Brands Create Customers

While brand builders usually craft brands to be as highly visible and as “hot” as possible, disruptive brands often call for a different strategy. Truth is, disruptive brands can be at their best when they’re kept to a low profile, and served very, very cold. Like the underwater mass of an iceberg they attract little notice as they glide into position. Then, when the time is right, they discretely split the seams of the reigning Titanic as it cruises past. One second they hide beneath the surface, and the next second they own the ocean. Bright lights and fanfares would only alert their intended prey.

Can Google disrupt the Microsoft brand?

Thanks to the always insightful David Berlind, we can see a potential brand disruption taking shape in the sea-change confrontation between Google and Microsoft for computing platform dominance. From a brand-builder perspective, this is largely a brand context battle about which brand will define the future context of computing. It’s the emerging Google brand context vs. the prevailing Microsoft Windows brand context. What appears on the surface is far less important than what’s going on down below.

Over several posts David outlines how Google is stealthily creating the infrastructure and applications for a powerful (hosted) brand platform that stands to cause Microsoft serious damage. In the best disruptive tradition, the Google brand is readying itself for this conflict calmly and quietly, barely causing a ripple.

For some background on disruptive brands see this previous post.

What is brand context?

Brand context is an amazing property of brands. It’s the world of opportunity that a brand presents to the customer, the real deal of possibilities that the brand conveys and incarnates, across all human dimensions. For the customer, it can be “the new you, in a better place” that only a brand can deliver. The brand context has the potential to extend the customer’s horizons, and provide a means of reaching them. It’s the opposite of artificial worlds fabricated by hype, spin and mind games. (These are properties of propaganda, not brands.)

Of course, a brand context can also be decidedly negative and restrictive. That invites disruption by a brand context that offers more freedom to customers.

The iPod offers a wondrously rich brand context of music compared to the restrictive context of CD’s. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Microsoft and the PC makers offered a superior brand context in the business world compared to the old way of working with pencil and paper. Now, it’s Google’s turn to offer a more liberating brand context of computing than that provided by a mature Windows Office.

The challenger: Google Apps

The heart of Google’s challenge is a new domain-oriented platform (and potential brand context) called Google Apps, which consists of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar, a forthcoming presentation app, and a basic intranet structure to manage them for domain users. Google Apps is aimed not at individual web surfers but at groups such as organizations, small businesses, enterprises and schools that share a domain. As David explains, Google Apps has many features the average Googler will never see. Its strength is a hosted set of core office applications plus workgroup and application connectivity in a single, extensible package. Currently it’s free for families; other groups can get a free trial through May.

Google goes after the disruptive 10%

As David notes, Google’s objective with Google Apps is to gain market share by offering the key 10 percent of Microsoft Office features that customers use most, at a fraction of what they pay for Office. This 10 percent equates to 95 to 100 percent of the features found in Google Apps. Gee, this might just ring a bell.

The promise of Google Apps

Google Apps holds the promise of being far cheaper and easier to administer than Microsoft Windows, while being largely compatible with it. If it’s reliable, costs far less, delivers equal or better productivity, doesn’t force hardware upgrades (a la Vista), causes fewer headaches, and comes with painless updates, it may indeed usher in a computing sea change for customers.

For Google Apps, brand context is critical

The strategic task for Google Apps is to become much more than low-end disruption. It needs to represent a liberating context of computing, where organizations and individuals can wield more power over their digital platforms and tools, and thus gain more control of their destiny. When we’re talking about these kinds of holistic changes in the customer world, we’re talking about the power of brands, above and below the surface.

Use brand context to advance the customer

What’s critical for Google is to deliver Google Apps as a superior computing context, one that advances the customer—and the customer’s world—as much as it advances computing itself. “Google” must become synonymous with this new context. (Yes, we’re now in brand territory.) In effect, Google must become the iPod to Microsoft’s CD, with equivalent cultural, social and personal awakenings. Through Google Apps the overall weight of computing has to be lifted from customer shoulders. To the extent that it’s a burden, it’s a burden they no longer need to bear. And as this burden disappears, the customer is freed to to grow along the lines that (hopefully) Google has stratigically mapped out. All in all, this heralds is a new brand context, one that signifies the end of the “Age of Dummies“.

Google’s goal: replace the Microsoft brand context

In practical terms, Google’s brand challenge is to replace the reigning Microsoft context of computing (largely dictated by Microsoft) with a more customer-centric computing context enabled by Google. There is no need to frame this battle as Google vs. Microsoft. It can be framed as customers vs. Microsoft, with Google in the customer’s corner.

Note that this is not a contest of feature vs. feature. (That’s a no-win product context that excludes the customer.) It’s a battle between different models of customer, based on which brand context offers the customer the highest growth trajectory. For this strategy to work, Google Apps will need to function as an extension of customers themselves. Thus, Google’s offerings are no longer “software.” They become—in their new context—”what the customer needs to do.”

To get to this point, Google’s brand strategy must answer two questions at the core of brand building:

1. What is holding our customers back?
2. What freedoms do customers need to raise themselves to the next level?

How Google answers these questions will determine the carrying power of its emergent brand context.

No slam dunk for Google

Building a holistic brand context for Google Apps will not be a slam dunk for Google. Execution on brand is critical. Moreover, Google has passed the point where it can just toss another new technology over the transom and expect it to flourish. It has to embrace customers with a vibrant closeness. That may be a stretch for Google’s techie culture, where “closeness” usually means the command line. Plus, there are still key performance questions to be resolved, such as how to get work done with Google Apps if one’s Internet service is not available. David Berlind is compiling his own to do list for Google, based on his first hand experience as a Google Apps customer.

Microsoft’s defense

Microsoft will defend itself against Google with online office apps via Microsoft Office Live, so the outcome of this battle is far from decided. Of note, though, is that Windows Live is viewed as suffering from serious brand problems. If these aren’t rectified, Google’s disruption becomes all the easier.

Iceberg Photo: Ansgar Walk — Wikimedia

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UPDATE: May 3, 2007
David Berlind mentions a new software application (called gShare) that enables Google Apps to replace Microsoft components for Microsoft Office collaboration. I didn’t mention it above, but the Google/Microsoft battle over brand context is also a battle of competing ecosystems.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Creating Customers, Brand Innovation, Brand Fundamentals, Brand Building, Brand Platforms. 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.