Noise, More Noise and the Value of Brand

I met yesterday with Peter Pezaris, president of social media site Multiply. Multiply is a communication and media sharing site that focuses on one’s immediate contacts (family and friends) and those once removed. I previously wrote about the company here.

Multiply got started around roughly the same time as MySpace but is playing tortoise to MySpace’s hare-on-speed (or crack if you prefer). Pezaris told me that the site has about 3.5 million monthly uniques and that its traffic is growing steadily. As I was driving to meet Pezaris for lunch I thought that the site, whose tools and functionality are impressive, really lacks a brand identity and that’s its central challenge.

Pezaris and I talked about the difficult task of translating the site’s somewhat complex user proposition – communication and media sharing with a selected group of contacts – into a simple marketing slogan/concept. The site is launching a new-and-improved version next Monday.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about the value and role of brand in crowded online segments recently. I don’t know whether I’m tired or precisely what . . . It just seems like everything is getting a lot more noisy of late with more and more companies and their widgets entering the market weekly, making grandiose but similar-sounding claims.

Behold, again, the “Web 2.0″ gallery.

Take comparison engines as an example. A new shopping site launches every couple of weeks it seems, with many of them making similar claims about breadth, depth or comprehensiveness (See, e.g., Pronto and TheFind). My belief is that the more noise there is in a particular segment the more people fall back on familiar sites and habitual behaviors. So the paradox, my theory goes, is the more competitive and crowded a segment, the more the incumbents and established players benefit.

Here’s some data on market share for selected shopping sites (I chose the sites) from Hitwise that was provided to me by Research Director LeeAnn Prescott:

This obviously doesn’t capture the total online shopping universe. But among the sites I asked Hitwise to compare, look at Amazon at 50.7% market share. Amazon isn’t exactly a comparison engine but it does compete with them for consumer traffic around product search.

I would argue that Amazon has that market share because of its longevity but also because the site has a bona fide brand, whereas most of the other sites do not. Shopping.com isn’t so much a brand as a great URL.

Feel free to disagree with me.