Brands Create Customers

If you want your brand to innovate, you need to make it hackable. You have to cultivate brand hacks. Make your brand so your customers can grab it, bend it, and extend it, adding their initiative and intelligence to develop new forms of brand value.

Brands, culture and customers

Donna Bogatin has a nice post on how customers “configure culture” by altering product offerings—or inventing their own products—to meet their needs.

Donna cites a Radar Research report that lists these elements as typical of “configurable culture:”

1. Instantaneous
2. Editable
3. Global
4. Networked
5. Multi-sensory
6. Interoperable
7. Archival
8. Customizable
9. Hackable

These are also the qualities of a brand on the move.

How to cultivate brand hacks

The easiest way to cultivate brand hacks is to invite customers into your brand. Make it a team effort: a partnership instead of a one-way, top-down stylized sales stimulant. Make your brand a method for solving a common problem. That puts you and your customers on the same page, writing it together.

Hack the context to create new value

When you develop your brand as a platform for brand hacks, the hacks you aim for are new contexts for your brand and your business. In other words, brand hacks are ways that customers can extend the scope of your business, by finding new applications and contexts of value. Through brand hacks, customers become your allies in innovation. And innovating a new context can be just as valuable as innovating a new product—and sometimes more so.

Brands are code

We should never forget that brands are code. The more programmers you can enlist, the stronger your results will be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 11:49 am and is filed under Brand Innovation, Brand Creativity, Brand Strategy, Brand Applications. 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.