Brands Create Customers

As a brand builder, one of the best ways to improve your brand program effectiveness is through the concept of the brand chain. The brand chain is a new way to understand the configuration of your brand programs. No brand should be without it. The brand chain has illustrative power—to help visualize brand program flow—and it has strategic power—to focus brand programs where they can create and grow strategic customer behaviors.

As shown in the diagram below, the brand chain is analogous to the supply chain. The key difference is that where the supply chain is made of value inputs leading to product production, the brand chain is made of value inputs headed toward the customer.

While the supply chain helps create products, the brand chain helps create customers.

The brand chain defined

Here’s how I define the brand chain in our New Brand Glossary:

Brand Chain
The brand chain begins where the classic supply chain ends. While the supply chain is made up of value-adding inputs leading to the product, the brand chain begins with product development and heads toward the customer. Through brand platforms and programs it delivers multiple forms of downstream value. The brand chain consists of creative brand interactions between customer and company, customer and product, and between customers themselves.

The brand chain plays a critical role in advancing both the customer and the brand platform, primarily through open-ended brand innovation and continuous customer integration.

The brand chain is vital to business

In business, the brand chain is every bit as important as the supply chain. Many companies with superb supply chains fail their customers by underperforming in their brand chain.

In practice, the brand chain is powerful tool that helps clarify the distinctive forms of value that brands can deliver. When a company analyzes its value creation process in terms of its brand chain, it can begin to focus on creating customers with brand platforms and brand programs that are both more effective, and more efficient, than media-based brands structured as broadcast “communications.”

The brand chain and value-based brands

A brand chain implies value-based brands. In effect, you want your brand chain to be a chain of strategic brand deliverables that advance your customers where competitors can’t follow. The more value contained within the brand chain, the more unique brand pathways a company can create for its customers.

The brand chain and the value chain

Conceptually, you can include both the supply chain and the brand chain in an overall value chain model. The value chain, which classically dates to Michael Porter’s work several decades ago, is itself ripe for re-assessment. A lot of value now comes from customers, who are partners in the value creation process. We need new ways to model that. (Ideally, your customers would radiate part of your brand chain back to you as value added to the brand, and would also radiate brand value into a wider value net.)

Managing the brand chain

Carefully managing the supply chain enables a business to optimize production and supply cost management. Carefully managing the brand chain enables a company to optimize how it advances its customers, and how it integrates them into its chosen innovation pathways. This can create a competitive advantage by raising the “barriers to brand” that competitors must overcome.

As I never tire of saying, a company’s customers are its greatest competitive weapon. The purpose of your brand chain is to create these customers and whip them into fighting shape.

I’ll discuss specific elements of the brand chain in a forthcoming post.