State of the Web: The Question of Branding

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You can't brand something that has no brand. Some ideas just don't add up. They simply aren't seminal enough or valuable enough to be brands and when they, the advertising and marketing folks, try to force-feed us dot-coms as potential brands, we recoil or laugh or think, "Do they really think we're that desperate or stupid?"

Did you shop at some place that shot gerbils out of a cannon? Is that why we went to Wal-Mart and Nordstrom's? Did we really like to buy pets from a sock? Did we want to Lycos?

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Oh man, it all seems so stupid in retrospect.

Sometimes I think about what the heck I would do if I were working at one of these nonbrandable sites. What would I do to change things? For example, let's take the virtual punching bag, NBCI (NBCI:Nasdaq - news - boards), truly one of the most brand-challenged enterprises I've ever come across. First it was positioned as a community site. That's because community used to grow like wildfire. But it turns out that the demographic of community was not advantageous to advertisers. Community became the ultimate deadweight of the Net. It can't be charged for successfully and it can't be advertised against. It simply can't be monetized. It's cyber-ballast.

Then it was positioned as a shopping site. Right into the teeth of a recession? We like shopping at our branded stores on the Web, not through some engine, and anyway, people who use these engines have already picked their favorites. You can't change them with the same kind of engine; you have to offer them something more special, or a better deal. NBCI didn't.

Now it's offering QuickClick, a reference service whose principal hallmark is that it isn't offered by Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news - boards). Oh please! Come up with something better. I tried it and found it worthless. And they're still using the same repulsive woman in their ads to try and make us feel good about NBCI. Can her already! I would at least know to do that much if I were running the show over there.

NBCI has to develop a product that's worth branding. I think it still can. It has to provide proprietary commentary and proprietary features that can indeed be branded because they are useful and have a value proposition. It has to develop something different, something that stands out and would stand out without the commercials.

I don't mean to pick on NBCI. It's just that this company, with all its capital and all its management capabilities and connections, simply has to succeed if we're to regard the Net as a truly commercial enterprise. It's like Amazon (AMZN:Nasdaq - news - boards), a great test case of what has to work if the Net is to be big business.

Right now it's not working and it's a painful reminder of the Net's lack of commercial appeal, even as we like it as a way to email and stay in touch and do some search and some CD downloading. It needn't be a lost cause, but it surely will be if they can't come up with something worthy of a brand.

So far, they haven't.

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James J. Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for the network of TSC sites and serves as an advisor to the company's CEO. Non-staff contributing columnists for TheStreet.com and RealMoney.com, including Mr. Cramer, may from time to time write about stocks in which they have a position. In such cases, appropriate disclosure is made. Under no circumstances does the information in this column represent a recommendation to buy or sell stocks. While Cramer cannot provide investment advice or recommendations, he invites you to send comments on his column to [e-mail].