People Listen with Ther Gut

...

an interesting exercise you can use to inspire the creation of your own Brand Driver.

Town Market: eBay

Yes, join me at the Town Market. Over 100 million of my closest friends and neighbors will be there. What can you buy at this Town Market, you ask? You can buy almost anything imaginable. Baseball cards and housewares, antiques and dolls, used books, used cars, new cars, clothing, electronics, tickets to Broadway shows, and airline tickets are all there for the bidding and the buying, Who will you be bidding against or buying from? More than 100 million of your closest friends and neighbors. All like-minded folks who just want an equal opportunity to buy and to have a little community fun doing it.

Town Market is eBay’s Brand Driver and its business strategy rolled brilliantly into one simple phrase. It’s the simple idea behind eBay that captures its essence and makes its branding signals intuitive.

In 1995 Pierre Omidyar, co-founder and Chairman of eBay had an insight about the Internet. Call it one of those Seinfeld-like observations most of us overlook. Pierre realized that people talked a great deal about what businesses were going to be able to get out of the Internet, but no one was talking about how to use the Internet to give market power to the individual consumer. He was interested to see how the Internet could create a fair opportunity for all consumers. Allow them get fair prices with no mark-ups on whatever they wanted to buy, with no middleman, and with the fewest people touching something along the transaction route.

I talked with David Knight, eBay’s Vice President of International Marketing about Pierre’s insight. “When Pierre launched the site, it was almost as a hobby,” he said. “ He was intrigued with the idea of giving like-minded people the opportunity to create a commerce connection. But unlike controlled Internet business models, Pierre left it to the community to evolve the business model - to see if users could develop the rules to make things faster and more efficient as they went along. Ebay gave them the tools and resources, but it was the eBay users who built the brand. Our customers are all brand managers.”

Allowing users to make the rules is what has allowed eBay to evolve into a global Town Market.

One of Pierre’s guiding principles is that people are basically good. The system of self-policing on the site -a set of simple and highly effective rules - bears this out. The values on which eBay grew came from its users. David emphasized that it’s their site. There are obvious technological and privacy guidelines eBay has put in place, but the day to day guidelines are provided by the people who come to the Town Market every day.

And people do come every day. Of the more than 70 million people who use eBay in the United States, 724 thousand of them use its commerce connection as the sole source of family income - and they’re incredibly successful. The people who work at eBay are encouraged to use the site as much as possible to experience what happens on the site on a day-to-day basis. David said, “Unless you’re on the site, you can’t possibly understand what a vibrant network it is for people. We have an event we call eBay Live once a year. Last year in San Jose 10,000 people showed up. We maxed out the convention center. We had round-table discussions with both users and employees, so that there was dialog about what was going on, what improvements could be made, what innovations to explore. We gave workshops on how to optimize an individual’s business on eBay, how to deal with imports and exports, with taxes, anything that could help our community of users. Our brand is not a super-controlled environment, which is what makes it what it is. EBay is not just an experience, it’s a movement.”

Ebay is a simple idea. It’s a global Town Market that creates incredible opportunities for anyone who visits. The branding signals that have grown out of the Town Market Brand Driver are absolutely in sync with its intent. The name, among its most powerful signals is easy and approachable. It’s a friendly word, and it sounds simple. Ebay’s other branding signals come through in the wide variety of educational tools, features and services the company makes available. Resources that enable users to buy and sell on the site quickly, safely and conveniently, as the handle implies will be the case. The site, itself, the most powerful signals, is enjoyable and simple to navigate. As the brand signal responsible for generating the greatest return on investment, its design, functionality and technology are made branding investments of the highest priority. One of the important things to learn from the eBay story is that it didn’t get so enamored with or distracted by its technology that technology overwhelmed basic human needs or the promise of the brand. In other words the technology became a means to achieving both its business strategy and its brand idea. (Pixar understands this as well. The simple and innovative stories told in Pixar movies are never undermined by its incredible technology.) The folks who work at eBay know the brand is about the people they serve in the Town Market and they never let anything get in the way.

Town Market, like every great Brand Driver, expresses all the intended associations behind the brand’s philosophy, and then some. It clearly says, “We’re a friendly and accessible place to come and buy or sell your wares”.

Pierre Omidyar, co-founder, Jeff Skoll, and CEO Meg Whitman (or "Mayor "as she’s affectionately called) have turned eBay into a global trading platform where individuals have balanced opportunity to buy or sell practically anything. Today, the eBay community includes more than a hundred million registered members from around the world. People spend more time on eBay than any other online site, making it the most popular destination on the Internet. The signals it sends have played a significant role in reinforcing the fact that it is a trustworthy and welcoming Town Market.

Imagination at Work: GE

“We bring good things to life. You don’t walk away from a tag line on a whim,” Beth Comstock, Corporate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of GE told me of her company’s catchphrase. “And we didn’t. But, 25 years after that incredible line was created, GE was still being associated with refrigerators and light bulbs in the mind of the consumer. While we still do that, and do it well, GE now represents a lot more. We’ve got six different business units ranging from health sciences to consumer finance