Brands Create Customers

There’s a sober brand lesson behind the recent announcement that The Sharper Image has filed for bankruptcy protection. If your brand has no idea of the customer that it needs to create, every new product you introduce can actually undermine your brand, leaving you vulnerable to death by a thousand brand cuts, all of them self-inflicted.

Brand cuts—and why they sting

The act of creating customers builds a strong customer context for the brand. Without this context, new products can appear as random events, cluttering the brand and masking brand value. Each new (random) product cuts into the brand, unintentionally to be sure, but a cut nonetheless. Instead of deepening customer relationships, the new products create more distance between a company and its customers. In time, the brand is shredded from within. Customers lose interest, wondering why the company lost interest in them.

No coherent brand strategy

The Sharper Image is an example of what happens to a company without a coherent brand strategy. “Coherent” in this sense means that the brand has to include the customer. And more to the point, the brand must have a definite customer in mind that it desires to create, a proactive customer type that will drive the business forward and add value back to the brand.

A seller’s brand

Unfortunately, The Sharper Image brand never really included its customers. As a brand, it was all about The Sharper Image. It was a prototypical seller’s brand, rich in merchandising and marketing, but one that could never conceive of its customers as anything other than passive “targets.” It never managed to create a customer context and a customer culture, two critical elements that fall into place during the customer creation process.

A brand of novelty, not innovation

Although The Sharper Image liked to posture itself as a brand of innovation, it was really a brand of novelty. It was a novelty store featuring electronic and digital gadgets. It promised and delivered novelty, although in later years, with items such as Trump Steaks, the novelty itself seemed rather forced.

Compared to Abercrombie & Fitch

It’s productive to compare The Sharper Image brand with that of Abercrombie & Fitch. The Abercrombie & Fitch brand knows how to create a customer. For many customers, the brand is liberating; it enables breakout behaviors. The brand points customers in a certain direction. It opens doors they could not open by themselves.

What new customer freedoms does The Sharper Image brand enable? What doors does it open? In what key direction does it point its customers? What new holistic truths does it reveal, or evoke? How does it promise to change it’s customers? These are key questions the brand never answered, or didn’t answer well.

The health angle bottomed out

For a while, The Sharper Image appeared as a brand of healthy living thanks to its many air purifier products featuring ionization technologies. But the company’s health claims for these products were debunked by Consumer Reports, and later became the subject of a major class-action lawsuit, which the company lost settled. It never seemed to recover after these blows.

The dangers of excluding customers from the brand

Some might consider The Sharper Image as simply a “1980’s company” that had outlived its usefulness, ultimately done in by real innovations on computers, the Internet, cell phones, instant messaging, etc. No doubt there’s some truth to that. Yet, had the company actively created its customers during its heyday, it would have had some valuable help in its time of need—and perhaps even before then. By excluding customers from its brand, it ultimately excluded them from its future.

Photo: Henthorn — Flickr

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Creating Customers, Brand Building, Brand Strategy. 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.