Digital Branding - A Phenomenon Empowered By The Internet And The Rising Importance Of Social Media

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 9,2, Maastricht University (University College Maastricht), language: English, abstract: The Internet has revolutionized the world in many ways. Recently, it seems that both people and organizations have gone all digital. This paper shall give an explanation of Reitkopf¿s statement on marketing by investigating to what extent the Internet has affected the world of corporate branding and elaborating on advantages and pitfalls of this medium. Arguably, digital branding can be a highly valuable online marketing tool if, and only if, an organization wins the challenge to understand its customers, to successfully establish a positive customer-brand relationship, and to have a comparative advantage over its online competitors. The structure of this paper his threefold. In the first part, it will derive implications of the Internet and social media on branding in general by elucidating advantages and disadvantages of the digital world. Secondly, the essay will focus on a specific aspect of the so-called I-branding (Simmons,2007), namely co-creation of brands. Lastly, a case study of the sports brand Nike will further clarify the meaning of I-branding and will provide examples for the advantages and disadvantages mentioned in the first part.