Breaking The Brand Barrier
Historically, brands have often engaged the world from the
missionary position.
Sadly, this top-down approach deadens customers,
dampens initiative, and greatly limits the value brands can provide.
These notes—initially in glossary form—explore a new concept of brand,
and a new role for brands in value creation.
Architecture of Participation
A brand model that favors customer interaction and initiative through the brand,
leading to bottom-up innovation and new market growth.
It stands in sharp contrast to the top-down, command-and-control architectures
of legacy brands.
Brand
Brands are tools that enable customers to interoperate with the universe.
The genius of brands is that they have no limits. The value of brands is that
through them, customers have no limits.
Brands encompass many dimensions. The following definitions touch upon
key parameters:
Brand (Core Definition)
Brands are avenues of value innovation in a creative engagement between
companies and their customers.
Brand (1)
A brand is vertically integrated value.
Brand (2)
Your brand is one of your capabilities. It extends your ability to deliver
open-ended value to customers. When properly executed, it accelerates customers
to a new realm of fulfillment which you create, and which only you can sustain.
Brand (3)
Brand is a non-commodity experience. It can grow from a product or service,
a company's character, or from artful wrappers that sharpen customer perceptions.
The essence of non-commodity experience is passion. Your brand has to have it.
Brand (4)
Strategically, the way you value your customer defines your brand. A brand that
treats its customers as commodities (purely to be sold to)
wastes much of its potential.
Brand (5)
Brands are programs to achieve company growth through customer growth.
As programs they invoke two critical perspectives:
1) "the customer inside the product," and
2) "the customer inside the company."
Weak brands distance the customer. Strong brands open their arms.
Brand API's
Brand API's are application program interfaces.
They provide convenient latch points for customers to grab onto brands and advance
themselves through the brand.
The best API's help convert customer initiative into better brand content,
context and value.
Brand Character
Companies with character create brands with character.
These are brands that stand for something, who are something,
and who act with singular passion and clarity. Brands with character
lead.
Brand Chain
The Brand Chain begins where the classic Value Chain ends.
While the Value Chain is made up of value-adding inputs along the production
process, ending at the customer, the Brand Chain begins with the customer
and is largely made up of downstream interactions between customer, product
and company.
The Brand Chain plays a vital role in advancing both the customer and the brand
platform, primarily through open-ended brand innovation.
In many industries the Brand Chain remains an unexplored field of market
creation and competitive advantage.
Brand Decay
Brands decay when they stop leading and start pushing.
One of the first signs of brand decay is when brands begin extending
themselves instead of their customers.
Brand Depth
The measure of customer presence inside the brand. Brand depth is a key
indicator of a company's ability to innovate on brand, and to create new
streams of customer value.
Brand Design
The process by which the brand team designs a customer.
(A brand is a customer template.)
Brand Essence
The essence of brand is collaboration.
Brands are collaborations in context between a company,
its customers and the product.
The company may initiate this endeavor, but the nature and success of
the brand will be determined by the most passionate player(s).
Brand Experience (1)
The process by which the customer realizes new dimensions of himself
or herself through the brand, via sensory, emotional or cognitive interactions.
Typically, a brand experience becomes meaningful only when it exceeds expectations,
i.e., makes a difference.
Brand Experience (2)
What the customer passes on to others, or returns to the company,
once engaged by the brand. Brand experience writes the brand story.
Brand Hacks
Customers hack brands. It's their way of pumping meaning into
a brand that doesn't measure up. In this process, customers add content
and context that the brand originator overlooked.
They effectively redirect a brand in this manner, migrating it into new
value domains, sometimes far beyond the original brand vision.
New brand strategies encourage (and thrive upon) brand hacks.
Notable brand hacks: Harley Davidson, Arm & Hammer.
Brand Imagination
The quantum leap in thinking that separates value-rich brands from
value-corrosive concepts. It's the difference between iPod and
"internet appliance."
The former plugs into the customer; the latter plugs into a wall.
Brand Innovation
Product potential times
customer potential. The brand exponential.
Brand Layering
The process of nesting sequenced brand benefits within the brand whole,
leading the customer through phased discovery to fulfillment.
Brand Leadership
The ability of the brand to lead the customer to a qualitatively better life.
Brand Loyalty (1)
The loyalty of the brand to what it stands for. In practice, brand loyalty
is a mutual loyalty of company and customer to a common cause.
The customer is loyal through the brand, not to the brand.
Brand Loyalty (2)
The transcendent condition that occurs when customers believe in you
because you obviously believe in them.
Brand Mode
Brand mode is the drive gear of brand builders.
It is a radical way of thinking that innovates on value to jump customers forward.
Brand mode generates new styles of freedom as context breaker and context maker,
extending customers, products and platforms.
You are in brand mode when your brain burns with the question,
"What is holding our customers back?"
Brand Model
As critical as the business model. While the business model defines a company's
profit logic, the brand model defines a firm's customer logic:
the structure and meaning of the brand program, its internal and external engines,
and how, when, where and why it creates and sustains customer value.
Brand Objective
Brands have one objective: to create the customers that sustain the business.
This is a dialectic of mutual growth, where brand and customer advance one another.
The brand leads by illuminating a customer destination and a path to get there.
It frames a compelling story, plots a course, meets adversity with superior values,
and sustains the customer going forward, to be sustained by the customer in return.
Brands that fail to create the journey and the reward are little more than cover art.
Brand Operating System
The Brand Operating System (Brand OS) is a set of steps, leaps and revelations
that enables
customers to do more, and be more, through the brand. It includes integrated context,
content and tools that customers can adopt to pursue richer realms of living.
The Brand OS provides traction for customers in the direction they wish to go.
In practice, it functions as a customer operating system championed by the brand,
and fully interactive with it.
Brand Platform
The brand platform is a structure of integrated brand components architected to
create focused customer growth. As a platform, it:
1) serves as a common foundation for brand program applications;
2) allows for greater efficiency in brand program development via shared elements;
3) leverages context and content across the brand; and
4) enables customers to extend the brand through bottom-up brand innovation avenues.
Brand Program
The set of applications through which the brand delivers value to the customer.
Brand programs should be designed to grow customers, in accordance with the principle:
"Grow the customer, grow the brand, grow the business."
Brand Roadmap
A depiction of the progressive development stages of a brand during its projected life.
It details the events, timing and context of how the brand intends to create and
extend customers. (It is, first and foremost, a customer roadmap.)
The best brand roadmaps are a march to a new market space.
Brand Scalability
The ability of a brand to extend its customer logic to higher market levels,
growing outward and upward from the product to a market-defining platform.
Brand Story
The narrative force that drives your brand. It's the drama of past, present
and future value that flows through you, and your products, to the customer.
A company's identity and positioning will appear contrived if they are not supported
by the brand story.
Brand Toolkits
Brands compete for customer attention.
One way to focus and sustain that attention is to provide customers with
convenient brand toolkits to enhance their lives through the brand.
Brand toolkits are compact "always on" brand applications,
devices or widgets that can be readily personalized to deliver new streams
of customer value. Their function can be parallel to, or convergent with,
core brand benefits.
Because brand toolkits can encapsulate the brand in dynamic customer context,
they are well-suited to explore new brand spaces.
Brand Vision
The ability to see your company's future through your customer's eyes.
Chronic Brand Deficiency
The condition suffered by customers whose growth has been stunted
by years of subsistence brands. Those who suffer from CBD are ripe
for brand innovation.
Commodity
Lack of imagination by the producer.
Customer Creation
Brands create customers.
In fact, brands are the engine of customer creation.
They create customers by connecting the customer with his or her potential,
using brand programs that leverage both the product and the company.
The newly created customer reaps new freedoms in being and doing,
happily sloughing off incumbent brands.
Creating a customer begins with
a holistic view of your customers,
where they're going, and how you can take them there.
Destination Brands
Structured experience platforms for tourist destinations (cities, regions, museums
and other unique locations). Active destination brands are necessary because the
physical destination itself is no longer enough, nor is scenic inventory,
nor mere promotion. Every destination brand must be a creative act that enriches the
visitor (in time and space) beyond the venue itself.
Destination Pump
In a branded destination, an experiential node that introduces a forward-focused
element of brand experience to the visitor. It is the strategic and structural fanfare
for what follows, given the programmatic concept for the venue.
Discovery-Driven Brands
Brands that follow a discovery process to lead customers to new forms
of meaning in their lives. Discovery-driven brands employ a method of prototype,
pilot, test and iterate to tune and re-tune brands along new context streams.
This incremental approach enables brands to validate their assumptions in context,
and to learn from customers going forward.
Great Brands
What makes a brand great is not that it does more for its customers.
A great brand frees customers to do more for themselves.
High Performance Brands
Brands that accelerate customer growth into new market spaces,
beyond the reach of conventional offerings. High performance brands
are programs for action predicated on high levels of customer participation.
Iconoclastic Brands
Brands that route around entrenched brand icons and deliver
value directly to customers.
Example: Wikipedia.
Innovation (1)
Products with more customer; process with less company.
Innovation (2)
Innovation is what you do for the customer, not what you do to your product.
Internal Brand Building
Successful brands are built from the inside out, as an organic expression
of company leadership, culture and capabilities. Employees are conditioned to
"live the brand" when company leaders exemplify brand values through their actions.
Internally and externally, brands are built by example.
Legacy Brands
Backward-facing brands that can suck the future from a company.
Legacy brands are predicated on top-down, command and control models which position
the customer as a passive commodity, solely to be sold to.
Legacy brands are vulnerable to competitors who create active partnerships with
customers to innovate on brand, elevating customers from "commodities" to
value co-creators.
Lock-In Brands
Brands that rely on artificial, non-value measures to keep customers.
Lock-in strategies are often self-defeating for two reasons:
1) the perception of lock-in undermines customer loyalty, and
2) perpetuating a customer base via lock-in removes incentives to develop
better solutions. Lock-in brands lock out innovation.
Packaging (1)
The package is not the box. The real package is the customer and the product.
Packaging (2)
One of the greatest packages ever is the Polo Ralph Lauren signature stitched
logo: brand, product and customer packaged as one.
Peer-to-Peer Brands
Brands powered by users that arise, grow and mutate within a shared
product or brand context. Peer-to-peer brands generate layers of meaning
through common focus and/or passion. They serve customer agendas,
but may open doors for product/brand platforms.
Market spaces of P2P brands include open source software,
product customizations, automobile aftermarkets, modding,
and software extensions. Peer-to-peer brands are brand additive.
Brands designed to be peer-to-peer extensible gain market advantage
over traditional top-down brands.
Pseudo Brands
Brands that aren't. Pseudo brands go through the usual motions of brands—an
eye-grabbing logo, pumped up personality, lofty vows, zippy tagline and media
splash—but do nothing to advance customers, or a company's ties to them.
Repetitive Brand Syndrome
The affliction suffered by companies that implement conventional brand formulas
and wind up (again and again) looking, acting and struggling just like everyone else.
Starbucks
The future of retail. Starbucks has cleverly packaged an invaluable and
inexhaustible resource (culture) with an everyday commodity (coffee).
You provide the former, and pay a premium for the latter.
Tear-off Brands
Brand swatches clipped from established brand fabric to impart new brand
freedoms to fast-moving customers, potentially extending the brand (and customers)
into new market spaces. Tear-off brands accelerate brand imagination.
Case in point: concept cars.
Value Creation Network
A system to co-create value established by a company and its customers,
and driven largely by brand programs. Brands play a primary role in
1) opening avenues of value innovation to all parties;
2) focusing and organizing value creation efforts;
3) articulating new modes of being and doing for customers; and
4) transforming new forms of value into market growth.
Value Innovation
The creation of new categories of customer value that can radically reshape markets.
In markets where established competitors fight head-to-head on price and features,
the value innovator defines a new form of customer value that transcends the status
quo, potentially creating a new market space with high barriers to entry.
Value Proposition/Brand Proposition
There is a world between these two. A value proposition is part of the sale.
The brand proposition is not for sale. Brand is not a transaction.
It is a joining. A handshake. A kiss.
Working Brands
Brands that team with customers to create new value. Instead of
projecting a corporate identity through symbols and slogans and high-level
campaigns, working brands
roll up their sleeves and make markets happen by directly extending products
and customers.
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