Brands Create Customers

“No one wants a relationship with their mustard.”

Kara Swisher uses this quote (from an ad agency exec) to begin her post, Social ads not cutting the mustard? She examines why widgets and other forms of “social advertising” haven’t (yet) lived up to their billing.

She continues:

This odd but spot-on observation was about why big packaged-goods advertisers–who are the really big spenders of the ad business–might be less than interested in leveraging social-media advertising and its promise of deep engagement with consumers.

No one wants to interact over mustard or mayo or ketchup or most products that pay the rent up and down Madison Avenue.

Brands and the big picture

In a narrow sense Kara is quite correct: we don’t need to chat with our jar of Grey Poupon, or have it update our Google calendar, or follow us around on Twitter. But no one really expects that, either. Such a focus on the jar or the tin is myopic. In the big picture of things—where brands play—relationships with products like mustard are very important indeed. They’re the essence of brands. What counts is the context of the relationship, and the ability of the brand itself to make that context sustainably engaging.

In brands, context is king

From a brand perspective, the blanket statement that, “No one wants a relationship with their mustard” is self-limiting. It precludes brand opportunities. Consumers can be open to such relationships—if they’re meaningful. Using mustard as an example, mustard brands have been designed to be very rich in relationships for decades. They certainly want relationships with their customers, beginning with brand trust and brand loyalty. And they certainly want their customers to have relationships with them—beginning with the brand experience of a consistently tasty product. These relationships are money in the bank.

Building the brand enthusiast

Customers who use a particular mustard will often swear by it, testifying to their relationship. If they also use it for marinades, sauces and dressings, the mustard will play a significant role in their recipe repertoire and cooking lifestyle. This places the mustard in the brand Nirvana of the enthusiast, and believe me, in that space will be a relationship. Weber understands this quite well, for example. And would Weber ever think, even for a second, that people don’t want a relationship with their grill?

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If you want your brand to innovate, you need to make it hackable. You have to cultivate brand hacks. Make your brand so your customers can grab it, bend it, and extend it, adding their initiative and intelligence to develop new forms of brand value.

Brands, culture and customers

Donna Bogatin has a nice post on how customers “configure culture” by altering product offerings—or inventing their own products—to meet their needs.

Donna cites a Radar Research report that lists these elements as typical of “configurable culture:”

1. Instantaneous
2. Editable
3. Global
4. Networked
5. Multi-sensory
6. Interoperable
7. Archival
8. Customizable
9. Hackable

These are also the qualities of a brand on the move.

How to cultivate brand hacks

The easiest way to cultivate brand hacks is to invite customers into your brand. Make it a team effort: a partnership instead of a one-way, top-down stylized sales stimulant. Make your brand a method for solving a common problem. That puts you and your customers on the same page, writing it together.

Hack the context to create new value

When you develop your brand as a platform for brand hacks, the hacks you aim for are new contexts for your brand and your business. In other words, brand hacks are ways that customers can extend the scope of your business, by finding new applications and contexts of value. Through brand hacks, customers become your allies in innovation. And innovating a new context can be just as valuable as innovating a new product—and sometimes more so.

Brands are code

We should never forget that brands are code. The more programmers you can enlist, the stronger your results will be.

Most people don’t realize it, but brands are code. At the core level, brands have much more in common with software development than they do with logos and product identities. In fact, brands should be viewed as an extension of the product development process rather than as a separate, multi-media “add-on” just before launch.

This is because brands are much more than symbols, slogans and promises. Brands are programs to get things done. And as programs, they’re built of . . . code.

In this snapshot, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why brands are code, beginning at the outside and working in.

Unlocking brand code

First, some interesting similarities:

• Brands have architectures.

• They have roadmaps.

• They have platforms

• They have programs.

• They have interfaces.

• Brands are executables.

• They have developers, and end-users.

• And most importantly, they have brand API’s.

Brands have a language, too. In fact, they are written in only one language. It is called CUSTOMER. It is a language that is infinitely interoperable.

What brand builders code

At a basic level, they code the customer’s needs into the product. In this process, they also code the whole customer into the company. This enables customer DNA to flow through a company, through its employees, operations and innovations. At a more advanced level, brand builders code new freedoms into the customer through the brand, enabling customers to be more, and to do more. In effect, they create a branded customer platform that advances the customer beyond what products alone can provide.

Brands as executables

Brands are not static images or frozen icons. Brands are action-oriented. They get things done. In other words, brands are executables. Every brand is a “.exe.” When you execute on brand, you raise the customer to the next level. Brands do this through value transforms embedded in the code.

How brand code works

Simply stated, brands are code for creating value. Their architectures, platforms, programs and interfaces transform the value inherent in the product into value realized by the customer. (This is no easy task.) At their best, brands do this in such a satisfyingly brilliant way that the customer leaves his or her old customer shell behind, and embraces the new brand going forward. When a great brand connects, there’s no turning back.

How exactly does a brand do this? First, brand building begins at the core of a company. Brands are not add-ons after the fact. Brands are a process of architecting customer progress into the product. Yep, the operative word is “progress.” The goal of a brand is to advance customers to progressively higher levels, so in future months and years they will be demanding all those cool innovations you have up your sleeve. Thus, brands are forward-focused. They are part and parcel of your innovation strategy.

Unzip your brand

So, if brands are code, how do brand builders create and deploy this code? You can find some initial guidelines in Unzip Your Brand.