Much ado has been made about the Domino's Pizza Builder. It has been praised, including here, as a great example of branded utility. While that is still true and deserved, one of their biggest competitors recently threw an oven-fresh piece of pan crust pie in their face.
Yup. Pizza Hut not only re-tooled their online ordering experience, but they also launched a slick application running on Adobe Air. Now if it's too much work to go to Pizza Hut's web site to order, you can place an order right from your desktop.*
Why am I pointing this out? Good question.
Long before many of us got into this business, someone decided that they could stand out by putting their product in attractive packaging. They were right. At first this probably worked tremendously for them, but then all of their competitors started doing the same thing.
We're looking at a similar situation today, only in a different environment. The evolution of the internet, the growth of broadband, and expansion of WiFi (and soon the presence of a more powerful mobile web) have made most products or services a click or two away from virtually anywhere. The same is true for 360-degree information about those products.
As people dig for more and more information on what they buy and online shopping continues to grow, having a great digital experience for your brand becomes as important as, if not more so than, having the right packaging at retail.
The problem is, any brand can work with their agency (or hire a new, better one) to make their digital experience more engaging, rewarding, useful and valuable. While this is quite important to do, and it can provide short-term competitive advantages, it doesn't necessarily communicate what makes your actual product or service unique and special and it doesn't give you any real long-term advantages. It just makes it easier to procure/engage with your company today. (The content within a brand's digital experience most certainly can differentiate it and make it more meaningful to people, however.)
When every one of your competitors has essentially the same quality of application/utility/experience as you, and eventually they all will, then what? Mobile? Nope. We'll be having this same chat when the code gets cracked there too.
Now, I'm not saying developing applications, making better digital experiences, and creating greater brand utility aren't important. They are. They're new pieces you need to add to the mix that will help contribute to the overall feeling a person has about your product or service (otherwise known as your brand).
But they're not the magic solution to leap-frogging the competition that many are making them out to be. They're a cost of entry to doing business today and tomorrow. They're not the long-term solution to making people want to buy your product or service over a competitor’s.
No, this all points to why the essence of what modern advertising has been about - building emotional connections between people and brands - is still needed. (But let's stop with all of the annoying and interrupting people, o.k.?) Especially as advancements in technology continue to make borders disappear and markets open up.
It is precisely why despite all the talk about this being "the application economy," having an engaging and interesting way to communicate what actually differentiates you from your competition, and that helps people feel something emotional for your brand, matters most.
--
*For the sake of transparency and honesty, I've not spent much time with their ordering tool, nor have I downloaded the application. The experience could fall short of what Domino's has done for all I know. But since the point of this post was about the importance of brand building today and not a review of their new application and online ordering tool, I didn't feel it required me to do so.
