How your brand can leverage the iPhone
Recent surveys by M:Metrics and Rubicon offer further evidence that the iPhone is shaping up as a premier platform for building brands. Third-party applications are booming, and iPhone users are increasingly going online. Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube are popular on the iPhone, as are online news and social applications such as Facebook.
For brands, the question increasingly becomes: How can our brand leverage the iPhone? How can we make it our platform, too?
Choosing the optimum iPhone approach
A brand can take a passive approach toward the iPhone, or a proactive one. A passive approach will pretend that the iPhone is a TV and be content to advertise, using traditional media methods. In a proactive approach, the brand develops a unique iPhone application that co-creates value with customers, in ways that competitors can’t match. Brands with this approach aim to become an iPhone player in their own right—and a big one.
The iPhone opportunity for your brand
Would people want an iPhone because it runs a super-cool application backed by your brand? Or will the application come from a competitor?
There will be killer iPhone apps for every profession and every customer passion. Apple can’t develop all of these. And that leaves room for you.
The brands that will gain the most from the iPhone platform will be those that raise themselves to the level of platform player. Through their applications they can advance the iPhone platform itself, making it more effective (and more desirable) as a means of personal expression and engagement.
The iPhone as lifestyle platform
If the iPhone is setting the standard for mobile devices of the future (and it’s hard to assume otherwise), then it’s likely that the iPhone will become the lifestyle platform of a valuable, growing demographic whose lives are geared online. This is a demographic that doesn’t “consume” media. It embraces and engages it, often in the form of interactive applications that users customize to their liking, or invent themselves in mashups.
Brands on the iPhone: portable, personal, persistent
In many ways the iPhone represents the future of brands: portable, personal, persistent. For brand builders, the challenge is to create a brand experience on the iPhone that leverages the iPhone platform in these three dimensions. The more value that your brand can deliver using the iPhone, the more power you’ll have to form enduring customer relationships. iPhone users may be immediate customers of Apple and the carrier, but strategically, their your customers, too.
The iPhone lets your customers take your brand with them—if you give them a reason.
Brands have three choices for an iPhone strategy
In general, brands have three choices in how they might utilize the iPhone platform in a brand-building strategy. From weakest to strongest, these are:
- Advertise on the iPhone (via the Web browser)
- Create tag-along, mini-applications in the form of widgets
- Create personal brand applications that add so much value that they enhance the iPhone itself, making it more vital to customer lifestyles. This is the domain of the brand-driven killer app.
On the iPhone, apps trump ads
Do you want the iPhone to be a channel for your ads, or to be a springboard for your unique brand value? The more you leverage the platform, the more the platform can leverage you.
Brands that want a unique and definitive presence on the iPhone will think of brand applications rather than ads. These apps will leverage the synergies between the digital platform and the brand, recombining them in a new helix of customer value and customer opportunities.
Brand-driven applications on the iPhone may be of any size. They can be web-based (like Facebook, Flickr, Google, etc.) or native apps written with Apple’s new iPhone SDK. Whatever their type, they’ll open up a whole new realm of brands as direct personal applications, where every use has the potential for rich brand interaction.
Brands as co-creators of the iPhone experience
Don’t tell Apple, but brands have the power to become co-creators of the iPhone experience, adding new customer dimensions, applications and platform effects. The iPhone is now the rage because it’s a huge leap beyond competing smartphones. In a few years, however, when owning one is common, it’s the deeply personal apps and a wide open Web that will carry the day.