Basic Buccaneer Branding | Team Philosoraptor

Open avenues

It is all too tempting to add this one to the long list of potential initial expenses, chalk it up to something the investors can pay for and move on to the important stuff. Of course this approach is wrong on every possible level, branding is important, equity is the most expensive form of financing – less is better– , and paying upfront without collecting any pertinent data goes against the grain of the can do spirit at the heart of internet marketing. For The Buccaneer Network at the very least then, simply outsourcing branding to an agency would be a bad route to take. Instead, we propose to use a standard approach from the internet marketing community namely, A/B split testing.

A/B split testing works by presenting users with a certain interface/special offer/colour scheme or whatever else, then changing just one aspect and recording the difference in results from before and after the change. Another take on this is to randomly select which layout a visitor to a certain page sees and to then track the results for both layouts at the same time. Prominent units of measurement in the online marketing community are click through rates and conversion rates. Of course, knowing that this can be done and how to do this aren’t sufficient reasons to do this, even if we know that the branding consultation route is not optimal. In short, why can’t we simply get some standard buccaneer themed images and go with it? The answer as is so often the case, is that the map is not the territory.

The map is not the territory

Popular in the Psychology and the Neuro-linguistic Programming communities, the term ‘the map is not the territory’ simply means that your understanding or representation of a certain thing is not necessary equivalent to the thing itself, no matter how well versed you may be in the field. We could therefore assume that simple buccaneer themed images would be the way to go based on the network’s title and the general attitude in the community, but still be very wrong. So instead, free art or low cost work from sites like fiver.com will be used in split tests to determine the community’s preference on branding before commissioning higher quality work. This could be in the form of asking users to click a preferred image before progressing to the site while in beta form, or having users pick one of two images as avatar with avatars resetting weekly (again during beta phase only). There are countless opportunities for doing this sort of testing, which will not only align the brand with the likes and wonts of its userbase, but will also aid in engendering a sense of ownership amongst said users.

The following four images are typical of the range of branding to be tested, going from the playful to the stylised. The first two are softer and more playful while the third is a stylised banner which acts as base for the fourth, an icon to be used for things such as the site’s favicon.

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