yelp has been subject to
criticism after allegations that business owners
were paying the site to only publish the positive
reviews, in an attempt to boost sales and hide
negative buzz about these businesses. After 10
small businesses filed a lawsuit against Yelp, the
site made the decision to remove the "Favourite
Review" option, that previously allowed a business
owner to choose the review they liked the most
and have it showcased, as well as made content
previously hidden from potential customers,
visible.
One challenge that companies face in social media
is how to react and respond to negative
comments.

ineffective handling of such situations may lead to

negative word of mouth among social media users.

If a company fails to develop a proper strategy to

answer negative response it may have a negative
impact on a brand’s image.
Core Web Vitals
With Google’s Page Experience Update May (2021) of a
new metrics called Core Web Vitals—measures site
load time, interactivity and content stability—it started to
impact overall search rankings. It is fast in loading.
Allows users to interact with pages.

Google keeps finding new ways to quantifiably measure

things that previously were not quantifiable within a
website’s user experience. The Core Web Vitals metrics
are an outgrowth of this theme: these metrics represent
new ways to quantifiably measure different aspects of
a website’s user experience.
Relationships
2022 marked the end of third-party
cookies and new privacy regulations.
Privacy-first data collection practices are
enforced. That means focusing on list-
building and developing relationships
with customers. Brands change the
content a consumer sees when he or she
comes to the website based on what they
are likely to be interested in.
Personalization Steps:
a. Data: brands that use personalization should
collect as much data as possible to create buyer
personas for better content and targeted ads.

b. Personas: Brands and marketers must create

buyer personas that represent the exact centre of
their target audience. From gathering data,
identify buyer personas’ habits, behaviours and
what they're looking for from brands.
C. Map your content: content is mapped out to
the specific interests and needs of each
persona. This means marketers must identify
what content would be of unique interest to
each persona and map these interests using a
diagram.
Create personalized content: This, in turn,
enables brands to deliver on the original
objective: Personalized content. Email is an
obvious example. Email for ecommerce can get
really personal.
Experience personalization: entails
morphing a web or mobile application
based on the behaviour of the user – and
is a step beyond simply personalizing
content like emails. “Tailoring the
customer experience on a website based
on past behaviour is one way to raise the
personalization bar. (hyper-
personalization)
Social Media
As the internet continued to grow and
increase in popularity, online applications
are very dynamic. This new generation
redefined the whole communication
scenery, which was portrayed by the
emergence of social media platforms like
Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok and so
on, with a big focus on interactivity.
Social media allows for interactivity,
micro-targeting, and data analytics. The
following are the most prominent
advertising tools utilized on social media:
A. Video ads: dominating the social
media scene and sometimes even
considered a primary means of
communication in the virtual world. The
power of video ads stems from their
ability to target multiple senses at once.
The most known video forms include
short feed-based ads and GIFs, and long
in-stream video ads.
B.Image ads: also a widely used format which
works well with different objectives. They
work best in increasing the level of awareness
about a certain brand and its offerings, or in
driving traffic to destination sites. They are
the best option when a prompt action is needed.
C. Carousel ads: gives businesses the ability to
showcase the product or the brand smoothly, up
to ten images can be used in one advertisement
D. Collection ads: similar to the previous
type, however, takes the form of a grid-
like layout. The ad in this context features
a main component (video or image) with
supporting images. By doing so, it seeks
to take the customer through the entire
purchasing cycle.
E.Facebook Dynamic ads: Uploading a
product catalogue is the first step in
utilizing this type of ads. Secondly, a data
feed is required, it must include
information about the offerings,
specifications, featuers, availability, and
so on) Afterwards, Facebook will
automatically start matching the right
products with the right people.
G. Social media Pages: allows a full
display of the brand and enhance the level
of exposure by various audiences. Also,
the pages allow interaction with the
brand’s representatives, or with other
customers. In principle, this escalates the
process of information dissemination.
H. Sponsored ads: also known as a
promoted post, is a post to any
community-driven notification-oriented
website which is explicitly sponsored as
an advertisement by a particular company
in order to draw a large amount of
popularity
Voice Search
The importance of voice search is on constant rise. Now with
Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and ChatGPT, any smartphone
user can physically ask their phone a question. This has also
extended to the home, with the likes of Amazon Echo and
Google Home cropping up in houses across the world.

As a result, brands should optimize for voice search by

focusing on longer-tail keywords that reflect how consumers
ask questions or make requests verbally to stay ahead. Voice
search is almost exclusively used on mobile, and it goes
without saying that the company’s website should be mobile-
optimised. If it’s not, then users will simply bounce back,
which will harm rankings.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the practice of
increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through
organic search engine results.

SEO is the art and science of persuading search engines such as

Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to recommend your content to their users
as the best solution to their problem.

Brands with deliverable content do not pay for the ranking. When
the user clicks on the result and visits your site, you do not pay
Google for a visit. And that briefly describes what is SEO used for.
On that same SERP, there are often paid results; they are identifiable
by the ‘Ad’ icon to the left. When a user clicks on a paid result and
visits the site, the advertiser pays the search engine for that visit.
Go casual in social videos

TikTok has over 500 million users and is available in

more than 150 global markets. Platforms like TikTok
allow marketers to more naturally weave brand content
into users’ feeds. Brands are moving away from always
looking professional by embracing hashtag challenges
on TikTok, for example.

Video content creates faster and stronger connections

between brands and their target audiences as they
leave less to the imagination, better tell a story, share a
message, and captivate users across various platforms in
comparison to static images.
Go Live
An extension of this video trend is live
streams, which will also remain popular.
According to marketing specialists, ever
since 2021, going live became a rising
marketing trend,” Going live leverages the
fact that people working from home are
spending more time on social media. Tools
include Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and
YouTube Live.
Influencers
A social media influencer is someone who
influences others through their social platforms.
There are social media influencers in every
industry and niche. This provides business with
a unique opportunity to identify, pursue, and
leverage these social media influencers to grow
their market share and increase retention rates.
Social media influencers can:
 Build a larger brand following

• Increase company’s credibility

 Increase conversion rates
Augmented Reality
 Augmented reality (AR) is an enhanced version of the real
physical world that is achieved through the use of digital
visual elements, sound, or other sensory stimuli delivered
via technology. It is a growing trend among companies
involved in mobile computing and business applications in
particular. Besides being cheaper than print ads.

 AR ads can skyrocket engagement rates since they are more

interactive and offer a newer experience than traditional
marketing mediums.

 The best part about an AR ad is that marketers can reuse the

content across various marketing channels, making it a cost-
effective tactic for audience interaction.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is a multi-channel,
digital marketing strategy aimed at
reaching a target audience through
smartphones, tablets and other mobile
devices, via websites, email, SMS and
MMS, social media and apps. In
recent years, customers have started
to shift their attention (and dollars) to
mobile.
Mobile ads are helpful in sending helpful
location-based messages to customers at
the right time and place. This increaes
relevence.

Mobile devices are always on, marketers

can communicate in real time with their
customers. Mobile marketing helps engage
customers by offering timely
communication.
Types of mobile marketing
A. Messaging : thoruhg SMS or MMS can
offer updates and discounts based on time
and location.
B. In-App ads:Snapchat allows brands to
utilize its mobile app to targert customers.
C. Proximity system marketing (geo-
fencing): involves delivering ads to
mobile uers within a defined geographical
location. This process is called geo-
targeting.
The SOSTAC model by PR
Smith (Chaffey & Smith 2013
pp. 3-5, Business Balls 2016).
SOSTAC model is a logical, systematic and
widely popular and used tool for strategic
marketing planning.

It is a planning system for developing and

managing marketing strategies, creating
marketing plans and campaigns.
The SOSTAC framework is particularly
applicable to the digital marketing context,
as it helps evaluate structure and manage the
key strategies, tactics and actions of a
company combined with digital marketing
communication techniques
The main planning stages for a digital
marketing strategy are the following:
S = Situational analysis – Where are we now
(current state)?
O = Objectives – Where do we want to be
(business goals)?
S = Strategy – How do we get there (plan to
achieve the goals)?
T = Tactics – What tactical tools do we use
to implement strategy (details)?
A = Actions – Which action plans are
required to implement strategy
(responsibility and
deadlines)?
C = Control – How do we manage the
strategy process (measure, monitor, modify
=track the progress)?
The digital brand management model is
based on the SOSTAC model. The five
empirical company cases are analysed with
the created model. The model has two
perspectives; the company and the consumer
perspective:
Steps:

1. Situation Analysis :
- Brand Goals,
-Current Performance of the organization,
---Customer Insight,
-Marketplace Opportunities and Competitor
-Benchmarking
The Situation Analysis is needed because it
gives a clear insight into where the
organization’s current business is, at and how
the company interacts with internal and
external factors.

A company will find answers to questions:

-how are we performing,
-what are our competitive advantages
-how effective is our marketing mix,
2. Objectives
Stage two of SOSTAC’s model of digital marketing
planning are the objectives, which should state where
the company wants to go in the future. The company
should conduct a SMART Test for objectives, which
aims to define practical, measurable and realistic goals to
achieve the strategy.

The objective is based on SMART (Specific,

Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Time-related).
3. Strategy
Stage three of the SOSTAC model is
strategy, the idea is how a company should
execute a plan to get to the objectives
which were set.

The core brand strategy is summed up in

STP: Segmenting, Targeting, Positioning.
4. Tactics
The Tactics stage of SOSTAC can be explained as the
details of the Strategy and the tactical tools to be used.

Choosing the right marketing mix is essential.

There are many tactical e-tools that can be used

(websites, banner ads, opt-in emails)

what makes a company successful in its tactics is whether

they understand what each e-tool can do (and cannot
do)
5.Action
The action stage of a digital marketing plan
requires good project management skills and
active attention to detail.

This part is where the tactics are broken

down into actions and each tactic or e-tool
becomes its own mini project, requiring a
series of actions and processes.
Good implementation is a key factor in this
stage.

Risk management is another thing that is equally

as important, together with choosing the right
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The action stage has been identified as the

weakest part of the planning process for most
companies.
6. Control
The last stage in the planning framework
SOSTAC stands for “control”. The main
idea of control is that the company should
monitor their overall performance with
various activities and actions and most
importantly be able to see if the efforts made
are working or not, and when not, how the
situation could and should be improved.
The company can monitor their performance
by for instance thorough:
-web analytics,
-profiling of the website visitors and the
customers and by doing customer
satisfaction surveys.
-Continuous and regular reporting