Brand Thunder is an SNCR Excellence in New Communications Finalist

Brand Thunder is a finalist in an award event that last year celebrated the work of such notable company’s as The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, GM, Flying Dog Breweries, Microsoft and more – and we’re celebrating now! (Read our press release if you don’t believe us.)

To be included among some of the best large and small companies out there is an honor and a joy, and to us – we’ve already won. We strive to provide solid products and meaningful results with our custom browser themes, this helps to reaffirm those efforts. So, we’re heading to Cambridge, MA on November 14 to see how it turns out at the 3rd Annual Excellence in New Communications Awards.
Okay, we’ll stop gushing now. (Sally Field, we salute you!) Here are some of the details around the event hosted by the Society for New Communications Research.

The awards program honors the work of corporations, governmental and nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, media outlets and individuals who are innovating the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities and virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, and professional communications, including advertising, marketing, public relations and corporate communications, as well as entertainment, education, politics, and social initiatives. Winning case studies are published on New Communications Review.

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Brand Thunder in its First Fashion Show – Dissecting a Unique Business Opportunity

While we think our custom browser themes make some of the most stylish and fashion-forward browsers, we never thought we’d find ourselves near the fashion runway. Indeed, last week, a Brand Thunder theme participated at the 8th Annual Vodafone Athens Collections (the Official International Fashion Week in Athens for Spring/Summer 09).

Here’s how, in less than 14 days, it came about for us, and we’re sharing it with hope that you can find new markets for your products.

As a rule, we try to monitor and improve the flow of business, looking at:
• How people find us – making sure we’re discoverable
• How we execute on partnerships – the people that help with our go-to-market strategy
• How we manage the build process to leverage our expertise, systems and efficiencies and minimize bottlenecks
• Measure the impact of the above steps on our company

For this project, the order of events was the following:
1. High ranking on search terms “custom browser themes” helped an agency to find us
2. Contract template for establishing strategic partners allowed us to quickly sign with a new agency
3. Production process in place enabling us to accept a rush order
4. Achieve a new category for our custom browser themes – custom experience for “closed” environments

Two weeks prior to the event, due to our blog entries and web site content, Brand Thunder ranked high enough for the search term “custom browser” that Anemone, an interactive agency in Greece (www.anemone.gr), found and became our representative in the Greek market. Using our contract template, we struck the partnership in less than a week.

During that time, Anemone received a Vodafone project – create a kiosk-like, branded presence on all PCs in the Vodafone internet café at the Athens Fashion Week show. Anemone decides to use the custom browser for the desired effect.

One week prior to the event, Anemone asked Brand Thunder to fulfill the project. Fortunately, our build process has been refined to the point that by shifting priorities we felt we could execute without disrupting all our work. The partner delivered branding assets, we did the rest.

What we’ve gained, in addition to new clients, is knowledge around a new use for our product – event-based, controlled-environment browser themes. Between Anemone and Brand Thunder, we created a kiosk experience using standard PCs – reducing costs but maintaining branding control for the client.
Looking back, we feel very lucky with the string of events that fell our way and made this happen. We also hope the diligence we practice in building our business helps create some of that luck.

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A Method for Entering International Markets

Brand Thunder is releasing its first European version of our custom browser themes. DJMick.co.uk is a celebrity photo site covering the gamut of sultry and photogenic people (we’re still waiting anxiously for a response to our Brand Thunder staff photo).

Targeting markets outside the US has always been a goal. Despite its steady growth, Firefox represents around 20% of US browser market share. However, market share in Europe is closer to 30% (source: xitimonitor.com). When you consider how Firefox is designed for the global marketplace and localization, and then look at our ad-based business model and realize the monetization rates of Europe are similar to the US – this all became a very easy decision. Nothing about our business needs to be geographically limiting.

To sell into the European market, we partnered with two strategic partners who already sell there (Adevia Software out of Vancouver, British Columbia and KAM Sports International out of London). We found them through our aggressive networking, both personal networks and networking sites like LinkedIn. So, while the thought of entering an international market may seem daunting – it turned out to be pretty straight forward since it is the same process we’re already using (see our blogs where we discuss our strategic partners Coolfire Media and DMB Sports).

This is a great first step toward achieving a global presence for our product. It became attainable once we found companies already selling in those markets and partnered with them. We have a belief that we don’t need to own every component of our business and should extend our reach through the strengths of others. And, as of today, that belief has helped us grow beyond the US market.

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Why Search Advertising Works in Internet Applications

There are two primary ways to make advertising revenue on the internet – display advertising and search. For our browser themes, search is a natural to include, so it should come as no surprise that Brand Thunder is announcing its relationship with Yahoo! Search, a premier provider in this space (view the press release here). But the question you may ask is “why is search the dominant advertising vehicle for internet applications like browser themes and toolbars?”

Available real estate is the short answer. A search box is small and a critical function that launches a full web page. There’s simply not enough real estate to make banners a significant element for advertisers in most applications. Naturally, there’s a deeper answer that can be explored.
Search enjoys heavy use and includes contextual and relevant search advertising. The ad is directly related to the search term used, or at least it should be, and the advertiser only pays when the user clicks on the ad, not when they view it.

With display ads, when the web page loads and the ads appear, the advertiser is charged – regardless of whether any one looks at or clicks on the ad. (Yes, were ignoring the whole remnant advertising category for the sake of this discussion) Now, think about an application that is open all the time. The potential number of ads that can be served is immense. Combine that with the limited space available in the application itself and both of these elements suppress the power of this space.

What helps the advertiser in the case of custom browser themes is knowledge of the type of person using the theme. Since the browser themes are centered on a single brand, there’s existing data on the demographics of that brand making it more valuable to the advertiser. So, we expect our partners demand some form of placement and anticipate it will come first as a value-add to sponsors that are already buy an advertising package (think sports team sponsorships) to establish a benchmark of performance. Fortunately, the flexibility of our product will allow us to meet whatever the next request is.

Posted in News | Tags: advertising, firefox, search, Yahoo | No Comments »

2 Reasons to Create Design Mock-ups for Prospects

This feels like a basic business idea, but having seen it both practiced and not practiced – we’re weighing in. It’s worth the effort to design a mock up of our product for each prospect we present to. Here’s why we think that.

Reason 1: It avoids the wrong discussion.

While our product isn’t overly complex, when you try to talk about it too much is lost. “Well, it’s a custom browser theme which incorporates your brand’s logos, color and style into the internet browser creating a persistent presence with your online audience.” Or, we can show them a mock-up of what we’re talking about. Now, we can limit the talk about us, and focus on what it means to them – isn’t that the point of every sales effort?

Reason 2: It shapes the right discussion.

We don’t just brand the browser; we add functionality and content. For example, we can invoke the sidebar which gives us a blank slate of HTML to really create whatever the customer wants. That’s too much freedom to convey in a presentation and is paralyzing.

Since we’re the experts of our product, we look at the prospect’s site and make a recommendation as to what we think works well in the browser theme. In the eyes of the prospect, we may be right or wrong but we’ve created a jumping off point for the discussion. Now the customer has an idea of what we might do with their stuff and that becomes the topic of discussion. We better understand the needs of our client are when they ask, “can you do this?”

You can see some of the mocks we’ve created on our Media page as well as screen shots of live product. Naturally, if you’d like to see a mock for your own company, we’d love to hear from you so feel free to contact us.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: browser theme, custom browser, mock, sales presentation, screenshot, start-up | No Comments »

Start-Up Business Development – Partnering for a Sales Lift

Early on, we had a hunch that sports teams would be a natural fit for our browser themes. If anyone has a propensity to show their affiliation – it’s sports fans. That has largely borne out to look at our early clients and our upcoming pipeline. With that scenario at hand and given the limited resources of a start up, how do you focus your business development and sales energy? Here’s what we are doing.

Instead of pursuing the sports segment ourselves, we’re partnering with firms like DMB Sports Group, a premier design and marketing firm in the sports industry. Given our portfolio and the data from released products, we feel we can close more deals by using an expert in the sports field and being a consultant to them – offering documentation, sales material and product knowledge directly relevant to their industry.

Putting the sports industry in capable hands allows us to focus on prospecting in new industries. Our experience is showing there’s tremendous value in capturing that first client in a market segment because that leads to other sales within that category. And since we are very comfortable talking about our product, regardless of the industry, we feel our energies are better placed in the prospecting role and creating those new opportunities.

That’s our new hunch – that as a start-up, we’ll gain more leveraging the expertise of a company like DMB Sports to help us exploit a category than trying to do it all ourselves. What’s your hunch?

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Does Google Change the Landscape for Custom Browsers?

The announcement this week that Google is launching its own browser, Chrome, could be a major obstacle for a company like Brand Thunder that is building its business on building custom browser themes – and primarily for Firefox. This is just the nature of business – the landscape changes. Each change will present some measure of opportunity and threat, but the share of each remains unknown. Are you prepared?

Our position is this creates greater opportunity for Brand Thunder. It generates more awareness in the market of alternatives to IE (still roughly 75% market share). There are already other alternatives besides Firefox. Users have Safari, Opera, Sea Monkey, Konqueror and others available to them. But Google has considerable clout and may be able to make the mainstream user more aware of their options. And, we’re betting that effort will help level the playing field meaning greater market share for all non-IE browsers.

Chrome is also open-source. Theoretically, that gives us the ability to create the same kind of immersive experience we do today with Firefox. Though, the ability to extend functionality is not built into Chrome today – so how functionally cool you can make it remains to be seen.

A bit of early reassurance was found in a TechCrunch posting which showed a reduction in IE visitors to their site and growth to both Chrome and Firefox percentages. It reinforces our immediate assumption.

In the long-run, it won’t matter. We’ll be where the users are, and where the capabilities exist. Today, that’s Firefox. Tomorrow it could be Chrome or something different altogether. We’re browser agnostic, and experience focused – connecting brands to their consumers in a landscape that’s sure to change.

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The Power of the Brand: Looking at Early Data

Brand Thunder has just entered a period where we’re not just leveraging a brand; we’re depending on it to overcome a potential barrier to entry with the end user.

Brand Thunder launched its first full bundle that includes our custom themes plus a full internet browser. Early data shows this full bundle is converting half as well as our custom theme alone. Our previous installation flow had users landing on a marketing page and then proceeding to download the custom theme if they were using Firefox, or to go and install Firefox first before returning to the marketing page – a less than ideal flow. Now, either user (Firefox or non-Firefox user) can proceed directly with the download from the marketing page.

The difference in scenarios is fairly significant. One is a light weight add-on to the Firefox browser, of which many Firefox users are familiar. The other is a full installation of the Mozilla browser (same code as Firefox, but we’re not allowed to call it that) plus the custom theme and functionality extensions and represents trial of an entirely new internet browser. We recognized accepting the full bundle would be a matter of trust for the consumers.

These are people who haven’t adopted Firefox through other channels, are trusting that Mozilla is the same code as Firefox like we say (it is), and trust the brand offering the bundle is going to do the right thing for their audience (they are). But talk about a barrier to entry.

Given these psychological hurdles, the fact that the full bundle converts half as well as the Firefox custom themes is outstanding. That’s the power of trust. That’s the power of the brand and why brand marketers go to great lengths to protect their brand. And why those of us entrusted with representing the brand have a duty and obligation in upholding the qualities of that brand.

We are striving to do so, and the early data suggests we are benefiting from that trust.

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Compelling Data and a Call for Lead Generation

It’s been a little over a year since we launched our first custom browser theme for the NHL’s Washington Capitals. That tenure has given us a solid data pool from which to compile our first case study, which will be made available via our website as a lead generation tool. (For our blog readers, you can secure yours now simply by giving us your name, title, company, phone number and email address on our Contact Us page – as close to free as you can get, but yes, you’ll hear from us for a short follow up). Note: The commercial portion of this blog post has now ended.

We don’t want to give away all the facts that are found in the case study, but one that we’re proud of is we doubled the penetration of Firefox usage on the Capitals web site. OK, we’ll give Firefox its due since it saw 40% growth over that period of time (growing from 16% to 19% over the time frame analyzed). Even giving Firefox credit for a 40% lift, that still leaves 60% that looks an awful lot like Brand Thunder contribution.

While Firefox penetration is not the goal of our program, what it indicates is a user’s willingness to overcome the hurdle of acquiring another browser to get the Capitals custom browser theme and that a compelling product can reach beyond the boundaries of your site and reach a new user. It also demonstrates a growing audience that has a persistent online connection with the Capitals. And that ongoing connection to the fan is the goal.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: capitals, firefox, nhl, themes | No Comments »

Getting Back to Start-up Basics – Refocus after a Rush of Work

Playing baseball in my youth, I was told to get back to basics when my hitting was off. It meant stop all the unnecessary things I was doing when I got up to bat, and instead refocus on the stance, bat position and keeping my eye on the ball. I’m finding the same refocus necessary in this start up.

The core items we focus on at Brand Thunder are:
• Telling our story – building awareness to our prospects and clients
• Selling our product – the calls, emails and contracts to actually sign a partner
• Developing our technology – process and implementation improvements for a sustainable and scalable business

The past five weeks have seen a total rework of all prior custom browser themes for compatibility with Firefox 3, the launch of four new clients (with a fifth coming any day) and the inclusion of a key business model component. And, all are vital to our business. But now that the rush is over, rather than relax, enjoy and get distracted – we’re refocusing on the basics. Doing the fundamental things necessary to build this business and keep doing it until the next rush of work hits, and it starts with picking up the phone.

If you have business fundamentals that you find valuable, we’d love to hear them – especially if you feel their applicable to our efforts. Post the comments here, or you’re always welcome to give us a call.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: browser, firefox, start-up | 2 Comments »