“Brand space” and the creation of new markets
Part of the fun in building brands is that while one half of your mind plumbs the nuanced depths of brand context, the other half peers three years out to leverage that context into new business opportunities. Welcome to “brand space,” where it’s microscope to one eye, telescope to the other.
Brand space is the realm of new business
As a brand builder, “brand space” is one of your most useful concepts. It encompasses all the territories where your brand intends a presence. Consider it your brand turf. Much of your brand space is forward focused. It contains the brand elements that will rise to the surface and nurture your business when your company launches new products and services. In fact, you will always be priming some part of your brand space for emerging markets.
There is a cardinal rule of brand space: use it, or lose it.
Let’s look more closely at brand space, and then examine an example of brand space that’s unfolding in real time.
Brand space defined
I define brand space as “an emergent customer context in which the brand takes a leadership role.” Your brand space is the potential value domain of your brand: where your brand plans to go. It’s your brand’s extended realm, or some aspect of its “manifest destiny.” Your brand space is typically far larger than the served space of your current, “operational” brand. It projects the customer and the brand forward, toward the next (higher) brand platform that’s on your brand roadmap. (And you do have one of these, right?)
A brand that’s well crafted will command a set of strategically related brand spaces that foreshadow where the customer is headed. Ideally, the brand moves the customer forward into those brand spaces essential for customer growth, and for the growth of the business. This is one reason why brand teams are also product development teams. Brand spaces assume a strong product/brand integration.
It’s important that the brand space is a “value context.” By that I mean it intends to deliver a new form of brand value for the customers to be created. Areas where you deploy brand spaces may have no current customers (virgin markets) or may have existing customers served by ho-hum brands. Your brand space needs to offer a new protocol of pleasure, protocol of performance, or protocol of whatever that will redefine customers out of the bog-like context that’s currently holding them back.
And, as shown above, the ascendant architecture of your brand platforms will dictate where your brand spaces will become fertile fields. Brand spaces are the bow waves of brand platforms.
Brand space and competitive advantage
If you want to beat competitors to the punch, it pays to use your brand space to enter nascent markets at the earliest opportunity. While your competitors are building out their feature lists, you can be delivering the pre-product experiences that align customers to your brand months before actual product introduction. This is not about hype or “making promises.” It’s about knowing what freedoms your customers crave, what freedoms your offerings will deliver, and giving customers a measured taste up front.
Brand space example: WiFi-enabled handsets
Tom Evslin has a fascinating post on dramatic changes coming to the mobile phone market. In a few years mobile phones will be WiFi enabled, meaning they can connect to the Internet wherever there’s a WiFi signal. That means, of course, that those WiFi phone calls will then be VoIP, and possibly, or probably, free. As you can imagine, and as Tom details, this threatens a major disruption of the telco carriers who now control things via their cell networks. One of the ripple effects is our brand space example. To quote Tom:
WiFi support in mobile phones will shift the balance of power from the big wireless operators to the cellphone hardware and software makers. Phones will be purchased independently of calling plans just as computers are purchased independent of Internet connectivity arrangements. Coupons for access may be included with phones instead of phones being included with calling plans. Why? Because voice calling will be too cheap to meter and hardware will still cost something. [my emphasis]
This amounts to a HUGE market shift. If you’re a maker of electronic devices and software whose products have personal communication potential, this change signals the potential opening of lucrative markets previously held captive by the major carriers. Perhaps there’s a future for you in the handset business, if you can leverage existing brand strengths in portable electronic devices, WiFi, design, and computer/Internet interoperability. If you’ve been on your toes, your brand space beneath this potential market will be jumping. It will already include a rich mobile communication context that can fit hand-in-glove with a WiFi-enabled handset. Your brand space is your running start, a latent brand context ready to be activated. If/when you launch that phone, customers will be standing by. The new market will appear to be naturally yours from the get-go.
I, of course, am no one to foment rumors.
Photo: laughlin, Flickr
August 4th, 2006 at 1:33 am
Brian, can you explain the difference between this concept and brand strategy & positioning?
As they both point at a future arena brands are trying to “own”/mean in a current market (the first long term, and the later short term.
August 4th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Good question. There is certainly room for overlap. I associate “brand positioning” with a company’s attempt to concisely define a brand’s identity and role within a business category. Brand positioning is done to differentiate the brand from competitors, and is usually tied to a special slogan or statement, and backed by a media campaign. It is often a perception play, in that you want your brand to occupy a unique “position” in people’s minds (one that also excludes competitors).
What I consider “brand space” is more a territory of brand operation where things happen from the bottom up, and where a brand can begin to deliver value that will support new product development and other strategic initiatives. This can be done without a lot of media fanfare. Using the example I linked to in the post, Apple could map out a brand space for mobile devices, and use its iPod brand to build brand value for its rumored mobile phone handset. It wouldn’t have to reposition itself as a wireless company in order to launch a successful “iPhone.”
August 5th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Thanks for your answer, it will be interesting to see how this concept develops.
August 5th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
Uri, there’s two things to keep in mind: 1) moves in brand space take time to play out, and 2) they often take place under the surface, for strategic purposes. To expand upon the WiFi phone example above, while Apple could use its iPod brand to lay the brand foundation for a possible entry into the wireless phone market, Apple competitor Microsoft has no comparable Microsoft-branded digital device. Thus, Microsoft’s leap from a (mostly) software maker to a “Microsoft phone” would be quite daunting. Hence (I’m theorizing) Microsoft launches “Zune,” a souped-up digital music player. This device has no hope of taking significant share from the iPod, but that may not be its goal. It does enable Microsoft to deliver mobile brand experience with a Microsoft product, a vital step toward an eventual (perhaps) Microsoft phone. Since the digital phone market is far larger than the music player market, Microsoft may well feel that Zune is primarily a “brand space player,” a stepping stone toward its strategic goal. (It would be one of those purple arrows in the diagram.)
I can’t cite any Microsoft document that states that Microsoft is actually doing the above, but I think it would be smart brand strategy if they were.
NOTE: This comment replaces a far shorter comment.
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