Brands Create Customers

Companies are often a bit unsettled when I tell them that brands are mostly interfaces.

They prefer to think along traditional lines, with brands as a promise, a persona, identity or symbol, or even a company’s reputation.

No, I tell them, brands may possess all of those elements, but basically brands are interfaces. In fact, they’re interfaces along three distinct fronts:

1. Company and customer
2. Customer and customer
3. Customer and customer’s future

In the big picture of things, brands help people interoperate with the universe. That is the Big Interface, and that’s where great brands shine. Why would your brand aspire to anything less?

A closer look at three brand interfaces

But for now, let’s look at these three, workaday brand interfaces.

Company and customer: your brand is the interface that helps you put more customer in your company. That pays dividends up and down the line. Instead of chasing customers, you join them.

Customer and customer: your brand is the interface that brings your customers together, creating that critical mass of you-in-them that rushes forward on customer initiative and imagination. Customers can help build your brand, if you let them.

Customer and customer’s future: this is the most important brand interface of all. This is where you create and grow your customers, connecting your customer with his or her potential. The customer you grow today will be the customer that desires your products of tomorrow, when he or she is further removed from commodity-land. If your interface is merely an ad campaign, or inventory dressed as a store, chances are your customers won’t go far.

And what about Brand APIs?

A Brand API is an application program interface that enables your brand to connect with customers, to involve them in their future and yours, and to deliver to them the freedoms they need to grow. It’s a set of tools, links and platforms that invite customers to join with your brand to grow.

Brands as applications

In days gone by, brand programs were largely considered to be communication programs. That led to legions of look-alike, do-nothing brands that were locked in their labels. In 2006 and beyond, with competition from every quarter, a brand has to function as an application program that helps customers get where they want to go. The brand does so within a company’s overall Brand Operating System (Brand OS). (See our New Brand Glossary for more details.) The Brand OS consists of Brand Platforms, and these contain the many brand programs that I call Brand Applications. The Brand API is the multi-function portal that opens all these applications to customer interaction.

The key benefit of a Brand API is that it enables access, teamwork, collaboration. It enables 360-degree initiative. It’s the hand you hold out to customers as you yell, “Grab on!”

If customers like where you’re going, they’ll fasten their grip.

For a more detailed discussion, see:  Interaction design: the new key to brands

Note: updated August 13, 2007

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 10:01 am and is filed under Brand APIs, Brand Building, Brand Interactions, Brand Communities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.