The shape of brands to come
Diagrams and visual models can be extremely helpful in illustrating how brands operate. They can often produce an “aha!” moment by revealing a hidden structure or an unseen customer relationship.
Being able to visualize a brand process, or a brand outcome, helps us craft stronger brand strategies. This is especially important when markets are changing, and legacy brands face threats from all sides.
Lately I’ve been working up a series of models for internal and external brand interactions. On the external side, brand interactions usually take place along four planes:
- Company/Customer
- Product/Customer
- Employee/Customer
- Customer/Customer
Rich models can be developed along all four planes, assuming the brand is fully engaged. An integrated model will include all four within a single strategy and program framework.
Here are two initial representations I came up with while trying to develop a generalized “big picture” brand interaction model along Company/Customer lines.
The traditional model
The first model represents the traditional, top-down brand approach, in which the brand attempts to engulf the customer with a set of meanings so profound that the customer becomes a creature of the brand. In many respects, this is still the “ideal” conventional brand model. The brand aims to be “like a God” to the customer, who is positioned as a meek, credulous and faithful “consumer.”
Without going into too much detail, this model has all the weaknesses of the conventional “command and control” brand approach. I’ve discussed those problems here.
The biggest (obvious) drawback of this model is that it constrains the customer. It doesn’t allow the customer to innovate and add value back to the brand—at a time when customer initiatives are increasingly seen as a driving force in brand success.
The interactive model
What would a brand interaction model look like if the brand aimed to create customers who could add value back to the brand? That is, if the brand were “two-way” instead of one-way, with customer intelligence and initiative factored into the model?
I was playing with different representations of Company/Customer interactions when I suddenly realized that the robust “two-way” model might look something like this:
Now that’s interesting. In place of the linear, marketing-induced top-down brand, we might be moving toward a subtle, supple non-linear brand, where the interaction between company and customer is not one of power and domination, but one of fluid intermingling, dynamic balance, and co-operation. Some background on this particular shape.
Who now has the inside track on brands?
And here’s another thought: American and European companies like to believe that their past mastery of brands will save their necks in the future, when competing products from Asia flood Western markets. In this conventional view, the inherent savoir faire of Western brands will still win customers and command price premiums that “Asian commodities” can only dream of.
Maybe that’s true for now, but what culture might have the inside track to the brand model of the future?
