Over at SEOBook Aaron, Lee, Shoemoney et al had a competition to win a free ticket to Elite Retreat. Needless to say I didn't win. (rats...) I DID however think that the question they posed was a good one, so I thought I would share my thoughts here.  

Why should a legitimate business need to worry about branding? 

Branding is the method used to create an acquired response from a target audience based on cumulative impressions and positive reinforcement. (1)  

Brand value is extremely difficult to measure, and yet there are some ingrained trends in search pattern behavior that make true the statement "If the consumer has heard of us we have done our job." (2)

If your brand name has been carefully chosen  (if it is easy to remember, pronounce, recognize, advertise), then aligning your brand name with your offering as soon as possible is likely to garner you extensive interest and revenue, especially if you apply this brand alignment to effective search engine marketing (SEO and Paid Search campaigns).

To establish and investigate this statement, let’s look at a few figures regarding search and online search behavior:

• There are more than 6 billion searches per month on the internet.
• More than ¾ of the US population will have internet access by 2011.
• Online population growth exceeds overall population growth in the US and the composition is approaching that of overall population in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, though skewed towards high-income households.
• The number of US at-home and at-work Search Engine Users is likely to surpass 200 million this year.

Let’s combine those figures with a multi-million dollar well-known global brand and look at their search results using a robust and highly accurate web stats tool:

Traffic: All Search keywords: Feb 2007: For the top 10 keywords/phrases searched:

• The brand name alone with no additional words as a stand alone term accounted for 6.8% of all searches (132,792 searches)
• The top 10 terms all included the brand name and accounted for 299,939 searches or 15.4%
• Specifically, the main brand name and sub-brands of the brand group accounted for 12.7% of all searches
• 61% of all searches were conducted through Google (>1.5 million searches)

In the top 50 results of keyword search by volume, the only term that did NOT contain the prime brand name was a lone, highly-relevant single word term. Also in the top 50 results were people searching for brandname.com and www.brandname.com in the search bar. The top 50 results accounted for 25% of all searches (further detail is omitted due to time restrictions).

Revenue: by search keyword:

• The top 10 keywords searched for generated in excess of 3 million dollars (>8% of revenue generated)

Revenue by direct entry of brand name to browser:

• This search behavior resulted in excess of 25 million dollars (70% of revenue generated)

So, should businesses worry about branding? Absolutely. Whether a company is large or small, if they have an advertising budget, and if they are legitimate and sell a product that fits the ethical, service, quality, and other requirements of today’s market in their industry, then not aligning their product or service offering aggressively with their brand name is likely to cost them greatly in terms of potential customers and revenue lost. In short, the opportunity cost of applying the advertising budget to non-branding efforts will be higher than they ever anticipated, especially as the global market goes digital.  

1. homewithgod.com/adv/adv_glossary.shtml
2. smartbizconnection.com/advertising_glossary_index.htm