Brands Create Customers

While corporate brand strategists are busy re-thinking brands at the top, the most powerful brand innovations may be taking shape at the bottom. In the digital age, brand leaders are born at the customer level, far from boardrooms and PowerPoints.

Brand innovation at social network sites

Prime examples are social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook. These sites, and others like them, are quietly redefining the brand identity mission. In traditional brand practice, the identity mission was to craft a company brand identity that was coherent, consistent and compelling, and then use brand programs and practices to drop it like a silo over customers. In contrast, the social network sites are turning down the volume of their own identity messaging so they can amp up their capabilities to become identity creation platforms for their customers.

This is a development all brands will eventually adopt, to some degree, consistent with their objectives and market situation.

Customer identity platforms

In effect, this new dynamic turns the traditional brand identity mission on its head. The new brand identity is less about promoting a company identity and more about using the brand to help customers build their own identities through the brand, as an integral part of the customer creation process. It creates customers as brand partners rather than brand subjects.

In other words, instead of being an identity silo, the brand becomes an identity platform for customers. As the brand extends the customer, the customer extends the brand, and the company. The silos (and silo thinking) are left behind.

And thus, brand identity is no longer a front-loaded belief system that must be imposed on customers. It becomes a shared workflow, collaborative and multi-faceted, gaining strength because its social rather than private.

Customer identity drives social network sites

Social network sites are becoming the new medium for helping customers forge their own selves. For people in their teens and twenties, identity is a very big deal. You have to roll your own, gloriously, and painfully. The sites understand this, and instead of dictating a preordained site brand identity to the customer, the social network brand frees customers to discover the interactions and identity contexts right for them. Instead of being a static symbol of the company, the brand becomes a customer process, flowing customers into new contexts of meaning and relevance.

The brand as customer platform

In effect, the MySpaces and Facebooks of the world are becoming customer platforms. That’s the ultimate sweet spot for any brand. As a customer platform, the brand becomes a customer partner in exploring and delivering relevance. Rather than dictate monolithic “branding” messages to them, it becomes their infrastructure for personal growth. It’s the brand as a social place, a value network, a home away from home.

Fred Stutzman is doing some pioneer work in this area, and has pointed out that social network sites are popular in large part because they help young adults negotiate the primary contexts where they can articulate their emerging identities. See Fred’s “Situational Relevance in Social Networking Sites” for an overview. (And see also my earlier post which is based on Danah Boyd’s seminal work.)

The brand as identity enabler

I really like the phrase, “to articulate one’s identity.” That’s something a brand can help customers do. The brand becomes a preferred vehicle for customers to discover and articulate their own identities. It does so by providing them with contexts relevant to their lives. This is the brand as an enabler: active, open, potent and personal.

Brands designed to create customers will have an easy transition to being enablers of new customer identities. Strategically, they’ll be creating customers around new freedoms, where customers will find new avenues to grow themselves. The business goal, of course, is to grow the customers that will drive the business forward.

Learning from social network sites

For brand builders, social network sites like MySpace and Facebook are a “proof of concept.” The task now is to see which enabling elements of these sites can help other brands do a better job of creating customers. Since brands are always in “learning mode,” this process should not be difficult.

What’s clear to me is that to survive, a business must actively create customers. As part of creating customers, it must offer new identity platforms as springboards for customer development, no matter what it produces. The faster it grows its customers, the faster it grows itself.

Don’t forget what makes a brand great

An apposite entry from our New Brand Glossary: “What makes a brand great is not that it does more for its customers. A great brand frees customers to do more for themselves.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 11:34 am and is filed under Identity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.