Brands Create Customers

A brand roadmap can be as important to a business as a product roadmap.

Companies have long used product roadmaps to illustrate the direction and timing of new products being developed. Roadmaps show development phases, timetables, milestones and outcomes. They help decision makers understand the steps and pacing of product development, and enable them to coordinate multiple innovation efforts into a coherent strategy.

Brands need roadmaps, too

Brands need roadmaps, too, because brands are never static. Brands are dynamic relationships between companies and their customers. They need constant improvement and innovation to maintain their competitive edge.

Accordingly, brand roadmaps depict the brand steps that will create the customers to drive the business forward. Decision makers need brand roadmaps to ensure that brand innovation strategies complement the company’s product development efforts, so that the customer relationships being forged by brands will help drive adoption of new products and services.

Defining the brand roadmap

We define a brand roadmap as follows:

The brand roadmap is a visual document that depicts the development stages of a brand and its customer relationships along an explicit timeline. The roadmap shows the phases, timing, and outcomes of planned brand innovations. Its primary focus is to illustrate how the brand (and the brand platform) will advance customers in concert with new product development. The brand roadmap lays out the sequence of planned brand interactions, relationships and experiences that will advance customers beyond the reach of competitors.

The roadmap is, first and foremost, a customer roadmap. It shows how the brand will grow customers in a manner that benefits them, and is also strategically beneficial to the business. The best brand roadmaps are a march to a new market space.

Who builds the brand roadmap?

The brand roadmap is the responsibility of the brand team. They create it, get necessary buy-ins and approvals, and keep it up to date. They also manage it so that brand development commitments are met.

What’s in the brand roadmap?

A brand roadmap will be customized to the strategic needs of a company. In general, though, one would expect a brand roadmap to include (depict or reference) the following:

1. Axes showing: 1) timeline/timetable; and 2) customer growth/brand depth
2. Discrete brand programs or applications to be developed
3. The brand platform and platform strategy
4. The brand model
5. The customer model
6. The customer growth model and development path (via delivered brand value and brand experience)
7. The brand innovation strategy
8. Markets to be created
9. Brand initiatives developed with customers (i.e., bottom-up)

Updated August 14, 2007

In a post called “The role of anti-marketing design” Robert Scoble argues that deliberately being ugly has its virtues. His post is worth a read to understand how non-designers often approach design. He also offers up a unique perspective on brands.

For Scoble, “anti-marketing design” is bare-bones design that’s a heartbeat from engineering, and isn’t “pretty”. You just throw it together. His prototypical example is a Canadian dating site that looks like a stripped down body shop, and according to Scoble, has “passionate users.” Heh.

Scoble’s own site is a better case study.

Scoble doesn’t want design to interfere with function. And I totally agree. I think “pretty” sucks, too. But Scoble writes for an audience whose idea of Incunabula is last week’s O’Reilly Radar. They pay a price for literal paradigms.

Regarding brands, he goes on to say:

Why does anti-marketing design work? Well, for one, big companies will never do a site that doesn’t look pretty. Why? Cause of the prevailing belief that great brands need to be beautiful. Look at what corporate branding experts study. Apple. Target. BMW. Everything those guys do is beautiful. Aesthetic. Crafted by committees of ad marketing department experts.

Target?? Please!! Target is Wal-Mart with lipstick. And both BMW and Apple have had their share of design dogs. And “crafted by committee” never creates anything of beauty, or of excellence. “Committees” and “aesthetics” are never on the same page, ever.

Here Scoble seems to be confusing appearance with design, and “looks” with brand value. Great brands do need to be beautiful, but brand beauty is not some refined aesthetic purity breathed down from the white-space deities. It’s a matrix of many different values, some of which include aesthetic appeal, but many more that touch on customer-based qualities such as functionality, usability, simplicity, character, and even virtues like “charm.”

All that said, I read Scoble every day. He’s a large part of the Microsoft brand–often the best part.

The WSJ had an interesting article on January 11 (sub required) about Coca-Cola’s reaction to the growing popularity of Mexican-made Coca-Cola in the US. The article touches upon fundamental questions about the nature of a brand, and who ultimately drives it: the company that launched it, or the customers that embrace the brand, sustain it in the brand ecosystem, and pay its way.

For Coca-Cola, the problem with Mexican Coke is that it’s sweetened with cane sugar, like the Coke of old, and threatens to capture customers from the modern day Coke sold in the US. Coke enthusiasts say the taste of Mexican Coke is superior to that of modern US Coke, which has been sweetened with high fructose corn syrup since the 1980′s. To them, Coke hecho en Mexico is Coke the way it used to be.

Except that it’s illegal. Coca-Cola prohibits Mexican Coke from being imported into the US. The Journal details how the company and its bottlers try to intercept Mexican Coke before it reaches US retail outlets.

Mexican Coke is nonetheless duly bootlegged into US markets, and is in such demand that it fetches a price premium, about $1.25 per 12 oz. bottle. Much of it is sold to Mexican immigrants, who yearn for the familiar taste, but it also has devotees among US citizens who are unabashed Coke fans. They praise it as the “real” Coca-Cola, especially since it comes in classic Coke bottles.

Taste test
High fructose corn syrup is an inexpensive, engineered sweetener. Coke claims the decision to switch from cane sugar in the 80’s was made for economics, and that consumers can’t tell the difference between the two.

Alas, consumers say they can. According to the Journal article, Coke loyalists say the classic, cane-flavored Coke has a cleaner taste than the high fructose version, with sharper flavor notes and a more refreshing mouth feel. Some even say it maintains the fizz better because of the traditional thick Coke bottles.

Driving the brand
Now back to the headline question: Who drives the Coke brand? The automatic answer is, of course, Coca-Cola. They own the brand, they grew it into a worldwide icon, and they spend millions a year on continuing brand development. The brand is Coke’s intellectual property. They drive it as they see fit.

Or maybe not.

Let’s not forget Walter Landor’s dictum: “Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.” If so, this may be a case where a brand created and nurtured by customers threatens to leave the factory behind. The yearning for Mexican-made Coke is a customer initiative.

This could be a case where the iconic substance of the brand has migrated from the company to its customers. Customers see themselves as the effective brand stewards, maintaining the original, authentic flavor against legal odds. (Hmmm . . .  sounds like Harley.)
In normal times, avid enthusiasm for a brand would be a brand manager’s dream. For Coke, though, enthusiasm for Mexican-made Coke sold in the US is defined as a problem, not as an opportunity. Instead of reconfiguring its brand to create and grow new customers, even into price-premium markets, Coca-Cola has decided to rein them in.

There’s always risk when a brand problem is not allowed a brand solution.

Perhaps on some sultry Caribbean isle an entrepreneur is planning to cash in on this demand with a back-to–basics cane sugar cola, authentic as all get out, to be sold in thick, scuffed bottles that hint of wild adventures in parts unknown.

Anyone for Cola Libre?

Today’s article in the SF Chronicle says it up front:

Consumer Reports, the magazine some potential car buyers scrutinize for hours before making a decision, dealt a blow to the U.S. auto industry Wednesday when it said that, for the first time, all 10 vehicles on its “Top Picks” list are made by Japanese companies.

No matter that some of the vehicles are designed and built in the United States. The latest Consumer Reports list is another reminder that the U.S. auto industry, particularly the profit-challenged General Motors and Ford Motor Co., is in dire straits.

This is what happens when you transform your brand from a badge of quality into a pseudo brand and a stylized sales stimulant. The Detroit brand model has crashed and burned, like an Edsel dropped from 10,000 feet.

If you work in brands, you have to be excited about the brand potential of widgets and gadgets. These are the live, highly visual icons that reside on your desktop and do important things for you. They are quick to access, and persistent. They are little friends, always there when you need them.

Widgets and gadgets are icon-like, mini-applications designed to provide information, lookup, and functionality via a quick glance or click on your computer screen. They can be designed to receive live data from the Web, increasing their power. Current examples deliver basic information, such as weather, time, news headlines, RSS feeds, computer system performance, and specialized information such as local team schedules. Using their rich visual interface, they also provide a slew of functions: calculator, radio station tuners, live charts, news readers, etc.

By design, widgets and gadgets are fairly easy to develop. Examples can be found here, here, and here.

Widgets and gadgets are brand interfaces.
Widgets and gadgets are new. Currently, they give only a faint hint of their potential power as brand interfaces. Most are geeky and one dimensional. Given a decent shot of brand imagination, however, they can open up a multitude of new connections, many of which can extend far beyond the product. The context of widgets and gadgets is a wide open field. On a basic level, they are interfaces to the brand. On a deeper level, they are interfaces through the brand. It’s at this deeper level that widgets and gadgets can build real brand connections.

Widgets and gadgets are tools for brand innovation.
Think of them as mini-platforms, bundles of relevance that can advance your customers through your brand. In a year or two, I’d fully expect that all new cars will come with a package of widgets. Download them to get basics such as service information and reminders, owner’s information, driving tips, mileage calculators, etc. Beyond that, it’s left to the brand to initiate any type of relevant, persistent connection that the customer can use. The widget is a portal of relevance with a customer power far greater than its diminutive size.