When customers outrun the brand

Some companies still find it hard to grasp that brands are tools for innovation, rather than tools to contain and corral customers. In these days of rapid change, a brand that doesn’t innovate can easily be outrun by customers. Musty icons, stories and promises are soon left behind.

In fact, there are notable cases where brands that try to contain their customers actually wind up trapping themselves. One day the corral is empty. Customers have bolted to better brands.

The newspaper industry: a case study

A case in point is the newspaper industry. Every brand builder should read Clay Shirky’s trenchant assessment of how that industry failed to save its future under the relentless onslaught of Internet innovation. The industry clearly saw the threat coming in the early 1990′s. It tried vainly to perpetuate its entrenched market power in various new guises, and with various new schemes. All of these failed miserably.

Backward-facing brands

With its brands looking backward, the industry could not transform itself into a new context of value consistent with emerging markets of online technology. Customers flocked to these new markets, creating powerhouse brands in Craigslist and eBay, social sites like Facebook, and blog publishers like Blogger and WordPress. They wanted to be active “publishers” themselves, not yesterday’s passive “readers.”

Brands are a forward-focused context of value

Brands are a forward-focused context of value shared between a company and its customers. “Forward focused” means that the brand lives at the leading edge of customer value. It’s an engine of new value creation. As a perpetual co-creation, it can’t be hobbled by fossilized icons, or by business models long past their prime.

If your brand isn’t changing the world, the world will be changing you

The bottom line in the sad story of newspaper publishing is this: If your brand isn’t changing the world, the world will be changing you.