Branding your Web 2.0 product

The initial user base of emerging technologies such as VoIP, and before that, email and the internet itself, tends to be the well-informed and technologically astute few, and it can be some time before use spreads to the mass market. VoIP, you could argue, hasn’t reached that stage yet, but with 100M users, Skype can’t be far off — in any case, the dotcom boom exemplified the rapid take-up of a previously ‘geek’ product, namely the dial-up internet connection.

Much like these hardware developments, 37signals’ products, Flickr and other Web 2.0 sites all started with an essentially geek user base — after all, it’s the geeks who poll their RSS feeds every minute, it’s the geeks who read hundreds of blogs, and therefore geeks who respond to terms like AJAX and Web 2.0, and think they’re cool. They were bound to be the ones who noticed products which weren’t initially promoted in the mass media.

We can then define a geek as ‘someone in the know’ — someone who is likely to be aware of products like these before the average man on the street, or Jake Tracey’s cab driver.

Of course, geeks have non-geek friends, and so use of these services spreads, I suspect, largely by word of mouth. While Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have large marketing budgets, Flickr, prior to the Yahoo! acquisition didn’t, and 37signals do not. Companies like 37signals can’t leverage millions of users of a hugely successful portal site and persuade them to sign up to Basecamp.

Having said all this, products like Flickr and Basecamp are not intrinsically ‘geeky’; after all, intuitive usability is high on the list of their features, and their basic concepts (‘upload photos to share’, ‘manage projects’) aren’t intellectually difficult. It’s simply that in order to break into the cab driver segment, they need to be pushed a little bit harder. This is both an awareness problem and a brand problem; the two are inextricable in any case.

Without substantial marketing spend, general awareness of these Web 2.0 products is likely to take some time. The process can be accelerated, I believe, by building a strong brand.

37signals have adopted a strong brand strategy. They are regarded among their geekier users for their ruthless and controversial approach to product development, but by those and their less geeky counterparts for their intuitive interface design; minimalist, functional products and their dislike for product bloat. Their lean, mean image has successfully reinforced their position among their current user base as a serious contender to heavyweight project management tools, and I predict that it’s this theme which they’ll use to drive a wedge into the lucrative mass market: brute functionality at low cost.