Does Your Website Reflect Your Brand?

How do customers remember your brand? What jumps out to your consumers and sets your company apart from your competitors? What are the benefits that set your brand apart from others? These are the types of questions people responsible for positioning brands focus on.

Many companies express their positioning with an actual statement that communicates how their brand fills a particular consumer need in a way that competitors do not. With or without a statement, or whether it is intentional or not, every brand automatically occupies a distinct position, relative to competing brands, in the minds of consumers.

For example, in a very broad manner, owning a BMW has a symbolic meaning of luxury, quality and engineering expertise. In another example, Volvo was known for safety features, and consumers gravitated towards the brand for their innovations in this area. These are the differentiating factors that distinguish these brands from others and impact the way consumers view them.

So many research efforts and dollars are dedicated to developing products that differentiate themselves on the marketplace, yet so many companies don’t reinforce this in their other marketing efforts.

Take John Deere as an example. John Deere is a brand that is dedicated to research and development, with products that boast amazing innovative technologies. But when you land on their website, that story is nowhere to be found, the brand falls flat, and instead comes across as lifeless and lackluster. Their wonderful history, stories and imagery are not being utilized. The site just doesn’t reflect the high quality brand that John Deere is.

This is a recurring problem in the automotive industry. I often step into pristine dealerships where I find men in suits and ties alongside spotless vehicles that have luxury written all over them. Yet, when I visit their website, words like economical, frugal, stingy and thrifty come to mind.

Ask yourself next time you visit your website, am I reflecting my brand’s desired image? Am I reinforcing what my consumers believe my brand to be? It may be helpful to take a look at what your competitors are doing to help answer these questions.

Whether it be your in-store distribution channel, or your on-line presence, it is important that your desired brand positioning be reflected everywhere it is portrayed.  If you fall in the category of having an outdated site that doesn’t reflect the image you want, reinvent your appeal with an attractive site that reinforces the way consumers see your brand.