Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

I was lucky enough to attend a PopSignal event a couple of weeks ago, and was surrounded by a few entrepreneurs who I really respect like the guys over at YouCastr and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot. We got into a pretty heated discussion on naming your startup. In fact, it was so heated that one of us knocked over his drink (that individual will remain anonymous.) We agreed on pretty much two points: naming your company is really hard and you’ve got to be able to purchase the domain name.

But a bigger question that we batted around was how does branding impact your web business? The opinions ranged from branding is just as important as it is for offline businesses to branding doesn’t really matter in the era of google juice. I’ve been thinking about some of the data that I’ve seen on branding, search volume and traffic. It’s pretty hard to find really tangible information on this subject, but there was a study done by MSFT and Comscore that showed a serious positive impact when branded advertising (display) was combined with search advertising.

Probably the coolest study I’ve seen on branding and online businesses is the chocolate covered grasshopper campaign that Grasshopper did when they changed their name/branding from GotVmail to Grasshopper. I don’t know if you remember this campaign, but they FedExed something like 25,000 chocolate covered grasshoppers to technology and entrepreneurial thought leaders earlier this year. I was in Pixily’s office when Prasad got his… it certainly got everyone’s attention! But did it work?

Thanks to the case study published by Grasshopper we can actually see if it did! The company spent approximately $68k on the marketing event, including the price of grasshoppers and shipping. In two months they got over 150 blog mentions, 8 TV mentions and 51.7k unique page views. More importantly, the Alexa visitors to Grasshopper.com eclipsed GotVmail.com and the new brand’s site seems to continue to outperform the old brands since the campaign – and in aggregate traffic to the two brands is much higher than to the single GotVmail brand pre-branding campaign.

online branding campaign results

My conclusion would be that there is still space for really creative branding campaigns in the online world. In fact, given that it is now easier than ever to track this sort of a campaign it is almost surprising that more companies don’t experiment with these sorts of attention getting branding campaigns.