STEP BACKGROUND
We believed that IBM’s content on the Web must reflect its brand strategy to be effective. IBM was reaching its target audience—from strategic partnerships with online services to Web tools like the conference tracker. For these efforts to be truly effective, IBM must ensure that they build on its overall brand strategy, on and off the Web. Each effort, current or future, should be carefully evaluated to make sure it is relevant to the brand strategy—leveraging the product, brand or emotional connections that IBM wants to make. Our task was to help IBM understand the problem and find ways for them to develop content which were supportive and additive to their overall brand strategy.

STEP OUTCOME
Our original goal was re-framed with a simple question: where should you put IBM’s Web content? To understand where to put the content, we first had to understand who the target audience is.

Understanding IBM’s target audience
Understanding the compelling needs and interests of its target audience would allow IBM to identify and develop content that provides value to the audience—either as customers, business people or individuals with personal interests. Consistently providing valuable content to users would open up an opportunity for IBM to present its brand messages to a receptive audience, as demonstrated by focus group studies of IBM customers (Maya Group, February 1997). in order to distribute the brand messages to the target audience effectively, IBM would need to offer a range of content flexible enough to engage different audience members in different kinds of relationships. Some relationships could be built on customer needs, others on business needs or personal interests.

Reaching the target audience
How, then, does IBM effectively create content for this target audience? Since IBM is ultimately in the business of selling its products and services, we suggested exploring a method for measuring the value of a given category of content (say, music or sports) to each audience segment cross-referenced with the value of that particular audience segment to IBM’s bottom line. This was a technique that IBM could use to prioritize the content areas it should address, based on the value these have to its most valuable audience.

Organizing the content effectively
Our next step, then, was to figure out how to organize it on the Web so that it suits IBM’s marketing needs, and appeals to its audience of users—the original challenge of the assignment We began by placing the content along a spectrum that moves further and further away from the core product and service information. The further away it moves, the more it seems it should exist independent of ibm.com and how the brand should be expressed. On the following chart, we can see how this has implications for how IBM might generate this content. Seeing the relationship of content and audience in this way helped the team realize that the problem was about the sequence and hierarchy of brand identification and emphasis. The problem was no longer operational strategy for creating or eliminating websites. It was now about finding an appropriate brand navigation system.

Model
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