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Branding is an advertising and promoting pursuit. As such, it occupies some of the most creative professionals in business. Each branding guru has his or her own idea about the definition of branding. Consequently, branding is an activity that seems to have no widely accepted standard definition. But the thread that seems to be common to most definitions is that branding is everything you do in your relationships with your customers and prospective buyers. That means that every contact you have with a customer or prospective buyer is a branding opportunity. Such an opportunity can result in success or failure. That is, the experience that the customer or prospective buyer has with your business will motivate him or her to be loyal, indifferent, or disgruntled. How well you handle such opportunities determines how successful you will be in making your brand work.

What Will You Brand?

Branding takes resources and effort. You don’t have the time and resources to brand your individual items (assuming they ’re unbranded), unless you have just a few products that you plan to sell forever. Consequently, most eBay businesses will attempt to brand their business, not their products. This article focuses on branding your business and specifically your business name.

How Do You Brand?

What you do to promote your business is branding. If you can promote your business well enough to gain recognition from your customers, you will be well on your way to establishing a brand. Here are some practical ideas for building your brand:

1. Know the market.

2. Keep your products and your sales effort up to date.

3. Provide outstanding value.

4. Use customer service to generate customer loyalty.

5. Pursue excellence.

6. Build brand recognition through advertising (online and offline), public relations, and marketing.

7. Leverage your marketing via eBay.

eBay is committed to helping eBay businesses build their brands and gives them many opportunities to do so on eBay.

Start with a Name

You start your branding when you pick a name. Pick a simple name. Would you buy a laundry bleach named Mild Sodium Hypochloride Solution for Laundering from the Sodium Hypochloride Bottling and Processing Corporation? Would you buy Clorox? Keep it simple.

The point is to enable customers to recognize it; that is, remember it when they see it. So, keep it simple and keep it understandable. If your brand is Elechron, who’s going to recognize it? If it’s ElegantClocks, it’s at least understandable.

The name should address the niche you are selling into. For example, if you’re selling nice clocks, a name like ElegantClocks gets right to the point. A name like Sathutral Merchandise Company doesn’t say anything about what you’re selling.

Keep the name easy to spell and pronounce too. No one is going to have trouble with ElegantClocks. But how do you spell or pronounce Elechron or Sathutral?

If you don’t sell in a niche but instead sell anything you can get at wholesale, use a name that reflects that type of business. How about All Goods Emporium?

Uniform Name

Use your business name uniformly throughout all your business operations. Your name should be the same for your:

• Assumed name or legal name

• Trademark

• Logo

• Internet domain name

• Website

• Email address

• Email signature

• Direct email

• eBay ID

• eBay Store name

• eBay Store Web address

• AOL ID, MSN ID, and Yahoo ID

• Froogle, Yahoo, and other datafeed marketplaces

• Telephone directory

• eBay auction ads and Store ads

• Froogle, Yahoo, and other datafeed ads

• Banner advertising

• Keyword advertising

• Letterhead

• Business cards

• Mailing labels

• Invoices, receipts, and packing slips

• Newsletter

• Legal and quasi-legal documents

• Everything else

Don’t dilute your brand by operating under more than one business name. And do put your name (brand) on everything. Everything!

Don’t Use “eBay” in Your Name

Don’t use “eBay ” in the name of your business. If you do, sooner or later you’ll hear from eBay ’s lawyers. “eBay ” is a protected trademark.

But do use eBay in a subtitle on your stationery, cards, advertisements, and the like. Example: ElegantClocks - Selling Clocks on eBay Since 2002.

Do You Need a Logo?

It takes more time and resources to make a logo stick, unless the logo includes your business name. Instead, just use your business name consistently. If you insist on having a logo, just use a specific typeface to make a typeface logo.

Remember that Coca-Cola is just a fancy typeface logo. You can easily make a typeface logo too.

You use a specific typeface in an image editor (i.e., the same one you use for editing photographs) to create a typeface logo. You can make the typeface any color with any color background (or a transparent background) and give your name a drop-shadow or some other simple enhancement.

If you’re looking for something a little unusual, try the T.26 Digital Type Foundry (http://www.t26.com). They sell new typefaces created by independent typeface artists, and each typeface appears only once in the T.26 periodic catalog.

Keep It Readable

Hey! Some of the typefaces available now are very cool but difficult to read. For branding , you need a typeface that’s not just readable but easy to read.

Logo

If you get talked into using a graphic logo by some enterprising digital artist who proposes to create one for you, keep the following in mind:

1. Do include your business name in the graphic logo in an easily readable form. A logo that doesn’t include your business name will be much more difficult to establish as a brand.

2. Have the logo created as a vector graphic. You will be able to make it larger or smaller without any loss of quality and employ it for a wide variety of uses. Make sure it looks good small as well as large.

3. Also, make sure it looks good in black & white as well as color. Then you can use it for business documents as well as on the Web.

4. Consider registering it as a trademark.

I have nothing against logos. They’re great. For a small business, however, the most efficient logo is one that includes your business name. That’s why a typeface logo makes sense. It is your name. And you can create it yourself, although an artist is likely to do a better job than you or me of choosing an appropriate typeface for an attractive typeface logo.

Domain Names

For your website, you need a domain name. One way to look at the domain-name situation today is that the pickings are slim. All the straightforward one-word names are gone, owned by someone else.

They have value because they’re easy to remember, and people actually use them to find things. For instance, if you sold clocks and put up a website at clocks.com, your customers would be able to remember your website address easily. A certain number of people looking for clocks will just type in “clocks.com” to see if they can find some, and they would find your website.

Still, millions of two-word combinations are still available. Many might be suitable for your website and your business. For instance, “elegantclocks.com” might be available and might fit your clock business. Or, how about “jonesclocks.com” if your name is Jones?

Your Domain Name

If you are starting from scratch, make your business name and your website address the same. It will be easier to build your brand, and it will be more convenient for your customers to find you:

Elegant Clocks (elegantclocks.com)

ElegantClocks (elegantclocks.com) Jones Clocks (jonesclocks.com) JonesClocks (jonesclocks.com)

Avoid extensions such as .net, .org, .biz, and the like. The good oneword names are taken for those extensions too, and the offbeat extensions will make it confusing for your customers to use your Web address. Stick with .com.

Go to the Whois search at http://www.netsol.com to find out if a name you have chosen is available. If not, choose another. You can register a domain name for as little as $9 per year at a domain-name registrar (e.g., http://godaddy.com). As soon as you make your choice, register the name immediately. Someone else could make the same choice at any time and register the name before you.

Keep in mind that your email address will be the same as your website.

suzanne@elegantclocks.com suzanne@jonesclocks.com

or

admin@jonesclocks.com sales@jonesclocks.com staff@jonesclocks.com

Domain names are not case sensitive; that is, the characters can be uppercase or lowercase or any combination. Thus, you can publish the Web addresses mentioned as:

ElegantClocks.com

JonesClocks.com

Suzanne@ElegantClocks.com Sales@JonesClocks.com

Names are important. Take some time to read about domain names in an Internet book and familiarize yourself with how they work.

eBay ID

Make your eBay ID the same as your domain name to help build your brand. The easier you can make things for your customers, the better. This will require your coordinating an eBay ID that’s available with a domain name that’s available.

If you’re dead set on getting a one-word name that suits your business, that name may be available for sale. Look up the owner in Whois, and try to negotiate a purchase. The value of domain names seems to go up and down with NASDAQ (the virtual stock market). When NASDAQ is low, you may be able to purchase the domain name you want inexpensively.

Your eBay Store Domain

Your eBay Store Web address is unique. It uses hyphens between words to make sense. For instance, your business ElegantClocks will have the eBay Store URL of

http://stores.ebay.com/Elegant-Clocks

This Web address belongs to you just as if you had purchased a domain name. So long as you and eBay remain on good terms, you will be able to use this URL indefinitely.

This URL is a good one. The eBay part is not too difficult to remember, although it’s more complex than it should be. If you use your eBay Store as the gateway to your multi-domain website, your eBay Store URL will suffice.

About Me

Your eBay About Me Web address is unique too. For instance, your business ElegantClocks will have an eBay About Me URL that matches your eBay ID.

http://members.ebay.com/ws2/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=elegantclocks

This is not exactly an easy URL to remember, and eBay ought to remedy this. If you use About Me as the gateway to your multi-domain website, this URL is something of a handicap.

Domain Prefixes

You can add a prefix to a domain name, and it’s like getting a completely new domain name. For instance, if you have the domain name clocks.com, you can use

alarm.clocks.com

grandfather.clocks.com sundial.clocks.com

and the like. (Only the owner of the root domain name can arrange this.) You simply put a period in front of the domain name and add whatever you want to. The prefixed domain name acts just like any other domain name. It will cost you an extra monthly fee for each additional name that you create this way with most host ISPs, but it might be worth it if you have a use for it. Unfortunately, you will have to educate your customers to put in that extra period.

Naming Case Study

It’s tough enough to pick a name. It’s even tougher to pick one for which you can still register the domain. Many domain names have been registered by people who just want to sell them to you.

I brainstormed for hours and checked the Whois database to determine if the names I dreamed up were unregistered. It is staggering how many names have been registered by someone else. The best I could do was sellerssite.com, not the most inspiring brand in recent memory.

nice thing about getting a brainstorm started is that it doesn’t necessarily end when you go to do something else like your daily chores. Sure enough, it came to me when I was out and about town running some errand. I thought of a name and looked it up on Whois as soon as I got home. It was available, and I registered it. It is:

Bayside Business, baysidebusiness.com

It’s true. This is not the greatest brand ever dreamed up. But it’s not bad. As I build this website up over the next few years, the brand will pull its weight and more.

But just a name doesn’t mean much. Amazon.com proved that. It’s what you do with the name that counts. So, it will be up to me over the next few years to build a website that’s valuable to eBay retailers and a brand that will remind eBay retailers to come back and visit again— and to buy books.

What does this example prove? If I found a decent name in a few hours of brainstorming alone, you can do it too. And if you find the going slow, enlist some friends and relatives for a brain-storming session or two. There are still plenty of two-word domains left unregistered.

How Else Can You Build a Brand?

What else can you do to establish your brand? You certainly can’t do as much as national companies, which build national brands with millions of dollars in advertising and promotion. But you can just use it; that is, use your name in everything you do.

You probably can’t get your eBay customers to remember your brand in most cases. But if you can get your customers to recognize your brand when they see it, you’ve done about as much as you can do. We are all bombarded with thousands of brands every week. Due to your modest resources to promote your brand as a small business, your brand probably won’t stand out in the deluge. In other words, past customers probably won’t remember to look for your brand when they need an item that you sell. However, when past customers return to buy similar items at a later date, you want them at least to remember your brand when they see it as they go through the list of eBay items. That is, you want them to recognize it.

Then too, if you’re selling items that people buy repeatedly, your customers will come back to you on eBay regularly just as they will anywhere else. They will look for your brand. That makes developing a good brand an important part of your business effort.

Not all retail sales get repeat business within a reasonable time (e.g., digital cameras), but many do get repeat business regularly (e.g., photofinishing). For instance, people may buy digital cameras every two to five years. But the same people may have their digital photographs printed by a digital photofinisher on an average of once a month. If you sell digital cameras on eBay, a strong brand may not be important to success. If you provide a photofinishing service via eBay, however, you will need a strong brand for repeat business. (Digital photofinishing is a service that enables customers to upload their digital photograph files, which the digital photofinisher then prints and delivers via snailmail.)

Ensure Continuous Visibility

You have to have continuous visibility to have a brand. If you go to buy soft drinks in a supermarket and Coke isn’t on the shelves, the Coke brand is seriously diminished. For your eBay business, you need to have plenty of auctions going all the time. You have to have high visibility on eBay. If you’re not there, bidders can’t recognize you.

Cross-Sell

Use the eBay Stores Cross-Promotion or other similar devices provided by auction management services to build your brand and your sales. These are excellent techniques and are readily available. Cross-promotion works best when the items are related. If the items are not related, cross-selling is not likely to work well. For instance, when you’re selling leatherworking products, cross-selling to stereo speakers isn’t going to be very productive. But cross-selling to leather dyes will probably increase overall sales.

Advertise

Advertising is the traditional means of building a brand. You can’t afford the advertising dollars (millions) it takes to build a brand off the Web. On the Web, the primary way to advertise is to put banners on other websites directing potential customers to your website. This is expensive too. The only way to find out if it’s cost-effective is to try it. But without your own website (or eBay Store) to which to direct potential customers, banner advertising doesn’t make much sense.

Provide Great Customer Service

And the winning brand builder is… Our old friend customer service! This is the best way to build your brand. This is where your focus needs to be. Without good customer service, you can’t build a brand on eBay—or anywhere else. With good customer service you can build a brand over an extended period. It takes a while, but it boosts sales.

Don’t confuse good sales with building a brand. A brand is about plenty of repeat sales and referrals. It is your customers coming back again and again and telling their friends and relatives about you. Good customer service is a major component of effective branding.

The Name Isn’t Everything

Remember that this article started with a general definition of the branding concept. The name alone doesn’t mean much. The process of branding is giving the name meaning—good meaning—through how you interact with your customers. Without using some of the core elements of good marketing to generate customer good will, your brand won’t come to mean anything. In fact, without good customer service, your brand could become a liability instead of an asset.

Accordingly, to understand branding, you have to think beyond a name. Branding is everything you do in your relationships with customers. A great brand is a symbol of something else. And it’s that something else that is the most important aspect of branding.

Aesthetics

As we all know, aesthetics are important for branding. In other words, your logo and marketing materials should be attractive and professional looking. Spend some money to have them professionally done. Try eLance, which you can find under the Professional Services link on the eBay home page. That’s a good place to find freelancers who can do advertising, marketing, and graphics projects for you inexpensively.

Don’t forget your auction ads, eBay Store, About Me, independent website, and HTML email. They should have attractive asethetics too and be graphically related by a consistant visual theme. Although the auction management services provide attractive templates—and eBay does too—having your own unique integrated designs can make your brand shine.

More on Branding

If all else fails, read the manual. That is, read a book on branding. Branding is a hot topic in business today as well as a hot topic in online business. There are many current books on branding. Try: Brain Tattoos, Karen Post (The Branding Diva), AMACOM, 2004. Did you notice that Ms. Post has branded herself? The Branding Diva. She offers a “Tool Kit” for the self-employed (a checklist of branding) as well as many other aids for doing specific branding tasks. And then there is Stan Slap who spoke at eBay Live in New Orleans. He claims to be writing a book. But you don’t have to wait for it. Go to his website http://www.slapworld.com and ask for the free article delivered in a PDF. The title of the article is: Fix the Future. His topic at eBay Live: Do Something About Your Brand Before It Does Something About You. And what is this presentation all about? A strong thread of customer service runs through it.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Branding is an ongoing campaign that doesn’t end. You do it by using other marketing techniques effectively, such as customer service and advertising. From one point of view, it doesn’t make sense to talk about branding separately from the marketing techniques you use to build your brand. From another point of view, however, you need to spend some time managing your brand, such as doing the following:

1. Ensuring consistent use of your brand

2. Aggressively using your brand for a variety of marketing and sales opportunities

3. Protecting your brand from infringement

4. Creating new marketing activities that specifically enhance your brand

5. Measuring the effectiveness of your brand

It is brand management that you need to evaluate for cost-effectiveness. Indeed, brand management is a necessary job without which the impact of your branding effort may be squandered. Brand management leverages the power of all your marketing activities and thus must be considered cost-effective and worthwhile.