The Internet's been cooking long enough now for at least a few
Web-inspired brands to become household names. You'd have to live
pretty far away from reality not to recognize Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Travelocity.com
and Expedia.com among a handful of other Web brands.
As these and other brands become further entrenched in public
consciousness, is there any reason to suppose that they won't be
extended to the physical world?
We've seen at least one example in the publishing field where
Yahoo! jumped into the print business with Yahoo! Internet Life
Magazine.
In fact, in publishing we're beginning to see hard-copy brands
extending to Web brands and then the Web extensions coming back as
hard-copy extensions. Folio Magazine, the trade magazine for the
publishing business, is now publishing foliomag.com as a
line extension of its print title with content from its Web
site.
The addition of more original content on the Web is likely to
fuel this trend. The Web extensions of print products started by
simply reproducing their hard-copy content on line. But
increasingly they're creating more original content. As the amount
of original Web content rises, there could well be a market to
repackage it in print form.
By the same token, as other types of Web brands create high
levels of brand recognition, they may well invest in
brick-and-mortar.
I started to get interested in this reverse branding from
virtual to physical reality when I passed a florist on the highway
near my home. The name was familiar: 1-800-Flowers, a
telephone-number brand entering the physical world. I checked at
their Web
site and discovered that there are 120 company-owned and
franchised stories bearing the 1-800-Flowers name.
Why, you might ask, with all the flowers they sell on the phone,
is this famous brand now operating retail florist shops? The answer
may well be that the markets for on-line and brick-and-mortar
businesses are not identical.
Down the road, I wouldn't be surprised to see Yahoo! and Amazon
stores and travel agencies in major malls branded Travelocity or
Expedia.
Crossover retailing is becoming increasingly common. We see
Disney and Warner Bros. stores, and Carnival has announced it will
operate retail locations.
We haven't yet seen crossover from click to brick. But if the
folks from the physical world can enter the Web space, who says the
reverse can't happen?