Brands Create Customers

A few months ago I proposed that the best way to change the game in any industry is to change the customer. We can now see this process of changing the customer unfolding at a meta level in leading social network sites, such as Facebook. As these sites offer broader and deeper communities for their members, they’re creating a new community-based “social customer” whose needs may not be met by traditional brands. Yes, new social sites are changing the customer and changing the game for brands themselves.

MySpace, LinkedIn, Mebo and Facebook are prominent social sites, but today I’ll focus on Facebook because it’s making big news with its innovative Facebook Platform. What sets Facebook apart (for the moment, anyway) is that its new platform allows third parties to develop software applications to run inside Facebook itself. It’s as if Facebook took the classic “closed portal” model and turned it inside out, giving members virtually unlimited choice of applications they might use.

Facebook as a platform of opportunity

Facebook thus becomes a platform of opportunity for three beneficiaries:

1. For Facebook members — as a richer platform for connecting with each other and sharing experiences
2. For application developers — as a potential market for innovative apps
3. For brands — as a new way to connect with customers, and to reshape brand identity.

Brands stand to benefit from Facebook’s platform approach, but they can’t fall back on “messaging” and brands-as-usual.

How Facebook is changing brands

With its new platform approach, Facebook is changing brands in three important aspects:

1. Facebook is creating a strong community context that can challenge the marketplace context where brands have traditionally flourished. In the Facebook context, the individual and his/her community are the focus of meaning; they’re at the center of the universe. Given this social centrality, traditional marketplace brands can appear as outsiders, as less authentic, and can fall to a second-tier.
2. Facebook enables a new mode of brands as personal applications, elevating brands from the static and symbolic to the functional, with new avenues to create customers. Brands can experience rapid, viral growth through Facebook communities when they’re a means of getting things done.
3. Facebook’s new platform raises Facebook itself to a unique brand presence as a network of expression, a happening “place,” and a true “relevance engine” based on users themselves. This raises the bar for brands. Brands without an innovative digital strategy (and deliverables) may simply go the way of these guys.

The Facebook Platform

As noted above, the Facebook Platform is important because it opens Facebook to third-party software applications, greatly expanding Facebook’s capability to serve member needs. A brand that provides value can gain a significant (free) presence on the Facebook platform in the form of a widget (a concise application) that enables members to do something gloriously useful and unique—in some context of the brand. Applications are integrated into Facebook’s look and feel, are intended to be shared, and can access (with permission) user data across Facebook’s 38 million members. See here and here, and especially Mark Andreessen’s comments here.

The challenge to conventional brands

To a large degree, Facebook and other social sites are in the connection business. The more they enable members to connect to (and shape) their personal networks, the more they thrive. In this process, a member’s group identity, support and social connections may ultimately take precedence over product and company connections that brands try to establish. One’s social network becomes an all-encompassing filter. In a context of strong social connections, where the individual is nourished by personal affiliations, exterior brand connections may be harder to establish, and sustain.

Let’s now explore the three game-changing areas where Facebook impacts brands. Other social sites may have similar impacts, as well.

1. Facebook’s community context

For brand builders, the most striking aspect of the new Facebook Platform is that it may create a strong community context with the power to displace traditional brand context. The trust, authenticity, emotion and loyalty that conventional brands strive to build can be delivered by one’s Facebook community itself, from the bottom up, in real time, 24/7. To the extent that brand connections have been a substitute for community ties swept away by the industrial revolution, digital communities like Facebook may portend a return to direct and immediate communal networks, intrinsically relevant, immediate, social and emotional. These have the potential to leave conventional brands on the outside looking in.

Replacing brand context with social context

Facebook may enable members to (potentially) replace brand context with their own social context, which is free, seemingly unlimited thanks to digital innovation, and always “relevant” because it is always under their personal control. Facebook thus enables its members to “create culture”—an outcome delivered by few current brands.

Within Facebook, members can join (or create) networks, find friends, make friends, easily share photos and videos, notes, calendars and experiences, personalize their profiles and keep close tabs on each other. Their social network is their context, and it’s under their complete (creative) control. That’s a far cry from the context of the classic “marketplace” model of atomistic, individual shoppers, where traditional brands flourished as the active agents of richer forms of meaning, using a top-down broadcast format.

One’s social network is the center of the universe

Equally significant, Facebook positions the individual and his/her social network at the center of the universe, invested with the media power of a small publisher. This is the new reality of digital community, a social sphere amped and enabled with communications and creative tools equal to (or stronger than) those of brands themselves. One’s community becomes a proactive cultural node.

This development pushes brands to move from a sales pitch or indoctrination model to an open, consensual, community model. The brand becomes less an agent of persuasion and more an agent of shared opportunity.

Facebook is the tip of the portent

Facebook, of course, is only the tip of the portent. In time I’d expect professions, crafts, towns, affinity groups, and social and political organizations to build similar online communities for their members, around similar open platforms, with add-in applications. Their own brand identities will demand it; digital technologies will enable it.

2. Brands as personal applications

Facebook changes the brand game in a second way by inviting developers (and businesses) to write software applications that run within Facebook—with controlled access to Facebook user data—to help members enrich and expand their Facebook networks. Brands can already advertise on Facebook, but the Facebook Platform is about applications, not ads.

For more on building brands as personal applications, see here.

A spawn of widgets

Most apps on the Facebook Platform will initially be one-dimensional widgets, cobbled together by developers in hopes of making an immediate splash. A few will gain traction, but most will lack the customer engagement to become “must haves,” or viral successes.

Types of applications

What kinds of widget-like applications might we see on Facebook? Here are some common types:

• Amusements — puzzles, games, time killers
• Information — news feeds, blogs, stocks, sports, weather
• Utilities — ways to find friends, form networks, vertical search
• Apps that link to outside sites — e.g., Facebook users can activate the Dogster Rescue Application with photos of dogs in shelters awaiting good homes.
• Advice — tactical help, mentor networks
• Sharing tools — to facilitate data exchange within Facebook
• Expressive tools — to personalize Facebook and produce more engaging content
• Social tools — to make one’s personal network stronger
• Vision tools — personal development apps to advance oneself via Facebook

Of course, there’s already a site devoted to Facebook apps. And more here.

What are the best applications for brands?

A brand would want to offer an application that is open, hackable, extensible, sharable, profound, unique, creative, expressive and personal. An enabler. A step ahead for the customer. Something that interweaves the context of the brand with the context of the customer, with the intimacy of a second skin. Something, I dare say, designed to create customers.

3. How should brands leverage the Facebook platform?

Given the Facebook platform, what strategy should brands pursue to create their own strong customer context? They’ll need to avoid being swamped by widget clutter, and to avoid being subsumed by the powerful community context of Facebook itself.

Push the brand envelope

“Brands as usual” is not the best approach. This will drown the brand in widget clutter. I’d suggest pushing the brand envelope to create a new foundation of brand context. You might start by rethinking brand strategy based on a new vision of brands:

“Brands are tools that enable customers to interoperate with the universe. The genius of brands is that they have no limits. The value of brands is that through them, customers have no limits.”

Help customers interoperate with the universe

Where Facebook enables its members to interoperate with each other, your brand can push that envelope outwards, beyond the Facebook frontier, to the universe itself. This is the actual turf of brands, between starry night and grain of sand, where you’re free to create and innovate in league with customers. (If dealing with the universe makes you uncomfortable, hire more liberal arts graduates.)

Brands and a bigger platform: the Internet

As a brand strategy, you might want to consider Facebook as your online starting point, not your end point. You can use Facebook as a springboard to a higher platform—the power of the Internet itself. Brands thrive best when they don’t have to pay tolls to local silos and walled gardens, including those as open as Facebook.

To quote Jason Kottke:

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the Internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007.

This also means that brands have a significant vested interest in developing open web standards, to insure a continuously innovative and extensible platform for their customers.

Changing the customer

Yes, brands are tools that enable customers to interoperate with the universe. In that vast space, your brand gains power by giving customers the power to change themselves, in a universal frame, through you. From a brand perspective, this means a customer liberation strategy instead of a customer containment strategy. In the digital age, you can share an expanding universe, or rule one that steadily shrinks.

The social context of your brand

We’re talking social context, too, which means your brand becomes a collaborative tool, a joint venture between you and your customers to discover richer forms of meaning—and living. In this process, your brand will be teaching Facebook a thing or two about interaction design.

The ultimate brand: a GUI

And ultimately, once all brands are mobile, your brand will exist as a polymorphic GUI, in a device, on a chip or in the ether, as a customer platform that runs through you, a universal enabler and communal sixth sense. Facebook will still be around, but yours will be the brand unbound, that fabric of opportunity that unfolds customers, connecting them with themselves, and their future.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 8:03 am and is filed under Brand Innovation, Brand Networks, Brand Communities. 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.