“What Is In A Brand Name?”

A rose is a rose, is a rose.

What is in a name? Certainly a rose is still as beautiful no matter what
name it might have. Even if it would not have the same ring to it.

An online name is very much the same.

Or so it seemed when investors plunked down almost $8 MILLION
to purchase the Business.com domain. They logically thought the
name itself would provide them with instant ‘Branding’.

But that recognition failed to materialize to the degree expected and
that domain is now only a memory, a footnote in dot.com history,
not because it no longer exists, it is still active, but rather because
it has yet to live up to the promise investors had envisioned.

That same story holds true for many of the best known
e-commerce brand names, like Pets.com, eToys and
Furniture.com.

The Internet has suddenly discovered that it takes more
than just a catchy name to make for a successful web site.

The name is important.

But it is not the only thing that matters.

Branding alone does not equal traffic.

Customer Service and Community are far more important
factors although those play out over time.

That is why online communities such as Yahoo!,
http://www.yahoo.com/, America Online, http://www.aol.com/
and the premier auction site, eBay, http://www.ebay.com/
are excellent examples of online brand success stories.

They built themselves up from the basic foundation of providing
a valuable and necessary resource. And it is certainly not a
coincidence that they are also some of the very few Dot.com
businesses that are profitable companies on the Internet.

Branding is important but alone it will not provide a web site
with the quality traffic that it needs to survive over the long
haul.

Your web site will need to provide visitors with a good
reason for them to visit, not just once, but to repeatedly
provide a sense of community that will bring them
back for more, over and over again.

And without ‘Customer Service’, that is, attending
to the needs of your visitors and also ‘listening’ to what
visitors want from you… you might as well pack up your
web site and just play games with your computer.