Brands move customers from Point A to Point B
One of the great myths about brands is that they’re supposed to be timeless, static icons. In this myth brands are fixed and immutable, casting a pure, Olympian glow from high above—or at least from the shelf.
Walk through any retail environment and you’ll note that many traditional brands still embrace this model. They’re inert, and proud of it, often reducing themselves to a symbol, slogan or promise that sits and waits for customers.
And waits.
And waits.
These days, traditional brands are doing a lot of waiting. Customers are passing them by, moving too fast to notice.
Great brands are customer wheels
Brand inertia is not the future. Newer brands have wheels. Better yet, they are wheels. They’re not icons; they’re enablers. They enable customers to get things done, to move from Point A, where things aren’t that great, toward Point B, where things are a whole lot better.
These brands grasp in a heartbeat that a worthwhile “brand experience” isn’t the package or the promise. It’s what the brand does in the real world to move customers forward. What counts is the quality of direction, the speed, and the distance that the brand delivers.
Moving customers forward
If customers can’t measure what your brand delivers—in how far and how fast they advance—your brand is one step closer to gathering dust.
A dynamic brand will enlarge a customer’s life and give him or her the tools to explore it. The best of these tools are at the tips of customer fingers and in the taps of their toes. (See photo above.) They’re immediate value, getting things in gear, popping up new horizons left and right.
Fast track brands
Online brands have a big advantage here, because they’re often enablers at the core. They’re fast track brands for fast track customers (who happen to have healthy incomes). Old brands ignore them at their peril.
(Fast track brands can cut you off at the pass.)
Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple are all good examples, and ever more “edge-ier” brands (like Pinterest) are emerging, rapidly trying to translate new digital capabilities into new vectors of customer value.
It’s the Point B that matters most
Every brand has a Point A: it’s the brand identity and all its attributes. What matters most, however, is the brand’s Point B. For the customer, Point B is Point Better-off. So we ask: Where is the brand taking its customers? How far ahead will that be? How will that Point B be a richer realm of living compared to today’s Point A.
That’s the brand question.
Photo: iessi — Flickr
