Brands Create Customers

When brands are built as stylized sales stimulants, as many are, they often wind up as forms of packaging, some basic, some elegant, but all a “wrapper” around the product or company, intended to make the contents more desirable.

Beyond the wrapper

Many brands get the wrapper right, freeze themselves into icons, and then retire for life. Then they wonder why upstart brands in plain brown boxes pass them by.

In building brands you have to look beyond the wrapper. Brands command a canvas that knows no edge. As a brand builder, you use this canvas to connect customers with themselves in new and vastly better places. While fine-tuning the wrapper is important, it’s not the most important part of the brand. That distinction goes to where your brand leads the customer—in that vast and fertile canvas you provide.

A brand is the first step of a movement

A brand is a collective venture for going places. By and large, it’s customers who will advance your brand. They need a vision, platforms, programs, and a direction that is all about them, and just a tad about you. They just want you to lead.

When you build a brand, your goal is to create a movement, a self-sustaining chain reaction that expresses the customer through the brand. It’s this energy from below that drives the brand forward. The immediate physical brand is just the first step, a catalyst for more powerful reactions to come.

The winner is not the wrapper

Movement rules. In brands, the winner is not the wrapper. The winner is the flag.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 11:57 am and is filed under Brand Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.