Finding Success in Branding
October 16, 2007
Most engineers think software that does X and Y will always do better than an application that just does X. But it’s not only about features — it’s about branding.
I’ll use one of the applications I’ve worked on as an example: Water Fight! Now, an engineer looking at this understands that this is not really any different than Food Fight! or Booze Mail from a technical perspective. You have friends send text and images to one another.
In fact, you might think, “Why not build an application that lets people select any image, some text, and send that? Then you can have Food Fight, Water Fight, Booze Mail, SuperSpoke, etc. all in one app! It’ll be huge!”
This is false. You have the features, but you don’t have the branding. When you move from Water Fight to “Generic Poke/Gift/Whatever”, you lose the ability to market to people who like water fights. As a result, what would we have to show for sticking to a more basic, specific version? About half a million users in less than three weeks.
The same goes for What Vegetable Are You? People don’t generally have positive associations with vegetables in general. If you ask people to name vegetables they’ll more than likely mention everyday vegetables like broccoli or carrots.
Pumpkins, however, are brilliant because they are associated with Halloween. It means you can push the Halloween angle really hard which is a great way to brand your application given the current season.
As a thought experiment, imagine this scenario: you have two applications: Pumpkins and Vegetables. Pumpkins lets you select a pumpkin to display in your profile. Maybe some of them are funny pumpkins with faces on them, and you can suggest pumpkins for friends.
Vegetables lets you do the same except that, instead of just pumpkins, you have all the vegetables under the sun.
The branding for Pumpkins is all about Halloween, pumpkins, etc. and the branding for vegetables is just about vegetables. Which do you think would do better in the coming months? My bet would be on the pumpkin application, frankly.
And once Pumpkins has more users than Vegetables, what’s to stop it from expanding in the “general vegetable” direction if they think they’ve saturated the pumpkin-lover market but are missing out on the broccoli-lover market?
Jesse Farmer, CTO Adonomics
Comments
2 Responses to “Finding Success in Branding”
Got something to say?
Great post. You want users to look at your app and go “that interests me” not “I can use those features to create something that interests me” or “there may be something that interests me in there. ” If they have to search to find it, they won’t add the application, but if what they like is right there in the title they are more likely to add the application.
[…] http://facebook-developer.net/2007/10/16/finding-success-in-branding/ […]