Brands Create Customers

Should Ocean Spray be content as a brand of cranberry products? Or should it aim for a larger stage, and a deeper customer context, where the meaning of Ocean Spray might transcend cranberries themselves?

Framing the big picture

This is the “big-picture” brand question that all companies continually face. There are times when the meaning of what they do (and can do) exceeds their products proper. They then look for ways to re-frame their brand to a bigger picture, one that recognizes the value they deliver, and that also opens new market opportunities.

Brands command a wider value horizon

What’s clear is that brands command a wider value horizon than products themselves. Because brands are a second skin, they can fit themselves to human imagination, desire and diversity. They manifest a protean power to connect with customers across many more dimensions than products themselves.

What are you a “brand of?”

Every brand decides what it wants to be “a brand of.” There are small-picture and big-picture options. The thumbnail view makes the brand a mere mark on the product. The landscape view sees through customer eyes, to that distant ridge line, and beyond.

Do you want to be a brand of shoes, or a brand of what shoes can do? A brand of computers, or a brand of personal expression? A brand of automobile, or a brand of driving?

Brand context is customer context

Your strongest “brand of” context almost always your big-picture brand. It’s a customer context, not a product context. It’s not based on what you say about yourself, or how you position yourself on a piece of paper. It’s based on what you deliver to customers, and how your brand deliverables enable customers to join with you.

Beyond the chew

A brand of bubble gum that’s just a mute mark on the package confines its “brand of” context to the chunk of gum itself. That’s weak. If you add a comic strip inside the wrapper you suddenly have a brand of entertainment. Add a baseball card and you have a brand of sports, or a brand of collecting, or a brand of socializing with other baseball fans. Invest some special quality in the gum and you have a different “something,” perhaps in a context stronger than all the rest.

These contexts are all possible because the brand has become an expression of the customer, not just a trade name for gum.

Brand context is hard core reality

Elevating your brand to a big-picture context is never easy. It’s a rendezvous with hard core reality. Promises are cheap; you have to deliver on the big picture you paint. The proof is in what your customers do with the brand, not in the narrow world of the brand itself.

A brand of cigarettes may style itself as a brand of rugged individualism. Based on what it delivers, it may be closer to a brand of emphysema. That’s the reality. Brands created as stylized sales stimulants open themselves to this predicament: if they’re more accountable to the sale than they are to the customer, they skew toward the make-believe, and hollow promises. They will have a price to pay later.

Developing the big-picture brand

A big-picture brand assessment considers these questions:

1. How can our brand become a customer platform?
2. What big-picture value can the brand deliver?
3. Where can the brand lead the customer?
4. What freedoms can the brand deliver?
5. How can this new context grow the customer, and the business?

What’s key to this process is that your brand delivers a more satisfying reality to customers, rather than the mere appearance of one.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Brand Fundamentals. 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.