The State of Online Branding in 1999
Bandwidth limits, 640x480 monitors and a web still figuring out what a brand even looks like on screen: where online branding stands in 1999.
Ask ten business owners what their brand looks like online this year and you’ll get ten different answers, because there still isn’t much consensus on what “branding” even means once you move a company from print and storefronts onto a web page most visitors are viewing on a 14-inch monitor over a modem.
The constraints doing the shaping
Most visitors are still on 640x480 or 800x600 screens, connecting at 28.8 or 56k, which means every image costs real loading time and every design choice trades off against how long someone waits before your page even appears. That single constraint has done more to shape what online branding looks like this year than any deliberate strategy: sites with heavy Flash intros and large images lose visitors before the brand experience even begins, while sites that load fast and look consistent, even with modest graphics, are the ones people remember.
What’s carrying over from offline branding, and what isn’t
Logo, color and tone carry over reasonably well, a company’s identity doesn’t need to be reinvented for the web. What doesn’t carry over cleanly is trust. Offline, trust gets built through physical presence: a storefront, a business card, a familiar location. Online, a well-known brand can look identical to an unknown one built by two people in a garage, and visitors have no reliable way to tell the difference just by looking.
The businesses handling this well are the ones investing in signals that substitute for physical presence: a real street address and phone number on the site, testimonials, security badges at checkout, consistent design that doesn’t look thrown together. None of this existed as a concern for offline businesses in the same way, and it’s arguably the biggest new problem online branding has to solve that print and storefronts never did.
The sameness problem
A related issue: a huge number of business websites launched this year look nearly identical, blue and gray color schemes, similar stock photography, the same handful of web-safe fonts. Some of that is technical limitation (the web-safe font list is short, and most small businesses can’t afford custom photography), but a lot of it is businesses treating their website as an afterthought rather than an extension of a brand they’ve already built offline.
The businesses standing out aren’t doing anything expensive, they’re just making deliberate choices, a specific color that shows up consistently, real photography instead of generic clip art, copy that sounds like an actual person rather than a brochure, and those small deliberate choices are doing a lot of work against a sea of interchangeable sites.
Where this goes next
Bandwidth will improve, screens will get bigger and a lot of today’s technical constraints on design will loosen within a few years. What won’t change is the underlying problem online branding exists to solve: giving a visitor who’s never met you a reason to trust you enough to buy something. The businesses figuring that out now, with today’s limited tools, are building habits and instincts that will matter a lot more than the specific technical workarounds once those constraints disappear.
More on Marketing Strategy, or browse everything from 1999.
