Nearly every successful company, certainly every incredibly successful company, has a branding strategy. Each of these companies tries very hard to associate themselves with one product, one idea, one message. Everything else they do is extra.
For Starbucks, it’s quality coffee, and the feeling of belonging (being the ‘third place’ as they call it). Baristas are supposed to make an effort to learn your name, know your drink, and even chat you up. They also build that sense of belonging by having their own lingo. If you go to a ‘real’ coffee shop after patronizing Starbucks for a while, you will probably be ostracized by the employees there; they’ll recognize you as a Starbucks person as soon as you place your order, and they might even correct you so that you understand that “what Starbucks calls a macchiato isn’t a real macchiato.” Are you going to go back there next time, or are you going to return to Starbucks, where they understand you and are nice to you? Starbucks wants so much to be associated with quality coffee that they closed all of their stores for two hours nationwide, to re-train all of their employees. If you think that was anything other than a PR stunt, think again. It would have been not only easier but certainly less expensive in terms of lost business for them to offer a rotation of training sessions so some employees could always be working while others were receiving training, but the press and image that Starbucks gained from that stunt more than paid for itself.
For Apple, they try hard to associate themselves with being hip, smart and having intuitive user interfaces. Their tactics are, in my opinion, more obvious than Starbucks’ because you can tell that they are trying hard to be hip and look smart just by watching their commercials — but it still works. By making their gadgets sleek and not clunky, some would even say ‘sexy,’ and repeating the word intuitive enough times, users have bought the idea that Apple’s user interface designs are intuitive to use, even when they are not. The interface may have a shallow learning curve, but that’s not the same thing as being intuitive — but it doesn’t matter.
For YouTube, they have obviously become synonymous with online video sharing. They aren’t even completely legal, but they make video sharing incredibly easy, and it’s obvious that that’s where they focus most of their energy, because the rest of YouTube is pretty crappy, but it doesn’t matter because when people think of online video, they think of YouTube, and that’s exactly where they need to be. The same applies for Google and search, Flickr and photo sharing, etc.
At Grooveshark, we obviously need to become synonymous with online music. We want to be your one-stop-shop for everything music related, and when you think music we want you to think of Grooveshark. The first hurdle we face is the name: it’s not very memorable. When I first heard of Grooveshark, I later tried to look it up as “Media shark” and then when that didn’t work, I tried “Music shark.” The next hurdle is the competition: there are dozens of other sites with more resources than us trying very hard to become synonymous with music, too. I believe we still have a chance, because we have a stellar team and a growing resource pool, but we need to stay on track and focus on the music before we get carried away with the “extras” such as the really social-networking heavy stuff. We have to remember our brand and concentrate our effort on that part of the site first and foremost. If we do that, we’ll make it.
This long lecture is my roundabout way of announcing that I have changed the url of my blog from http://wanderr.com/grooveshark/ to http://wanderr.com/jay/. This is of little consequence to most of you because I have my server set up to automatically 301 redirect requests from the old URL to the new one for the foreseeable future. As you should be able to guess by now, I’m doing this for the sake of branding. The insights and ramblings that I share here are more for the Jay Paroline:developer brand than the Grooveshark:online music brand. I started with wanderr.com/grooveshark/ in the hopes that I could coerce my colleagues to all use that as a blogging platform, but of course we are all too independently minded for that, so we all have our own blogs. I think that actually works out better because now we can compete to see who gets the most blog hits. Right now I’m in 2nd place because Travis has been blogging much longer and he writes about Vim, one of the least intuitive tools ever created (too bad it’s so darn useful!), so there’s plenty to write about and plenty of people searching for help with the thing, and quite honestly his blog is a valuable resource in that regard. Nevertheless, I am catching up!
In closing: Now would be a great time to update your bookmarks. The longer you wait, the more likely you are to forget; Especially if you are as forgetful as I am. Losing your memory is not a fun experience, trust me.