Differentiate the customer, not the brand
Time for another chapter in my continuing carve through traditional brand practice. Today I’ll boldly propose that a focus on “differentiating the brand” can be a misguided approach—even though it’s the primary thrust of a vast majority of brands. The problem with “differentiating the brand” is that it’s never enough. It’s a half-measure at best. What a brand really needs to do is to differentiate the customer. That’s how a brand gains traction. It’s that new and different customer that will carry the brand forward. Your brand is the endless wave that makes it happen.
Opening the brand to new opportunities
“Differentiating the customer” opens a brand to new opportunities of value creation at the edge of the brand. Instead of the brand being a top-down, hermetically-sealed means of control, it becomes a customer infusion, vibrant and vigorous, speeding forward on customer feet. A brand that differentiates its customers can tap into customer initiative and innovation to explore new brand territories and discover new markets.
Your ability to differentiate the customer can make your brand a personal ally of those ready to conquer new realms of experience.
There’s no better place for a brand to be.
The old way: differentiate the brand from rivals
In the traditional brand approach, the brand is “all about the company,” and “brand differentiation” is all about competing head-to-head against rival brands. “Differentiating the brand” in this manner becomes a major goal of the brand team. Working from an inward vision, the team does everything it can to make its brand stand out from the competition. Ergo, the conventional brand approach: a unique identity, positioning, emotional appeal, brand experience, brand personality, promise, packaging, loyalty programs, slogans, visual and audio signatures, look, feel and everything else that might give the brand special appeal.
Conventional assumptions that can limit the brand
Unfortunately, the conventional approach to brand differentiation makes critical assumptions that have can have serious brand-limiting consequences.
- It assumes that the brand is a form of communication; it employs a media model of brands. This can reduce a brand to messaging, when customers need an enabling model of brand that delivers new customer capabilities.
- It assumes that a brand is part of an “offering” that needs to attract customers. The brand sits on a shelf, on a screen, or at a location where potential customers interact with it, and hopefully fall under its spell. This assumption can reduce a brand to a stylized sales stimulant, with little power to change the game.
- It assumes that the brand is the predator and the customer is the prey, the more passive the better. The customer is there to be hooked; the brand is part of the lure. The problem with this assumption is that predators don’t build communities.
- It assumes that the brand is all about the company and the product. By minimizing innovative diversity from customers, the brand risks becoming an inbred monoculture with a single point of failure.
In general, these assumptions influence companies to homogenize customers into commodity categories such as “consumers” so they can be “targeted” with media campaigns.
Alas, you can’t differentiate customers when you view them as commodities.
Company potential X customer potential
As I’ve noted previously, a brand is company potential X customer potential. The problem with all those assumptions above is that they differentiate only one half of the brand: the company half on the left side of the X. In a whole brand strategy, you are far better off with an enabling model of brand (that seminal X ) that fully includes the customer as an active brand component. The right side of the X can produce a decisive brand advantage.
Creating a new and improved customer
In other words, the last thing we want to do is to slap “New and Improved” on the brand package and leave it at that. Through the brand, we want the customer to be new and improved. We want to move the locus of the brand from the company and the product into the customer, so customers open the brand to initiative and innovation from below, and can extend the brand beyond the reach of competitors.
This means letting go of the brand as a self-centered media object and embracing the brand as a dynamic collaboration with customers. When you create the conditions for customer success you create the conditions for brand success.
How do we differentiate customers?
The best way to differentiate customers via the brand is to begin by asking the primordial brand question: What is holding our customers back? That’s your basis for delivering brand value that customers can use. It’s also your basis for analyzing the growth potential and growth vectors for customers, and for understanding areas where customer differentiation can be productive.
In general, you want to differentiate your customers from the losers created by your competitors. Look for new dimensions of customer being and doing that can become new brand contexts that you can leverage.
The dimensions of customer differentiation can include:
- Differentiating customers from their current (unsatisfactory) selves
- Differentiating customers from socially or culturally prescribed behaviors that hold them back
- Differentiating customers from market constraints imposed by competitors
- Differentiating customers from those who are thoughtless, hopeless, hapless schmucks—or other suboptimal models of humanity
- Differentiating customers from any context of constraints that impinges on their freedom
Developing new models of proactive behavior
The process of differentiating the customer is part of a larger process that includes 1) designing a customer, and 2) creating a customer. As you proceed, you’ll be developing new models of proactive behavior that are uniquely sustainable through your brand. In practice, you want to embed your brand as a kernel of opportunity within the customer, one that works within (and with) the customer to generate richer forms of expression and higher forms of living. In fact, you’ll be enabling customers to differentiate themselves.
Brandwise, this calls for multi-threaded brands, and ultimately, personal brand applications, the highest form of brand.
Platforms for customer differentiation
Yes, you will be building platforms for customer differentiation. We’re talking strategic differentiation; platforms are the only way to go. The whole point of differentiating customers is to enable them to create new forms of value which can be added back to the brand, increasing your strategic advantage.
All this, of course, means you will now be predicating your brand on customer initiative and innovation, rather than on those hermetic in-house sessions where you dreamed up the next big thing. Your brand emerges as a principle of concerted action rather than a constructed essence. And no, the result isn’t brand anarchy. Customers will be following your lead.
If you can’t lead, someone else will.
Two examples
Apple does a consistently fine job of differentiating its customers. A customer differentiation strategy requires a company with innovative chops, and Apple certainly fits the bill. Every new device it produces adds another level of sustainable customer differentiation into the Apple mix. The Mac could only go so far. Then came the iPod and iTunes. And now the iPhone. Each innovative step enables more layers of proactive customer behavior—through the brand. Microsoft, Dell, et al. can’t keep up. Sadly, they’ve homogenized their customers into a dead pool.
Harley Davidson is another example of differentiating the customer. Check out the video.