Online Branding: What Great Brands Get Right

Strong brands do not become different brands when they move from one channel to another.

That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy for a business to lose itself online. A website gets designed by one person, social media is managed by someone else, digital advertising has its own look and message, and suddenly, the business has several different personalities depending on where a customer encounters it.

Online branding does require businesses to adapt. A website works differently from social media. Video communicates differently from search. Email creates a different kind of relationship than advertising. But adapting to the environment does not mean abandoning the identity people recognize.

Some of the world’s most familiar brands offer useful lessons here—not because a small or mid-sized business should try to market like Coca-Cola or Nike, but because the principles that hold a brand together can work at almost any scale.

Coca-Cola: Stay Recognizable While the Channels Change

Coca-Cola has long been one of the most recognizable brands in the world. One useful lesson from its online presence is not a particular social media tactic. It is that the brand remains unmistakably Coca-Cola as the places where people encounter it change.

The familiar visual identity, tone, imagery, and larger brand story create continuity. A campaign can adapt to a particular audience, event, culture, or medium without making people wonder which company is speaking.

That is an important distinction in online branding. Consistency does not mean using the same graphic everywhere or repeating the same language across every channel. It means creating enough continuity that individual pieces contribute to the same larger impression.

Your business may never have Coca-Cola’s reach or budget—and it does not need them. The principle scales down beautifully. Your website, social media, email, advertising, video, and other digital touchpoints should feel as though they came from the same organization.

Online Branding Is More Than Your Logo

A recognizable visual identity helps enormously, but online branding is not simply a matter of making sure your logo and colors appear everywhere.

Your brand also comes through in what you talk about, how you explain things, how you respond to people, the stories you choose to tell, the quality of the experience you provide, and the personality people encounter when they interact with you.

That is why social media can be such an interesting branding environment. Unlike many traditional forms of advertising, it gives businesses opportunities to respond, participate, listen, and interact. The brand is not simply broadcasting a message; people can talk back.

That interaction can reveal more about a brand than a perfectly polished advertisement ever could.

LEGO: Give Customers Something They Want to Participate In

The original version of this article cited brands such as LEGO and Sharpie because customers were creating and sharing products made with their products. That remains a useful lesson.

Customers do not always have to be passive recipients of brand content.

LEGO is an especially natural example because creativity is built into the product. People make something, show it to someone else, exchange ideas, and create something new. The customer becomes part of the story surrounding the brand.

Not every company sells a product people can build with, of course, but businesses can still ask what their customers might naturally want to share. It could be a finished project, transformation, experience, accomplishment, recipe, trip, event, before-and-after result, or simply a moment made possible by the product or service.

The lesson is not “get more user-generated content.” It is to recognize that your customers can sometimes tell a more interesting story about the value of your business than the business can tell about itself.

GoPro: Let the Product Live Inside the Story

GoPro has provided another enduring lesson in branded content, as the product naturally enables customers to capture experiences worth watching.

The original article described videos that put viewers in the middle of adventures—a dog running toward the beach, a professional dirt-bike rider making a run, and other experiences centered on movement, adrenaline, wonder, and fun.

What makes that approach interesting is that the product does not always have to be the entire story. The experience is the story. The product makes it possible to capture and share the experience.

That is a useful question for any business creating online content: are we always talking about ourselves, or are we showing people something they actually care about?

Good online branding finds the intersection between what matters to the audience and what the business meaningfully contributes.

Dove: Build Around an Idea Bigger Than the Product

Dove’s Real Beauty work offers a different lesson. Rather than building every message around soap or personal-care products, the brand has spent years exploring ideas surrounding beauty, self-image, and how people see themselves.

The original version of this article referenced a well-known video in which women described themselves to a sketch artist and were later compared with drawings created from another person’s description. The point of the campaign was emotional rather than product-focused: the way we see ourselves may be considerably harsher than the way other people see us.

Whether a business is enormous or very small, there is a branding lesson to be learned. People can understand what you sell relatively quickly. A stronger brand also gives them some sense of what you care about and why your business exists in the way it does.

That does not mean attaching your company to a cause simply because cause-driven marketing is popular. The connection has to make sense. When the values a business communicates are disconnected from how it actually behaves, customers notice that, too.

You Do Not Need to Be on Every Online Channel

This is one place where I would give advice exactly the opposite of the original article.

At the time, we pointed to successful brands being active across the major social channels. Today, the number of platforms and digital environments makes “be everywhere” both unrealistic and strategically questionable for most businesses.

Your brand needs to be where it can meaningfully connect with the people you need to reach.

For one business, that may include several social networks. For another, search visibility, a strong website, email, video, and one social platform may be far more useful. Another company may depend heavily on industry communities or professional networks.

Consistency does not require ubiquity.

It requires making intentional choices about where your brand appears and ensuring that the experience makes sense wherever people find you.

Consistency Does Not Mean Sameness

This is one of the most important ideas in online branding.

Your brand should be recognizable everywhere, but the execution should fit the environment.

A long educational article belongs on a website, whereas it probably does not belong in a social post. A short video may work beautifully in one environment, while an email gives you room for a more personal conversation. Search content may begin with the question someone is asking, while social content may begin with the story that makes them stop scrolling.

The format changes. The underlying business should not.

That is where branding matters for businesses of every size. A strong brand gives the people creating all of those different pieces a common foundation: how we look, how we sound, what we value, what we promise, and what kind of experience people should expect from us.

What Can Your Business Learn From Big Brands?

The answer is not to copy Coca-Cola’s social strategy, GoPro’s videos, LEGO’s customer content, or Dove’s campaigns. Those brands have different customers, resources, products, histories, and objectives than your business does.

What you can borrow are the principles.

Stay recognizable as the channels change. Give customers reasons to participate. Tell stories people care about rather than constantly talking about yourself. Let your values show through when they genuinely belong there. Adapt the execution to the medium without reinventing the brand every time.

Most importantly, remember that online branding is not a separate version of your brand.

Customers do not divide you into your website brand, social media brand, advertising brand, and real-world brand. They encounter pieces of the business and gradually form a single impression from them.

Your job is to make those pieces add up.

If your digital presence has grown one channel at a time and no longer feels like one coherent brand, a connected marketing approach can help bring those pieces back together. And if you need help figuring out what should stay, what should change, and how it should all connect, let’s talk.