Brands that live in the past eventually stay there
One thing fairly certain about brands is that brands that live in the past eventually stay there. Brands innovate, or die. In other words, your brand is not your legacy. Your brand is your tomorrow. It’s your brand innovation that writes your future. Backward-facing brands are kaput.
Apple’s brand story: wildfire innovation
Apple understands this principle and innovates like wildfire, advancing its customers to new realms of value: iPod, iPhone and now iPad. Each step forward explodes the limitations of legacy approaches. In their place Apple enables new ways of being and doing, in new contexts where customers are better-off. That’s what brands are supposed to do.
Microsoft: chained to a legacy brand
In contrast to Apple’s ardent innovation, Microsoft is chained to a legacy brand, its brand of market power stemming from the desktop monopoly that Microsoft forged in the 1990′s. Microsoft drags this legacy everywhere, like an anchor, in a vain hope of installing the past on the future.
Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t make its old brand form fit the new multi-platform world. The Microsoft brand, initially a liberating force in corporate America, now creeps like a pall. It’s heritage hangs likes a curse. There’s brand failure everywhere, most recently with the Microsoft Kin, a highly-touted mobile phone scrapped just two months after launch.
These failures weigh heavily on Microsoft employees, the makers of Microsoft’s future. Their comments on the Kin debacle in Mini-Microsoft describe a backward-facing brand in full dysfunction.
