Natural Search Blog


7 Tips for Achieving Online Brand Recognition

I’ve worked for Verizon SuperPages.com for about a decade now, and it’s always been a bit deflating when John Q. Public asks me where I work, I tell them “SuperPages.com” — and then there’s sometimes this faint look of incomprehension that crosses the person’s face as they fail to recognize the name.  Oh, sure, they recognize the Verizon name, if I drop that — and they often tell me they use our wireless phone service or somesuch.  But do they recognize “SuperPages.com”?  Not always.

Why is it that our brand name doesn’t have wider recognition? I’d wonder.  After all, our site has certainly been around long enough, and has been used by plenty of people. We’ve been one of the primary websites of a Fortune 10 company!

Well, maybe we finally reached the tipping point where this is concerned, earlier this year. We noticed that the SuperPages.com name was mentioned in the Sally Forth comic strip. Did we reach brand identifiability with this?  Is having your brand name mentioned in popular culture media the sign that you’ve finally arrived — that your brand name is at last graduating into the coveted household brandname recogizability status that trademarks like Coca-Cola, Ford Motors, Wal-mart, and yes, even Google, have enjoyed?

It’s made me wonder what it takes to build and achieve a recognizable online brand in this day and age. How is it that a well-founded, major corporation like ours has worked for years, spending millions in promotion, while a relative upstart like Google can come along and zoom past us in brand recognition within just a few years?

I have some ideas on the subject which traditional marketers may not agree with, so read on and I’ll describe what I think it takes to make it into the mass consciousness.

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