• by Tom Hespos , September 13, 2005

On a conference call many moons ago, my colleagues and I were listening to a potential client run down the list of requirements for a Web site development project we were pitching. While the requirements coming out of the client's mouth sounded like that of a massive portal for women with kids, the Web site was actually supposed to be built to support a brand of canned tuna. That's right, I said tuna.

Unfortunately, not every brand or product can have its own content destination or wide-reaching portal for the target audience they're after. Simply put, consumers expect quality content from publishers, and not necessarily from the people they buy yogurt, deodorant, or pickles from. On that conference call about the tuna brand pitch, one of my coworkers listened to the ridiculous rundown of whizbang features, extraneous content, and Macromedia-spawned dancing baloney the client wanted on his Web site, turned to me, and put the call on "mute" for a second.

"A Dynamic tuna portal?" he asked, giving me a puzzled look.

It was all I could do to avoid cracking up.

Across the brand landscape, there are thousands of low-involvement brands from which an individual consumer might not expect much. For me, one such brand is Irish Spring soap. I've been buying it for as long as I can remember. I like its fragrance. I don't expect anything from Irish Spring other than that it should be present on my local supermarket's shelf when I need to buy it. I don't want to sign up for an e-mail list entitled "Clean as a Whistle--A Daily Dispatch of Soap-Related Anecdotes" or become a member of the Irish Spring interactive message boards. (Note: These things may or may not exist. But they probably don't, since I just made them up.) Trying to cultivate a dialogue with a brand that merits about 10 nanoseconds' worth of consideration every month is probably not the way to go when considering an interactive strategy. Neither is a giant lifestyle portal, unless your brand has invested fairly heavily in becoming a lifestyle brand.

My point is that many brands currently scoping out online initiatives don't start with the basics of delivering on consumer expectation. Sure, there are plenty of features that most consumers expect to be on any brand's Web site (contact information, FAQs, etc.), and even some features that can be pleasant surprises, even for low-involvement brands (recipes, brand lore)--but the best assessment of what types of communications an interactive experience should deliver from a brand needs to start with the consumer and his expectations.

Just as there are quite a few brands I'd rather not interact with, aside from buying the product when I need it, there are several other brands with which I'd like to have a deeper level of involvement. Where do brands fall on the interactive involvement scale? One of the ways to gauge that would be to ask consumers what they think. Would they be interested in a regular e-mail from the brand? If so, how often should it be delivered? Do consumers want flashy Web site graphics or less bandwidth-intensive, text-based information? Is there enough interest in the brand or the product to start a user community?

These are all questions consumers must answer for a brand. That is, unless you want to spend too much money building the dynamic tuna portal that no one will visit.