Toward real-time, granular brands
Like everything else these days, brands are in the midst of radical change. The change is all around them, and in the very nature of brands themselves.
Peter Rip adumbrates some possible new directions for brands when he discusses major changes affecting enterprises in the era of “Web 2.0″ and social software.
He writes:
Enterprises are the ultimate Walled Gardens. The distinctions of customer/supplier, employer/employee, management/staff, marketing/sales/engineering, Chicago Office/London Office, IT/line of business all become less meaningful in a world where information is more easily, more inexpensively, and more rapidly shared, transformed, and consumed. This will put pressure on organizations (and regulators) in a long wave of upheaval. Enterprises that harness this fountain of real-time and granular information will have a huge competitive edge - an edge equivalent to the first uses of data warehouses and data mining. They will find and react to opportunities the way that program traders find and react to market inefficiencies. This may well be the new Strategic IT. The strategic IT asset is not the software that automates the process. The asset is the embedded knowledge of all these enterprise communities and its integration into business processes.
What is fixed to the past fails the future
Peter is talking about some huge shifts here. I especially like his observation about the changing nature of “strategic IT assets.” They’re being transformed from archetypal software programs (that we all know and pay too much for) to the embedded knowledge of enterprise communities. That is a BIG shift, but as software applications break into smaller and smaller chunks that reside close to the customer bone, you can see where the era of monolithic software may be gradually drawing to a close.
The end of “mainframe brands”
This same principle is also playing out in brands. The archetypal (closed and proprietary) brand asset that sits in a showcase is giving way to a collective and collaborative brand that teams with customers. There are a lot of “mainframe brands” out there that are now feeling the heat from brands that are “live and local,” and much more responsive to customers. (And to continue this thought, the new brands won’t be like servers or even desktops. They will be more like AJAX apps.)
As Umair Haque might say, brands are being atomized.
Rethinking the nature of your brand
It may be time to rethink the nature of your brand. If you design your brand as a form of social software (with sufficient brand api’s), it can both shape and tap into the “embedded knowledge” of your customers. To the extent that your brand actively works to create new customer platforms, your brand will be awash in the “real-time, granular information” that is the pulse of new market opportunities. It is certainly the pulse of brand innovation.
Remote icon vs. real-time and granular
Don’t cripple your brand by making it a program to shape customer perceptions. Instead of being a remote icon, above the fray, your brand is out there in the wilds of the market helping customers make history. In its real-time and granular incarnation, it’s no longer an outside force.
It’s a second skin.