The Commons

When I first visited Chicago in the late 1970s, you couldn’t find a road without a pothole or an alley that wasn’t blocked by someone’s abandoned Pinto. Much of the near southwest side was a mire of unmarked streets and buildings scarred by riots from a decade before. Every complaint you heard was followed up with “If Mayor (Richard J.) Daley were alive, this would be fixed.” (Richard J. had, at that point, been dead three years.) When a pothole at the corner of Narragansett and Belmont consumed the front end of my Datsun B-210, I turned to my host and said, “I’d never live here.”
This was a lesson in online branding—although the Internet had not yet been invented.

The crux of the lesson: I never experienced Chicago’s  alleged “brand.” I never saw the wide-open lakefront or world-class institutions planted along it. I didn’t get to a blues bar or Second City. I never saw the functioning traffic lights, award-winning architecture, or robust  economic activity you’d expect from “The City that Works.”

Why not?  Because I couldn’t get there. Roads were broken. The L didn’t connect. And the cost of parking was—oh yeah, the car was now undrivable.

Visiting a college website is more like visiting a city than it is like reading a viewbook or watching a fundraising video. With cities and websites, brand is the cumulative user experience. It’s the experience of the user as he or she tries to learn something, find something, or do something. That experience is comprised of many components, including visual impact, messaging and content, functionality, and ease of use.

In an economic downturn, that list can seem daunting. You’re tempted to choose one component—visual impact?—and fix that.

But here’s a radical idea for recessionary times: Whatever you do, fix the navigation, too.

On a nationally-ranked law school site, it’s a challenge for a prospective faculty member to find the curriculum. On one East Coast college site, the best way to find its renowned graduate program is to Google from outside the site. Whatever these brands offer—their navigation just sabotaged it.

Ease of use, particularly navigation, is a powerful catalyst. Although some worry that usability can undermine brand expression, others argue that the two can be congruent, and Accenture’s Web Evaluator tool counts navigation and search as one of the nine criteria for a positive online brand experience. There’s reason for this: a study by the Institute for Research in Management shows that poor navigation on a brand’s website affects the visitor’s perception of the offline brand. In other words, a bad experience trying to find a list of majors and minors on BobsCollege.edu undermines the visitor’s appreciation of Bob’s College in general.

So do what Chicago did (eventually): Fix the roads. You’ll add welcoming and smart to your online brand. You’ll de-stress the visit. And, most important, you’ll make it possible for the visitor to experience your brand as you intended.

- Lee Reilly, Vice President, Interactive

Tags: e-marketing, economic downturn, higher education, interactive, nonprofit branding, technology