Part 2: Brand, simplicity marketing and the innovative

How does a company where the product or service experience is, by definition, offline, use the Internet to brand?
Image and brand building now have to occur mostly off line. (I could not make a good Coke commercial for the Internet until I could make my target consumer laugh or cry.) So the Net today is focused more on the behavior and purchase side of the marketing equation.

This, however, will drastically change as Personal Video Recorders destroy TV as we know it today and as the Web goes broadband allowing true full motion sight and sound marketing.

Isn't the "new" role of the Internet in initiating more customer-oriented marketing simply reaffirming old (relationship) marketing principles, or is there something special that the Internet adds to marketing?
My definition of a brand is the capitalized value of the trust between a customer and a firm. This has not changed. However, how we build and enhance that trust is changed by the ways in which the Net allows us to enhance the relationship with a customer.

I give American Airlines permission to voice mail and e-mail me updates on my flights on the day of departure. I want that information and I trust American not to abuse it. My relationship is thus stronger today than when I had to call an 800 number to find out what was happening.

And can you talk about "Simplicity Marketing" and what it means in terms of how a company must market to its customers?
The focus today must be on making the consumer's life easier and less stressful. Brands that win in this decade will be the ones that provide these benefits in all kinds of areas.

When the corporations controlled marketing, not the consumer, they proliferated choice, options and categories that worked when we were one household wage earners and life was simple. Today, less that one in four US households is a traditional family - husband, wife and kids at home.

Today, two wage earner households are stressed for time and do not have the slack to save coupons, compare cell phone pricing plans or take a Saturday to go car shopping and visit four or five dealers. The problem is most marketers are stuck back in the old world while their customers have moved to a new pattern of living.

Is there a parallel between this idea of simplicity marketing and the growth of self-contained networks and all-in-one sites like AOL, Yahoo! and others, where the consumer is invited to take up residence in just a part of the Internet, and never needs to explore the rest?
Sure, AOL was a great execution of Simplicity Marketing. Don't worry about ISP's, browsers and the complexity of the Internet, just sign up with Uncle Steve Case and get all you need at one price in one location with no complexity. AOL is the Honda Accord of the Net. Not glitzy or high performance like a BMW but simple and reliable for the mass audience. The next step up is My Yahoo and then you get up to the techies who are really into the permutations of all Net technologies.

So given the dynamics of the Internet and technology change, can you really research it using conventional research techniques - by the time the results are published, everything's changed?
Researching the really new and innovative is the most difficult thing you can do. We can only relate to what we know. The Palm PDA would probably have researched very poorly because we would not have understood the real benefits.

Same with the Personal Video Recorders, they so transform the TV experience that it is difficult to convey the experience. These kinds of breakthroughs depend on passion, intuition and guts on the part of the innovator and on the word of mouth of the early adopters. Research does little here.

Thank you for all your insights!