Brands Create Customers

We encounter the term “brand strategy” in just about every brand discussion these days, but what does “brand strategy” actually mean? How does it fit into that dynamic matrix that includes a company, its products, its brands and its customers? And what makes it “strategic”?

Brand strategy defined

As I see it, a company’s brand strategy describes how the brand intends to create customers. Specifically, it sets forth the creative, social and moral steps that the brand will take to create the customers that will drive the business forward.

“Creating customers” is a strategic act

“Creating customers” is a strategic act in itself. It is one reason why the “creating customers” approach to brands is so powerful. It is inherently strategic. It aligns company and customers in a shared context from the get-go.

The process by which a brand creates customers is outlined here and here.

What a brand strategy must include

To be effective, a brand strategy must include these qualities:

1. It is value-based. It aims to deliver new forms of value that advance customers beyond the status quo, and beyond the reach of competitors.
2. It innovates. It aims to deliver a new customer context, a new vision of what customers can be, and do—exclusively through the brand.
3. It is structured as a platform. It’s goal is to make the brand a platform of new customer opportunities, a springboard for personal customer growth.
4. It collaborates with customers. Brand strategy is a joint effort to free customers from current markets, illusions or fears that hold customers back. Customer energy magnifies brand energy.
5. It’s an overt act of culture creation. A brand strategy aims to create a new culture of growth, initiative and discovery that raises customers to a new level. This is a new level that leads to profitable new markets for the company.

A brand strategy takes its direction from the brand mission. It includes the capability of brand vision, which is the ability to see your future through your customers’ eyes.

Many brands don’t have strategies

While there are a great many brands in the world, not all brands have brand strategies. Many brands are constructed as intense identities to be flogged by advertising campaigns, in which the “brand” operates as a stylized sales stimulant. Such brands are synthetic creatures of marketing and sales. They’re part of a persuasion package, and persuasion is not a strategy.

Companies can employ negative brand strategies

Certain companies may employ negative brand strategies that aim to limit and contain customers. Their goal is to use customers, rather than to create them as proactive brand partners. Often, these strategies result in brands of illusion that go medieval on their customers. They follow a brand agenda to keep customers weak, because they lack a strategy for dealing with proactive cultures—including those of their own employees.

Photo: Inky Bob — Flickr

Merlin Mann has announced that he’s “shifting gears” at his famed 43 Folders personal productivity site. In effect, he’s reinventing the 43 Folders brand. The site is changing from a brand of personal productivity to a brand of personal creativity. It’s brand deliverable is changing from improving one’s core efficiency to improving one’s creative output—and one’s personal relevance in the world.

The shape of a new brand

The new 43 Folders brand approach is evolving as we speak, but we can glimpse its general shape and direction. It’s RIP for “productivity pr0n.” The new focus of the site, in its own words:

43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.   . . .

This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.

Right now, 43 Folders is focused on an arc about how to improve the quality of your career and life by managing your attention in a way that allows you to work your ass off on the creative projects that matter most to you.  . . . .

I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want to help you figure out how to make those things even better. That’s pretty much it.

The person the new brand will create

It appears that the new person that the 43 Folders brand intends to create will be one who can enjoy a creatively-focused life in the context of a workaday world. This is a trans-cubicle, integrated approach that opens up a lot of possibilities. Defining oneself as a creative individual who articulates a passion can dramatically refocus one’s life; it can actually make certain mainstream “productivity” issues irrelevant. One’s life jumps to a whole new level.

Some questions

1. It’s not clear yet if the new approach will concentrate on workaday people with passionate hobbies, or also lean toward serving artists and creatives. Will this be a new 43 Folders for the “creative class?”
2. The original 43 Folders approach helped spawn a “productivity process” movement where process took center stage. People flocked to GTD and joined the Moleskine militia. However, a strict focus on productivity process can be limiting to an individual’s growth. Will the new approach be more “philosophical,” with less emphasis on process? In other words, will the journey take precedence over the journal?
3. Who might serve as a model practitioner of this new approach? Every new brand should bring to life a new model of customer, someone who incarnates the brand and serves as a reference.
4. A brand “arc” or a brand journey?
5. What are the brand possibilities inherent in a DIY approach? How might these trump factory brands? This might be the basis for a multithreaded brand from the bottom up.

The incumbent challenge

Of course, there’s one dark shadow hanging over this new 43 Folders initiative. The last word on creative productivity has already been uttered, and immortalized, by Father Guido Sarducci, two decades ago. It’s hard to top that.

Illustration: Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook entry for a flying machine. (Leonardo could have used 43 Folders. He was notorious for starting many projects and finishing very few.)