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“I don’t like RSS because I can’t control our branding within it.”

Boyink Interactive Client

I had lunch with a client the other day, and he made this comment concerning RSS.  This particular company has a strong, long established, very controlled and very visual brand.  They are doing email marketing, sending out bulk HTML emails that are designed to bring people back to one of the corporate websites. 

In one sense, it’s an application where RSS would be a natural fit.  They’ve had requests for it, in fact.

But for a company who is accustomed to being in control—down to the nearest pixel—of a very strong visual brand, the mostly text-nature of RSS is a turn-off.

The conversation left me conflicted.  I’m a heavy user of and believer in RSS, as it lets me cast a much wider net of information collecting. As a user, I appreciate it’s simplicity and “everyone’s message is the same format” delivery as this allows me to work through new posts quickly.

But for a company posessing a strong visual brand, is the tradeoff of a wider audience worth giving up the brand presentation? 

Or, if you don’t have a brand without graphics and styling, do you truly have a brand?

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. sparky on August 29, 2005

   Guess it depends on how you read your RSS.

   If you use the Firefox live bookmarks like I do I would see their presentation exactly as they wanted.

   I have RSS Feeds set up in my Kontact but I rarely use them, preferring the live bookmarks method instead.

2. Frank Johnson on August 30, 2005

   My instinct tells me that your client isn’t understanding branding on the web. For me, ultimate branding has to do with the experience a customer has with the company and its people, not with the visual aspects of their logo, advertising, etc.

   I like to call the visual aspects “initial branding,” because they attempt to influence the customer’s understanding of the company from the outset. But once a customer has an experience with the company and its people, then that ultimate branding replaces the initial branding.

   On the web, a user’s experience with the website is sort of an intermediate step. The visual aspects can be powerful, but if the user experience at the website is difficult, the visual aspects (and what they suggest about the company) will soon be lost in the frustration of trying to navigate through the website. Or, the visual aspects can be powerful, the user experience on the website can be refreshingly smooth, but if the receptionist is rude to me the first time I call the company, then who cares about the visual aspects or the fact that the company’s website is easily navigated? All of a sudden, my experience with the company and its people has become the ultimate “brand.”

   In the web arena, user experience trumps visual aspects, and then personal experience with the company trumps user experience on the website.

   And so your client, in the interests of maintaining a powerful visual brand is making the user experience more difficult (by not providing what the customer wants in terms of access to information). In trying to maintain the visual brand, they are damaging their overall brand more than they know.

   Frank

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