Brands Create Customers

On Friday, May 19th, Apple opened its stunning Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. The large underground store is entered through a striking glass “cube” aboveground in a spacious urban plaza, making the entrance itself an iconic beacon. It’s an immediate landmark.

The Fifth Avenue store is a showcase of the Apple brand. It has lessons for all brand builders.

Framing the customer
To aspire to greatness a brand must frame its customers on a plane of greatness. Apple knows how to do this. Through its innovative architecture, Apple makes a trip to this store the virtual equivalent of visiting the Louvre in Paris, where visitors enter through an equally striking glass pyramid. Apple thus frames its customers in the context of Europe’s greatest art. The “cube,” though, does not mimic the Louvre’s pyramid. It honors it symbolically while making its own distinct statement. It invites customers to become active creators of art using Apple technology, not just spectators of past creations. Customers who enter the glass cube experience both the homage and the daring break.

The event
A cardinal rule of retail is to make your retail space an ongoing event that awakens your customers to new experiences. Your store is a realm of customer connections, not just a door and four walls. And “event” means drama—lots of it. Thus, opening a store becomes an exponentially dramatic event, flush with new connections. Apple is a master of such occasions. The indefatigable ifoApple has some Fifth Avenue event details. Here is a snippet:

The short early line and thunderstorms translated into a huge line just before and after the opening. At 4:10 p.m. New York Times tech writer David Pogue showed up with a new black MacBook, with the iMovie recording feature running, and was interviewing people. At the same time, we could hear the store employees yelling and hooting inside the store. At 4:30 p.m. there were 915 people in line, stretching around the block. Security guards split the line at business entrances to keep them from being blocked.

At about 5:30 p.m. dozens of store employees came up the stairs and started working the waiting line, standing on the plaza and making like cheerleaders–the crowd yelled back. At the same moment, Steve Jobs appeared at the entrance, generating more yells, including from some young woman who told Jobs, “You hot!” Apple’s architects and retail execs also joined the group, standing to the right of the cube entrance. Johnson and Blankenship hugged again. The press had arrived and were positioned to the right of the entrance.

With just 15 minutes left before opening, the young man who was #8 in line turned to his female companion and proposed to her. She accepted, and that set off a ripple of “Awwww” back through the crowd, and up to the Apple staffers. Some came over to offer their congratulations.

The waiting line was in a perfect configuration to watch the show and create sidewalk buzz. The closest people were both those at the front of the line, and those at the end. Both groups were looking straight at the cube, which is raised up several steps, creating a stage. The pedestrian area was jammed, and there was a huge crowd of people across Fifth Avenue trying to catch a glimpse of what was occurring.

Retail as an expression of brand
Apple rightly considers retail to be an expression of the Apple brand, on par with other brand expressions such as “design” and “user interface.” In other words, “retail” channels the brand. It is not allowed to impose constraints that bend the brand.

Apple demonstrates that retail space is also a spatial extension of brand, a multi-dimensional platform for customer experience and growth. Retail is thus a workspace for brand. You build out from the brand. It’s what your brand does with—and within—that space that defines who you are, and where you lead.

More on the Fifth Avenue Store from Apple.

Photo source: openeye, flickr

UPDATE: ifoApple looks into estimated construction and maintenance costs of the Fifth Avenue Store.

Every craft and every profession needs a patron saint. Your patron saint is the spiritual power and muse to tune your senses, watch your six, and ease the path ahead. It’s someone you can commune with on the Ducati, in the midst of a do-or-die decision, or while laying out the bills for a case of 2004 Antinori Tignanello.

People graced by a patron saint have that special glow. Their inner dashboard radiates a confidence of connection.

So, who’s the patron saint of brands?

Dionysus: patron saint of brands

That’s easy. It’s Dionysus, the edge-god of art, passion, creation and wine, Mr. Wild Side himself, ecstasy in excelsis, musician, dancer, fount of thoughts unbridled, lust undying. Like great brands, Dionysus unfolds the untamed. He pushes limits. In a world of tepid convention, he’s the sensual feast of free.

Not for the meek

Dionysus is not for the meek—but neither are brands. He’s a non-stop force of creative destruction, blasting the current context for something bigger and better, shredding, melding, re-shaping, re-birthing. He may be momentarily satiated, but satisfied—never. He doesn’t let brands coast, or calcify.

Brand-builders can’t have limits

Dionysus is the perfect patron saint for brands because brand builders can’t have limits. Their mission is to bring products to life, pushing, pulling and transporting customers beyond the grind, into new contexts of living. Brand builders don’t just strut upon a stage; they cook up new stages. Dionysus fuels their brew. (Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne above captures some of the Dionysian fire.)

The Dionysian license to create

Vital question: If you’re a brand builder, does having Dionysus as your patron saint grant you the license to let your senses soar and your creative juices run wild?

Vital answer: Only if the essence of your creation is a higher form of customer. (Brands aim high. Don’t waste your powers on trivia.)

Dionysian brands

There are brands, and then there are Dionysian brands. Dionysian brands are a ferment of mind and matter. Instead of being some concocted add-on, or a cheap-rent façade, they’re primordial and potent, delivering visceral value, procreating customers, infusing every synapse of company being. They’re passion from the core. You, the brand builder, are the music, the grapes and the dance. Step one is to Unzip Your Brand.

Per Nick Wingfield’s article in the Wall St. Journal (sub req), an informed source claims that the new Apple store in Manhattan will be open 24 hours a day.

Well, why not? Brands never sleep.

Brand pacing

Apple understands the value of brand pacing, the practice of advancing your customers to new domains of experience your competitors can’t match. The faster you innovate on brand, unlocking more context for your customers, the more light years you place between yourself and your competitors. By the time they cobble up a look-alike, you will have moved your customers to a far better universe.

In brand pacing, brands focus on customers, not on products, or campaigns.They continually, and relentlessly, keep advancing the customer context.

Brand pacing and brand platforms

Strong brand platforms make brand pacing possible. We’ve commented on the Apple store before as a key element in the Apple brand platform.

Companies run on two feet: product and brand. When they lead with their brand, delivering value in the process, competitors have a hard time catching up.

Photo source: jackcheng

I’m not a big fan of product placement. Paid placement smacks of low-life commercialism. (High-life commercialism being a totally different matter.) The real problem is that conventional product placement usually violates brand context. Since brands are collaborations in context between company and customer, the arbitrary imposition of a particular beer or soda in the context of a story usually breaks the story. It reduces it (glaringly) to an ad.

If it’s a posh action flick about the good spy in a BMW being menaced by the evil oaf in a Hummer, that’s different. Those brands extend the characters, in context. But usually the placement has as much relevance as arm candy at the Oscars. The placement doesn’t make the story better. And viewers are used.

Creative placement trumps product placement
Brands used creatively can make a story richer. Movie buffs gasped in delight when Sin City’s Marv dragged a thug face down through the streets while driving a 1968 Corvair. A ’68 Corvair! Now that is placement.

Alas, all too often product placement is story defacement.

A creative option
There’s an option, though. Tell a special story yourself, in the context of your customer. In it, explore the full character of your brand. Plumb new dimensions. Raise questions. Be fearless. You—and your customers—will be the richer for it.

The difference in a nutshell: Creative sells products. Apple creates customers.

Few people have an “mp3 player problem.” Lots of people have a “lack of music problem.” iTunes and the iPod make music available, easily and copiously.

Apple connects people with their music. Creative sells a player.

You and your music can grow with Apple. With Creative, it’s you and your player.

So, when you’ve lost the customers, try to win with lawyers. BusinessWeek has the latest.

At Dcamp in Palo Alto last Saturday I made it a point to see Sarah Allen’s presentation called “Cinematic User Experience.” It featured slick UX technology from Laszlo (blog) that enables a user’s web experience to approximate the unitary experience of seeing a movie. When a website is created using Laszlo technology, everything unfolds in front of you in the context of a continuous dialogue or story. Instead of discontinuously jumping from web page to web page, you use tabs to unfold additional views that quickly appear in the context of your present web space. You become, in essence, the director of your own web experience. Very interesting approach. Brand builders should check it out.

Brands and the cinematic experience

Sarah’s presentation got me thinking about “brands and the cinematic experience.” As soon as she finished, I grabbed a Peets coffee from the food table, stepped outside to the cool shady courtyard (the Bay Area is unconference Nirvana) and scribbled 20 minutes of notes and diagrams. I usually link “cinematic” to the phenomenon called “persistence of vision,” that peculiarity of the human eye (or brain) that enables us to watch 24 discrete frames per second and translate them into continuous motion, instead of chaos. A movie becomes our own “fiction” of those 24fps.

In a brand experience, we interleave frames from the brand with frames from our own lives, effectively editing our personal “demo reel” with cuts of brand context, images, brand fx, grainy b/w clips, or whatever the brand brings to the table.

Brands and “persistence of context”

Brands, of course are very different from motion pictures, but they do share some “persistence” qualities. Brands operate in a zone that I would call “the persistence of context.” Products come and go like individual frames of a movie, but a brand provides a “persistence of context” that keeps customers in touch with the core narrative (value dialog) that’s taking place. This is largely because brands are created in the context of the customer, not that of the product, or the company.

The brand narrative is all about the customer

Yes, the brand narrative (all those frames of context) is about the customer. The brand narrative is a brand interaction in which the brand frees the customer to experience new facets of life. (If the brand is any good, it should have the power of an awakening, and a revelation.) Through the brand, the product tells a special customer story. Or, more generally, brands plot a customer course, and help the customer shape his or her own unique narrative. The brand narrative is never a top-down “telling.” It’s a collaborative process of discovery.

“Cinematic” or “landscape”

Question: Is “cinematic” the right metaphor for brands? Maybe not. Brands might be more “landscape” than they are “cinematic.” The cinema is a passive theater. Landscapes invite exploration. Brands have a lot in common with vast spatial expressions: topographies, maps, horizons, worlds. What’s clear to me is that mankind was not made for piddly caves. (Or silos.) We crave the wide open spaces.

And the point of brands is to create new customer spaces.

Breaking through the prescribed heavens

See that guy in the banner at the top of the page? He’s breaking through the veil of the “prescribed” heavens to gaze into a wondrous vault of the real universe. What he sees is only the first layer. Beyond that glorious vault there is another vault, and then another. Brands are the rips in the firmament that enable us break free from the dictated world into a world of discovery. When you “create a customer” with your brand, you enable him or her to break through an imposed veil to grasp a larger truth and a larger reality. Brands are the dynamic adventure that rips through the static here-and-now.

Brands as metaphor

Brands are the metaphors of products, and of customers, and of customers “customizing” products. I’ll say more about this in another post.

Brands: portrait view, or landscape view?

After thinking about cinematic and landscape views a bit, it dawned on me that we could go a step further and analyze brands as to the type of “page view” they represent: portrait view, or landscape view. Traditional brands are hierarchy-driven, much like the standard “portrait view” page, a hierarchy of top to bottom. They put the brand at the top and their customers on the bottom. Customers become brand derivative, within a brand silo. The traditional brand agenda is to lock them into the page.

The landscape view of value-based brands

In contrast, value-based brands are “landscape view” because brand innovation and customer opportunity need the wide open spaces of a landscape, the opposite of the restrictive silo. Landscape brands are full of new vistas, fresh horizons and soaring vaults of heavens, where brands and customers can collaborate to create new value. They’re superior to portrait view/silo brands because customers themselves are creatures of landscape mode. They want their brands to open out, so they can leverage the brand experience to grow themselves.

Semi-bottom line

I will have to get back to these thoughts at a later date. There’s more here than I can sort through at the moment. I would say, though, that if you’re in the process of designing and developing brands, get the biggest cinema display that your business can afford. You might as well envision your brand through the widest customer eyes—across the widest customer spaces.

Photo: mikefats — Flickr

Note: updated August 11, 2007

Added photo and some new material, links and new heads.

Note to self: Instead of updating an old post, write a new one. Well, a new one on this subject is now in the queue.

Dell’s market leadership in PCs and servers is eroding, according to the NY Times (sub req). HP and others are catching up, or have caught up. Apple, of course, has its own enviable gig that Dell can only dream about.

Don’t “target” customers; create them.
Dell’s predicament is what happens when you focus your business on targeting customers instead of creating them. The Dell brand once stood for decent, affordable computers using the latest technology. Now that other computer makers can offer the same value proposition, Dell’s once dominant position is threatened. HP and others are stealing the air from the Dell brand. In a few years when Chinese computer manufacturers are selling direct to customers in the States, using all the supply chain tricks learned from Dell, what will be Dell’s claim to fame?

At one time, Dell service was a strong differentiator (5 Dell’s in our office at last count.) But Dell service is now a huge black mark. So no traction there.

The reason you want to be “creating customers” is to keep growing your customers with new capabilities and freedoms so they won’t be satisfied with yesterday’s solutions. Your brand is an incredibly protean and potent tool in its ability to unlock market value. Alas, as Dell is learning the hard way, merely “targeting” customers is a dead end.

Today’s target is tomorrow’s hole.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis.

I’ll be discussing brands as interfaces at Dcamp in Palo Alto on Saturday, May 13. Hope to see you there.

As it happens, our core definition of “brand” is interface rich: “Brands are avenues of value innovation in a creative engagement between companies and their customers.”

That’s no accident. We see brands as guiding all sorts of vital interfaces in the ways that customers are created. We’ve written about that here, here, and here.

I’m looking forward to feedback and ideas from the BayChi people who will attend, and from interaction designers ready to liberate brands from the tyranny of the box.