Amazon VS Barnes & Noble
Most people are aware of importance of putting a brand name. According to The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, written by Al Ries and Laura Ries, there are certain ways to name and build up a brand for a product, a service, a company, or an on-line firm. The authors mentioned that one of the biases toward typical marketers in a brand is that they believe a brand and an Internet brand are inextricable: registering an existing brand name on a Website can be an Internet brand. It could be possible to believe this statement because Internet has become the easiest way to develop your own business, and yet it is powerful enough to kill your brand if an Internet brand is less powerful than an existing brand. However, I do not advocate melding an existing brand with an Internet brand. A good example is a book business, which is one of homogeneous categories. Yet Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com have pursued different brand strategies.
Amazon.com was established in the late 1990s, and its primary scope of business was to sell books on the Internet. When Amazon.com was introduced, many book buyers thought that Books.com, one of the biggest competitors on the initial battle and now belonging to Barnesandnobel.com, was going to be more popular due to ease of recalling a word or they rather wanted to visit any bookstores near their house. In order to destroy the initial perception of shopping a book on the Internet, Amazon.com needed a unique brand image. The image Amazon.com created was directly from the actual image of Amazon, a huge and giant river in South America. This was able to build credibility between Amazon.com and potential prospects in fact that Amazon.com is able to deliver any books they want at an affordable price. Nowadays Amazon.com wants to expand its product categories and sell entertainment products, such as DVDs and CDs, on the Website. There is no problem to sell those products under the same Internet brand because its core brand is not merely for a book, but an entertainment. Apparently, the brand, Amazon.com, has sufficient condition for being a good brand based on the brand criterion – memorability, meaningfulness, likability, transferability, adoptability, and protectability. All scores should be high enough, and the brand has competitive advantages against competitors.
What is the biggest bookstore chain in U.S.? The answer should be Barnes & Noble. Theoretically, there is synergy effect when two or more organizations coordinate together than when they work separately. So Barnes & Noble’s physical bookstores with an on-line bookstore could have created a successful story. The first step Barnes & Noble pursued was to put its brand on a Website – www.barnesandnoble.com – because the existing brand was well established on the off-line market. However, many potential book buyers had difficulty to type its web address and often put a wrong web address accidentally so that they either landed a wrong Website or saw an error message on the web browser. Once experiencing this incident, they never intend to visit the Website anymore. What Barnes & Noble had done to solve this problem was that they registered and acquired another Website; one is www.bn.com and the other is www.books.com. In fact, none of them met The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. It is difficult to figure out what bn.com stands for unless net surfers type and access the Website. Moreover, a name of books.com abuses the law of the common name. Apparently, books.com does not carry on the image of Barnes & Noble. Speaking of importance of a brand, its Internet brand does not have one single and unique image.
Theodore Levitt mentioned on his book, The Marketing Imagination, that it is important to establish a core business. The initial business model of Amazon.com was in a book category. What they discovered was that a book is a homogeneous product and this is not a core business they want to stick with. These days a core business Amazon.com is in is an entertainment business, and its Internet brand well represent the image of the core business. On the other hand, Barnes & Noble has clearly been in a book category and attempted to carry on its existing image on a Website. As a result, the Internet brand evaporated the existing brand image. What if Barnes & Noble uses the Internet as a powerful medium? The image of the Internet brand will be the same as what customers have felt on the bookstore. However, what Barnes & Noble did was that Internet brand could be a business opportunity and a powerful medium: you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Creating one single brand identity will rejuvenate Barnes & Noble in order to compete with Amazon.com.
Montiks