Online Branding By Glaceau

Glaceau is the line of products distributed by Energy Brands, Inc. The brand image behind Energy Brands, Inc, and Glaceau is to provide the alternative to ordinary bottled water. The marketing effort grew from 1996 into a success in 2005 which launched a new marketing category in the beverage industry called “enhanced water”.
They are also noted for their humorous descriptions on bottles. Glacéau’s slogan is “hydrate responsibly”.

Glaceau provides a branded house strategy within its brand portfolio mainly because of the rich similarities and consistency’s of font styles, copy tonality, and package designs. On their Web site, all the products take on similar typefaces in their individual logos. They all fit under the same umbrella.

The brands are very well known for it’s conversation and creative copy attitude on all of its products. It originally started only with smart water, but then really made its mark on its vitamin water labels.

In addition, Glaceau uses vitaminwater.com as its popular URL protocol to provide an online presence for each of their brands.On major search engines such as Google, when you search with keywords like “glaceau”, “fruitwater” or “smartwater”, the first link result that shows up is for vitaminwater.com. However, if you type fruitwater.com into the domain bar, it takes you to the same site. I am sure Glaceau has it set up with many different domain names in order to track how many unique visitors are interested in which brand. Vitaminwater.com is probably the most used due to its overall popularity and keyword search statistics.

The Web site’s functionality is strictly flash based with heavy animations for almost every aspect as well as transitions. Each time a user clicks on a link, its typically takes loading time to transition to the next page. Continuous animations also appear in the background on multiple pages that provides constant movement and attention grabbing browsing. The Web site, in general, as a lot of extra spark that I think appeals very well to the target market. People who like flashy products, yet like to simple, straight-forward design.

Some online branding strengths include the multiple domain names to the same web site. Yet, this also could be confusing to visitors and they may think they were sent to the page by accident or may be annoyed that they have to go to an umbrella branded site. For marketers, it is a great way to get vitamin water loyals interested in and trying other products like fruit water.

The site provides the potential for high retention rate because of the copious amounts of Web site interaction. Activities such as customizing your own social networking banner ad for users to place on their profiles provides a long time of interaction and thought process. They call it vitamin waters tryit creator. When I made this banner, I think it took me at least 15 minutes until I was satisfied with the final message I wanted it to say!

Some of the Web site’s weaknesses include too much flash and perhaps not enough infomation. I would personally like to see more wellness or explaination on the whole vitamin notion and playing more on the branding of each drinks “vitamin”. Also, having a seperate Web site, at least for vitamin water, would be ideal for future integrated marketing campaigns such as the Shaq/jockey ads currently integrated in the vitamin water section. It would have been more effective if it had even its own domain name as well.

Some of google’s realted searches when a person types the keyword “glaceau” are:
glaceau stock, glaceau 50 cent, energy brands inc, glaceau coke, darius bikoff glaceau tata, glaceau sale, and glaceau owners.