The focus of my academic research for our project was centred around online branding, which my group using this as a basis of our questions to ask our interviewees from different creative industries. The article I focuses on is Geoffrey J. Simmons, titled “i-Branding”: developing the internet as a branding tool“, which while this article was written in 2006/2007, it still has relevant information in regards to marketing on an online space, and potential ways to interact with this emerging platform.

The paper is based around these 4 main aspects of marketing and branding that are crucial to adapting to an online space; Communication, Content, Interactivity, and Understanding your customer base.

 

Marketing communications and understanding your customers goes hand in hand, as part of the communication process in marketing to communicate your brand to your customer/audience, and be able to convey exactly what your product/company is, comes from understanding your customer/viewership, and how they perceive your brand. In terms of creative industries like music and film, it is paramount that you understand your audience, as well as being able to find that audience. The power of the internet is that distance is no longer an issue when marketing your content to an audience, so in that regard establishing an audience has never been easier. However, breaking through the internet has never been harder and will continue to be a challenge as new content creators are having to compete with each other for attention, as well as having to now compete with the entire history of their medium, which is a growing issue in the music industry. These are factors we will be interested to see how our interviewees respond to these issues.

Simmons also suggests that another important element brands need to do to have a lasting impact on an online space is a continued interactive relationship with their target audience, which falls back into this idea of the search for attention in a space that is incredibly crowded. This is a part of online marketing that is one of those necessary evils, some referencing it as “playing the game”, which will be a key part of our interview series as it will be really interesting and hopefully revealing to see how different creative industries have had to adjust to this new reality.

 

“Googling yourself is not vain. It is the necessary tactic for managing your personal identity.” – Maya Demishkevich.