Seems like the luxury Brand debate is coming to an end. Luxury Brands often do have a problem with the transparency and accessibility of the web. Because they do have a reputation to protect. And they need to stay exclusive.

However this does not mean luxury Brands can ignore the the fast evolving changes in digital branding. Research shows that the luxury consumer is ready for 2.0 and they do have very high expectations.

Not meeting this expectations will definitely harm your brand. For a luxury brand, just ‘keeping up’ is not enough. You have to be outstanding.

Beth Uyenco, Research Director for Microsoft Advertising comes with the following Luxury Brand Engagement Model:

• ‘Awareness’ To stay in line with the offline communications, and to deepen the brand experience with interaction, your web presence needs to be of top quality.
• ‘Admiration’ Luxury Brands need to exceed expectations and do also have to communicate on an emotional level.
• ‘Exploration’ Similar to the in-store communications. Luxury customers will want a personalizes way of exploring the Brand and its products.
• ‘Consideration’ After the exploration phase, it is important to create engagement. In this stage it is very important to know who your future customer is, to deliver an exceptional service and to invite the customer to join the Brand.
• ‘Purchase’ Integration of offline and online will give the possibility to enrich the purchase experience. It is about helping to buy more efficient and/or making the purchase a remarkable moment.
• ‘Ownership’ There are many digital ways to keep and strengthen the relations with your exclusive customers.

(Thanks to Microsoft Advertising and frankwatching.com )

People are spending more and more time on the Internet, right? But the front runners, the heavy users are more and more facing the problem of information overload. They are disconnecting in stead of connecting.

The next trend is going Off line.

We will see more and more (lab)topless meetings, topless holidays etc. And people are trying to find ways to use their free time more effectively (lifehacking). Gmail labs comes with a new feature the TakeABreak option which effectively removes you from all Gmail functions for 15 mins.

For Brands this trend is one to consider. Besides the fact that being relevant will be the only prevention against customers disconnection with your Brand. Brands have to start thinking about how to offer disconnecting experiences, lifehacking widgets and more TakeAbreak tools, products and the like. Customers will love you for it.

It is about a delivering sounds, sights, smells… for a well deserved holiday . It is not about selling it there. It is about people taking it home in their systems. That’s what I call a good Brand association.

It is possible to protect your Brand name in Google Adwords.

A nice example you find if you try to make a text-ad with the term  “Euro 2008″ in it. You get the following message (see picture):

Trademarked Term.

Due to trademark reasons we do not allow advertisers to use “Euro 2008″ in their Google Adwords ads.

If this is a wise decision for all brands, I don’t think so. It has an effect on your distribution which you should consider. However it can give you some Brand control.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to get relevant traffic to your website. You only pay a commission when this traffic is giving some result.

I always compare affiliate marketing with offline retail. Retail is making money by selling your product and keeping a part of the revenue. For Brands it is always wise to have this distribution channel in place. But just like with offline retail you must have a strategy.

When you are for example a luxury brand. You only want to see your product sold in exclusive shops. Otherwise you harm your brand. On the Internet this issue is even more relevant.

Good affiliate networks always let you, as advertiser, review each website to decide if a website is a suitable match for your brand. But still this is not enough. We have seen examples of big brands getting in very bad places. (check German examples here).

To prevent Brand damage you should always manage your affiliate programs properly. Is there anything strange going on in your program. Affiliateblog.nl (in Dutch) comes with a lot of things you should look at. In short, ask yourself this questions :

• Check your top-10 affiliates. Do you know them? Where do they get their traffic from?
• Check your stats. Are there any affiliates delivering huge amounts of traffic with a low conversion and/or high bounce rate?

To start with affiliate marketing in Switzerland you can start with Tradedoubler.
More basic info about affiliate marketing on wiki.

When you look at the structure of digital companies you often see something like a ‘labs’. Nice thing about these labs is that you create a platform for innovation and that you share this process with the outside world. If done properly it is a great tool in product development and it also has growing involvement as a side effect.

A good ‘lab’ is more than just asking people to send in ideas. It is about sharing information and asking for feedback from experts or consumers.

10 examples of labs:

1. TBWA has a Media Arts Lab, you can find it on TheBigWhatAdventure.com. Besides that the website is a sleep (last update from 24 January 2007) I do not really consider this a Lab. It seems more a ’send in an idea’-thing like openad.net. Unfortunately it has nothing to do with product/advertising innovation. Sharing the process of innovation in advertising could give TBWA (or any other traditional agency) some valuable feedback and involvement from digital experts.
2. The famous Google labs now has a sister called Google creative lab. It is all about Google trying to serve the Branding market. And, as you can read, it is looking for collaboration with advertising agencies. Interesting project, curious when we get more insights.
3. Msn adlab. I like the Coming soon! parts. The video hyperlink tool looks similar to videoclix.tv . I don’t see really experimental stuff though.
4. Advertising Lab. More like a blog about The future of advertising. But the blogger is working for an ad agency which gives it a lab function.
5. American express is doing nice things within their Labs. They are even transparent in their discontinued experiments.
6. Nokia Trends Lab. Typically a consumer lab. Inspiring project. Urges creative thinkers to use mobile technology.
7. BBC Innovation labs. Series of creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams of professional creative technologists, application designers, software developers and interactive media designers, working across both Future Media & Vision platforms.
8. Swiss mobile labs. (I mentioned this one before)
9. Innovationlab.dk
10. and of course Liftlab.com

If you know more, feel free to mention.

To get some inspiration it is always nice to look at award winning campaigns. This week I found the Webby awards in New York and the Belgian Cyber Lions Awards.

With the Webby Awards, NYtimes.com was the big winner also for the NYT style magazine video’s. The Obama “Yes We Can” video-clip is a winner. And The Onion wins seven awards for their webvideo’s and podcasts. (thank’s to webwereld.nl).

I think we can conclude that video is becoming really important these days. In this respect I like to get some special attention for Viva la Creation! (also a webby winner). It is a video remix project. With their tool called jumpcut, anybody can remix video.

When video remixing gets mainstream think about the possibilities for user generated content but also about again losing brand control. Anybody can take your video-commercial and make his/her own version.

In these days it is difficult to protect your brand against bad publicity. Everybody can say anything on any platform. It is impossible to dictate communications around your brand. Brands with the illusion of control are way behind. As explained on many other blogs bad news is spreading fast on the Internet. Much faster than good news. Here is a nice example of how to prevent this:

This Wednesday I was complaining about netvibes on twitter because netvibes seemed down for more than a day and I just had directed some prospects to my public page. Normally when I have something to say about a company I do notice them adding @company in my tweets. Never did I get any respond. It seems like most companies are using twitter for pushing in stead of interacting.

But with netvibes I did not. What they did is they noticed me complaining (using Twitter track I suppose) and asked me to get in contact. In10 minutes the problem was solved.

Think about what this did with my brand perception. And the perception of others following my tweets…