Behind every great brand is a critical, creative force that holds the brand to the qualities that set it apart. This force won’t tolerate mediocrity, half-ass execution, or excuses. It’s a force that radically differentiates the brand from the commodity approach of “good enough.” The “good enough” approach leads to products strewn across discount aisles, or piled in remainder bins.

Commodities are “good enough.” Brands are special.

Commodities are “good enough.” That’s why they’re commodities. Brands are special. And when it comes to delivering a special user experience, at the personal level of touch and feel and interaction, small details become amazingly large.

Details make the brand

As a case in point of details that make the brand, we might consider the new Zune HD, pictured above. See where I’ve outlined the word “marketplace.” The review site RantsAndStuff noticed that the full word “marketplace” doesn’t fit on the screen. The final “e” is truncated. Yep. Chopped in half. Read their article for their comments and the comments of others on how this “little” detail makes a big difference.

One excerpt:

It’s the little things like this that make me wonder what else did they not pay that much attention to. They couldn’t have dropped the menu font just a tad to make it fit on the screen? I know I’m nitpicking but shouldn’t someone at Microsoft also be nitpicking this kind of thing?

Of course, brand details are not really “nits.” Brand details are the brand.

In Microsoft’s defense (sort of)

In Microsoft’s defense, the new Zune HD  hasn’t been officially released yet, so flaws we see now can still be fixed. Engadget checked it out, with a video, too. So did TechFlash on 8/13. Official release date is September 15, 2009.

The question remains, however: Why send out a pre-release PR picture of a flawed product? First impressions are brand impressions. Why advertise your flaws? It’s not a good sign when the builders of a brand are less attentive than prospective customers.

Photo: Microsoft (with my highlight added)

Brand values, brand approach, brand identity.

Via Dustin Curtis.

Hat Tip: Hacker News

A Google brand play

The elements of Google’s emerging education brand are set forth in Google for Educators. This initiative is a Google brand play, taking shape before our very eyes. (A brand, let’s not forget, is a collaboration in context that creates new customers and new customer value.) Google is building programs to create customers in teachers, and in students. To build its brand it doesn’t need glitzy campaigns, high-octane messaging, costly Super Bowl ads, celebrity endorsers, iconic symbols, or throbbing slogans. This is a Google brand built from the bottom-up, through customers themselves and their communities.

A brand of deliverables, not promises

Significantly, Google is building its education brand through what it delivers, and by what it does, rather than by what it says or promises. Bands are deeds, not words, and brands rich in deliverables have the inside track to be recognized as brands of integrity and trust.

In education, integrity and trust are fundamental.

Google in the classroom

To see what Google is up to in the education market, look at the links in the above-noted Google for Educators site:

• Tools for your classroom
• Classroom activities
• Classroom posters
• Google Teacher Academy
• Teacher Community

Building the integrated brand

One way to describe a brand is to call it “vertically integrated value.” Google already offers a broad scope of integrated tools for learning, incorporating Google search, Google Docs, and many other applications. These are the building blocks of an integrated brand. Basically, Google is covering everything a student or teacher would want to do in the collaborative learning process, made available from single drop-in cloud.

Students can take notes in Google, write essays, share and collaborate, create special projects, and communicate with blogs, podcasts and videos. Eventually, they will take their tests in Google, too, with stealthy algorithms to keep things honest.

And yes, there will soon be “Google Certified Teachers” who successfully complete the Google Teacher Academy.

A Google brand platform for education

What Google is building with its education initiative is a brand platform. Here is how I define that term:

The brand platform is a structure of integrated brand components architected to create focused customer growth. As a platform, it: 1) serves as a common foundation for brand program applications; 2) allows for greater efficiency in brand program development via shared elements; 3) leverages context and content across the brand; and 4) enables customers to extend the brand through bottom-up brand innovation avenues.

You can see how all these pieces are being fitted together. And you can foresee the pieces to come.

Photo: jisc_infonet — Flickr

For insight into the proactive dimension of the concept of “good” in business, I can think of no better place to begin than a recent essay by Paul Graham called Be Good.

Whether you’re working with for-profit or non-profit brands, this essay will help you envision a moral platform for your brand, inside and outside the company.

Troubled movie rental chain Blockbuster announced today that it has offered up to $1.3 billion to buy troubled electronics retailer Circuit City. While the announcement of this shotgun sandwich led to a lot of head scratching on Wall Street, Blockbuster said the deal would deliver new customer value in electronics and digital media. The company was a bit short on specifics, but did mention a new combined business based (very loosely) on “digital convergence” and Apple Stores.

Little brand logic behind the deal

Frankly, it’s hard to see any compelling brand logic behind this move. Based on their recent poor performance, the two companies haven’t figured how to sustain deep connections with customers in their respective markets. At best, joining up might deliver some rather “iffy” value streams, like Circuit City upselling movie subscriptions with sales of DVD players. It’s hard to see what new kind of customer this unlikely combo could create. The comparison to Apple Stores is far too stretched to be credible.

Synergies questioned

Indeed, many Wall Street analysts wondered what real “synergies” the deal would produce, and whether these two companies could produce any such synergies.

From Reuters:

‘It’s not quite clear to me what (Blockbuster’s) intentions are, how they would finance it, what’s the strategic rationale for the deal,’ said Dennis Bryan, a partner and portfolio manager with First Pacific Advisors, a Circuit City shareholder.

‘The world is littered with remnants of bankrupt retailers,’ said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan. ‘It’s a bad idea.’ . . . ‘Blockbuster has not yet completed its own turnaround. . . . . Circuit City has serious problems and I’m not sure if Blockbuster management has demonstrated it has the skills to turn those around.’

Failure meets fiasco?

Columnist John Paczkowski labeled this proposed buy-out, “failure meets fiasco.”

Like what, exactly, are the synergies between a foundering movie rental chain and a foundering electronics retailer—aside from the fact that they’re both, you know, foundering? If it’s Blockbuster rental kiosks in Circuit City stores, the alliance would seem doomed to failure. Wait. It is Blockbuster rental kiosks in Circuit City stores.

When brands are reduced to “assets”

There’s a large amount of deal making behind the proposed buyout, involving agendas of activist and dissident shareholders on both sides, as the Wall Street Journal notes. In this context, brands play no proactive role in either business. They’re reduced to “assets,” just as customers are reduced to “sales.”

The problem with the asset approach to brands is that if often kills innovation. Brands become part of valuation packages. They no longer create value themselves. Perhaps that’s one reason why both companies are in such trouble to begin with.

Photo: jslander — Flickr

A related kind of whitespace plays an important role in brands. What I call “brand whitespace” is conceptually akin to the whitespace of designers, but in brands it’s a behavioral space for customers rather than a graphic one for layouts. Brand whitespace is the new maneuvering room that a brand creates for its customers. It can make a dramatic difference in how customers perceive a brand, and interact with it.

Brand whitespace is engagement space

Brand whitespace flows from the brand context that we create for, and around, customers. It forms the “engagement space” of the brand, where customer potential meets brand potential. The larger the brand whitespace, the more freedom the customer has to interact with the brand, to do something proactive with it, and to extend it. With this customer freedom, brand whitespace helps us create customers who can add value back to the brand.

Breathing room

You can think of brand whitespace as the breathing room of a brand. Creative brands offer lots of whitespace because they want the customer to be creative, too. Brand whitespace is that blast of fresh, bracing air that customers inhale in the presence of your brand programs. The more nourishing that atmosphere the more sustaining the brand engagement, and the more new life customers can breathe back into the brand.

Why brand whitespace matters

Brands suffer when they fail to create sufficient whitespace for customers. This can occur when a brand tries to impose a belief system from above, using campaigns of messaging, theatrics and special effects. Such an approach can choke the customer out of the brand. Without whitespace the brand becomes a series of pronouncements about itself: one-dimensional, top-heavy, closed, cloistered and stale. With no space of their own, customers can’t freely interact with the brand or with each other. With a diminished air supply they become passive and dull. The brand itself eventually withers to doctrine and drill, kept alive only by inertia.

Brand whitespace is interaction space

Brand whitespace is brand interaction space. It is where the brand and the customer join to advance their mutual agenda. Brands, of course, are a two-way street. An airy brand whitespace can transform that street from a cramped, one-way alley into a bustling two-way thoroughfare, opening the gates to ideas, insights, innovations and emotions. The more freedom that the whitespace affords the customer, the more the customer can interact with the company, the brand, and other customers to generate new forms of brand value.

Brand whitespace is collaboration space

We design brand whitespace as a context of collaboration and joint discovery. It’s an open work space where the customer and the brand join forces. This is a space of partners, and of equals. The more stimulating the brand whitespace that you provide, the more your customers are free to grow in new directions, taking your brands with them into potential new markets.

Brand whitespace is innovation space

We need brand whitespace so our brands can fully benefit from the initiative and innovation of the customers we create. In this context, brand whitespace is the customer’s opportunity space, mediated by the brand. I like to think of it as a virtual sandbox, where the brand and the customer are free to experiment, explore, prototype and iterate.

Brand whitespace helps advance the customer

Brand whitespace is customer growth space. It helps advance your customers beyond the reach of competitors. In the process it helps transform customers from lowly marketing “targets” to a living brand resources with value-adding potential. By giving customers the freedom to maneuver in the context of the brand, the brand can elevate customers from passive “consumers” to active brand participants and partners.

The brand goal here is twofold: 1) leverage customer insight and initiative to create new forms of value that competitors can’t match; 2) let customers take the brand into new markets where competitors can’t follow.

From a brand perspective, your customers are your greatest competitive weapon. Creating a stimulating whitespace is one way to build out your competitive arsenal.

The measure of brand whitespace

The measure of brand whitespace lies in the degrees of freedom that the brand makes available to customers, within the brand context. These can stem from the company, the product, the brand and the customer. On an axis, the low end of whitespace would be propaganda, and the high end would be partnership.

How to create brand whitespace

How do we create the brand whitespace that both brands and customers need? The answer will differ with every brand, but here are some general guidelines:

1. Understand that your brand is a method for creating customer value. Brand whitespace is one of your premier tools. It’s a new context of freedom that you deliver.
2. Your brand whitespace will determine how freely your customers interact and interoperate with your brand. The greater the freedom your brand confers, the greater your potential brand drive from below.
3. Conceive your brand as a shared innovation platform with customers. Brand whitespace forms an innovation sandbox where you and customers can tinker.
4. Build your brand as a means, rather than an essence. A brand that enables customers to shape new forms of self and to do new things will have plenty of whitespace where customers can re-create themselves through the brand.
5. Design your brand to deliver freedoms that competitors can’t match. Use your whitespace as a competitive weapon to win customers to your side.
6. Brands designed as messaging campaigns usually offer very little whitespace for customers. They clutter the customer’s world, and are vulnerable to brands that take a whitespace approach.
7. Brand whitespace is customer headroom. It’s a sign that you respect your customers.
8. Create a brand context larger than the company. Share this context with customers. Ask them to help shape it, and to move it forward.
9. Use your brand whitespace to open avenues of collaboration, initiative and innovation between customers and the brand, and between customers themselves.
10. How you present your brand can prefigure the brand whitespace you make available to customers.

In future posts I’ll identity specific cases of brand whitespace and how they help build strategic advantage for the brands involved.

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:

1. Advertise on the iPhone (via the Web browser)
2. Create tag-along, mini-applications in the form of widgets
3. 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.

Photo: Christopher Chan — Flickr

The monumental baggage problems at Heathrow airport’s new Terminal 5 highlight the importance of what I call brand failure points. Brand failure points are critical company operations that can potentially break the brand if they fail to perform. If they do fail, it’s the brand that pays the price, and the price can be heavy. Full recovery may take years.

Brand failure points often hide behind the scenes, far from the brand limelight. A classic brand failure point for a high-flying airline is, of course, lowly baggage. To an airline, it’s a back room job. To passengers, however, it’s front and center.

Brand failure points: off the brand grid

Brand failure points are especially dangerous because they’re typically off the brand grid. They often inhabit the least glamorous parts of a business, far from the glitz and the glamor. They’re usually not addressed in a typical brand program, especially one that lives large on symbols and fanfare. They’re often outside the direct control of the brand team, tucked away in black boxes and back rooms. Potentially, they are silent brand killers, churning and chugging away in the bowels of the business until they suddenly snap—and take the brand with them.

Failure points and points therein

In this post I’ll first discuss the nature of brand failure points, using Heathrow Terminal 5 as an example. Then I’ll suggest basic steps the brand team can take in identifying potential brand failure points, and in failure point management. The latter requires that the brand team assume a much higher profile in company operations.

Let’s begin with a review of what happened at Heathrow Terminal 5.

The potential for lasting damage

Terminal 5 is a gleaming new wing of Heathrow built at a cost of $8.6 billion on the promise to eliminate airport delays and congestion. It is run by airport company BAA and British Airways (BA) as a prime gateway to BA flights. Terminal 5 puts BA’s brand squarely on the line. Unfortunately, the seriously flawed opening is widely viewed as a brand meltdown for BA, with hundreds of canceled flights and thousands of irate fliers. As a grand opening, it was something of a faceplant.

One report called the inauspicious beginning “an absolute national embarrassment.”

From Bloomberg:

British Airways Plc canceled 54 flights today as the chaos at London Heathrow airport’s new Terminal 5 stretched into a third day.

. . .

“This will clearly go on for days,” said Howard Wheeldon, an analyst at BGC Partners LP in London. “The potential for lasting damage to British Airways is far greater than anything that has gone before.”

“A calamitous debut” according to the Los Angeles Times.

A passenger quoted in the Financial Times:

“What a disaster. I was always told that with the arrival of T5 everything would be better. RUBBISH! I was delayed for 1½ hours on a flight that only takes 90 minutes. I still don’t have my bag.”

Perhaps the Financial Times said it best: it will be a “long haul to restore BA’s reputation.”

What went wrong at Heathrow Terminal 5

These are some of the things that went terribly wrong at Terminal 5 as part of its grand opening:

1. Inadequate employee parking caused employees to be late to work as they searched for spaces in employee lots; slow shuttles from alternate lots caused more delays.
2. Once at the Terminal, employees could not get to their stations because not enough security personnel were deployed to screen employees before entry.
3. Baggage handlers underestimated the time it took to get bags from one part of the (huge) Terminal to another.
4. Baggage conveyor belts (10 miles of them) backed up; one belt broke down.
5. At one point, 15,000 bags were stuck in the Terminal baggage system.
6. The first seven flights of day one left Heathrow without checked baggage.
7. In all, 430 flights were canceled.

In addition, as reported by the Independent, BA misinformed affected customers on compensation for delays, and refused to provide hotel rooms for delayed passengers per ticketing agreements.

Failure points can cascade brand damage

Brand failure points have the power to cascade brand damage far beyond their point of origin. The potential brand fallout from BA’s Terminal 5 problems is not just angry passengers without flights and bags (although that’s bad enough). The potential damage is that passengers may decide to avoid Heathrow and British Airways altogether, or maybe skip a UK leg of travel in fear of time-wasting delays, or lost luggage.

Product launch is a brand event

Let’s not forget that a product or service launch (or grand opening) is first and foremost a brand event. It exemplifies the brand mission. It defines the brand identity and the brand deliverables going forward. It announces to the world the new kind of customer that your brand intends to create. As the event unfolds, it will produce lasting perceptions and impressions, many with strategic consequences.

BAA and BA went through many dry-run scenarios before Terminal 5 opened, but the opening was still a “national embarrassment.” One reason may be that the opening was not treated as a brand event, with top-level brand team participation and direction. With so much at stake, who else would one put in charge? It’s the brand team’s job to see the company through the eyes of the customer, to discern threats to brand value and to envision the total brand process that the event represents. Functional groups have neither this responsibility, nor vision.

Rarely, one individual can control the unveiling of a brand. At most companies, the brand team must step in, and step up.

Identifying potential brand failure points

I define a potential brand failure point as follows: a company operation that alone or in combination can fatally damage the brand’s ability to create customers and sustain the business. These are big ticket items, not trivial symbols. We think of them as “points” because that makes them easier to identify and fix.

As the brand team lays out brand touchpoints of a new product or service it will gain insight into the potential brand failure points of the operation. Plot your touchpoints on a value grid and configurations of failure points will reveal themselves. Similarly, as you plot the customer brand path, the brand value nodes at key junctures may approximate brand failure points.

What you’re “a brand of” makes a difference

How a company defines its brand can make a company more—or less—vulnerable to brand failure points. An airline that defines itself as a “brand of transportation” will think of itself as airplanes, equipment and processes to move paying passengers from point A to point B. An airline that defines itself as a “brand of travel” will position itself closer to customers by definition, and should have far better control over potential brand failure points.

Points to remember

1. A product launch or facility opening is always a potential brand failure point. That’s why we have beta programs, soft launches, dry-runs, scenarios and contingency plans. These should have heavy brand team participation (if not direction).
2. Conventional brand approaches high on glitz and glamor often overlook brand failure points. Then it’s the CEO who takes the fall.
3. Brand failure points can occur when a brand team aims at gilding perceptions rather than delivering brand value. Blinded by atmospherics, the team overlooks the fact that customers are creatures of substance.

Brand failure points can “break” customer experience

Another way to identity potential brand failure points is to ask if a particular operation or process has the potential to “break” the desired customer experience. “Break” is the operative word. Customers are forgiving—to a point. At an airport, mediocre food is tolerable. A slow baggage carousel is tolerable. Missing baggage is not.

Putting the brand team in charge

The only way to prevent brand failure points from undermining a business is to give the brand team the authority to deal with them up and down the line.

Structurally, we move the brand team from the media periphery to the core of business, which is where it belongs in the first place.

Identifying, managing and containing brand failure points is hard, grueling work for the brand team, often far outside their traditional comfort zone. Nevertheless, it has to be done.

Do it now, or pay the price later.

Photo: kozumel — Flickr

I ended a previous post, How to define the brand mission, by stating that I would compare the brand missions of Google and Microsoft as examples of my approach. This post fulfills that commitment. As a bonus it tosses in Yahoo, since Yahoo is now contemplating an unwelcome buyout bid from Microsoft itself.

What we see in this comparison is one company with a productive brand mission, one company that denies brand value altogether, and one company whose brand mission is so lacking in purpose that it never takes off.

Comparison framework

Please keep in mind that my focus is entirely on the brand mission. As I define it, a company’s brand mission is to create the customers that will drive the business forward. “Creating a customer” is a strategic act that entails a joint venture between company and customer. Each feeds off the initiative and innovation of the other.

Brand Mission Criteria

In comparing and assessing brand missions, these are some of the criteria I consider:

1. What new value does the brand intend to deliver?
2. What kind of customer does the brand aim to create?
3. How will that customer add value back to the brand?
4. How does the brand mission help create a platform for new customer opportunities?
5. Where is the brand leading its customers?
6. How does the brand mission add value over and above the business mission?

Applying the “brand of” test

One way to analyze a company’s brand mission is to ask: What is Company X a “brand of” in the first place? This helps reveal the effective, real world brand mission, not a brand mission that’s tossed up for PR purposes. In my analysis, here’s how these three brands stack up:

1. Google is a brand of Internet opportunity—especially for customers
2. Microsoft is a brand of market power, where the customer is tightly contained
3. Yahoo is a brand of place, where many great things happen—for no particular purpose

Microsoft: business mission trumps brand mission

Microsoft seems to be one of those companies where business mission trumps brand mission. If we define “brand” as a collaboration in value and culture between a company and its customers, it’s reasonable to argue that there is little brand mission at Microsoft. At Microsoft, the customer is targeted for capture and harvest; advancing the customer is not part of the plan. The result is a Microsoft brand that’s frequently viewed with suspicion and distrust.

Microsoft: a brand of market power

To the extent that Microsoft is a “brand of” something, it is a brand of market power. The Microsoft brand mission seems to reduce the marketplace to a Microsoft company town, anchored by a Microsoft company store, where customers are limited to Microsoft’s integrated offerings on Microsoft’s terms and conditions. Is this “bad?” Yes, if you want to stay fresh and grow. This model will eventually grow stale and collapse upon itself.

Microsoft’s goal: make brands irrelevant

Microsoft seems to feel extremely uncomfortable with the concept of brand itself, perhaps because brand responsibilities might interfere with Microsoft’s market power objectives . If Microsoft can force customers into a Microsoft company town where other brands can’t compete, then Microsoft wins “the brand game” by making brands irrelevant. In the absence of effective competition, their “non-brand” wins, no matter what they say or do.

Create customer dependencies, not customers

It appears that Microsoft’s strategy is to create customer dependencies instead of creating customers. Those dependencies translate into market power. The downside is that this strategy typically locks out innovation, and over time alienates customers. In the long run, this strategy is counterproductive. One “payoff” of this strategy is the notable lack of enthusiasm for Microsoft’s most heralded product in years, Microsoft Vista.

Google: a brand mission to unlock Internet value

We’re all familiar with Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra, but that’s not Google’s brand mission. No, Google’s brand mission is far more disruptive, and revolutionary. It is to unlock the value of the Internet using customers as the key, and as the beneficiaries. That’s pretty Schumpeterian right there. If I were to condense the Google brand mission into one line, it would be this:

Google’s brand mission is to translate Internet capability into customer productivity.

Google as a value-based brand

Google is a good example of what I call a value-based brand. It delivers value customers can use. For Google, the Internet is not a medium to be monetized. It’s a set of infinite capabilities to create value-producing opportunities. Google is pushing Internet value into the hands of customers at an amazing clip, faster than any competitor, and with more customer-side options for customization via brand API’s.

New customer opportunities mean new markets

For example, one could see how Google might become the universal digital platform for education. Instead of purchasing Microsoft Windows, students could do research, take notes, collaborate, write papers and make presentations using Google apps within an on-campus Google network. Some students are there now.

The advantage of the Google program, he said, was that it allowed him to keep his information on Google’s servers so that it was accessible at any computer, whether he was working at his fraternity, a coffee shop, a campus computer bank or the library. The experience, he said, has persuaded him not to pay money for software.

“I don’t ever see myself buying a copy of Office,” he said.

Google: an enabling brand

Thus, Google is an enabling brand that gains strength by advancing its customers beyond archaic business models geared to hoarding properties (or gateways) and imposing fees and rents. In this respect, Google’s brand mission places the greatest powers of the Internet in the hands of customers. Customers reap new value and return new value to Google, completing the cycle. (Every new Google app is one more building block for its advertising network, or a complement to other networks Google has abuilding.)

Yahoo: a brand mission stuck on sticky

I have to admit that I’ve always liked the free-spirited Yahoo culture, plus Yahoo’s ability to deliver some first-rate, innovative Web apps. That said, there was always something missing in the Yahoo brand, as if it lacked direction and defining purpose.

Long on features, short on mission

Yahoo seems to be long on features but short on mission. It’s hard to figure out where Yahoo is going, where it’s leading its users, and what kind of customer Yahoo is trying to create. It’s as if the self-absorbed Yahoo parts have more presence than the global Yahoo brand. This makes identifying the Yahoo brand mission—and identifying with it—far more difficult.

A “media company” brand mission

The Yahoo brand mission has been conditioned and constrained by Yahoo’s “media company” orientation. As a media company, Yahoo doesn’t create customers as much as it creates an inviting place for content “consumers” to spend as much time as possible, so they can be exposed to advertising. In accordance with this media model, Yahoo has lots of media “assets” whose intent is to collect segments of valuable “eyeballs” that advertisers might covet.

Stuck on sticky

Yahoo’s brand mission would seem to be this: create a digital village of outstanding properties where visitors can be entertained and made totally comfortable, so that they stick around for advertisers. This mission doesn’t do that much in terms of advancing customers. It certainly falls short in creating customers who can personify the Yahoo brand. Brand-wise, Yahoo is upstaged by tiny Moleskine.

In Yahoo’s brand mission, Yahoo is a cul de sac instead of a journey. That robs the brand of a defining passion to galvanize and lead customers toward overarching goals, outside the village gates.

Declining orbits

Where Google innovates to enable new value for customers, Yahoo innovates in hopes of keeping users’ eyeballs in orbit. This approach limits the sense of discovery and adventure that customers can experience. No surprise, then, if users eventually wander off. Indeed, this closed-in experience may have led to Yahoo’s sluggish performance, which invited facilitated the Microsoft takeover. Had there been a living, breathing Yahoo brand mission in place, the company (and its customers) might have had a fighting chance.

Photo: sissi de kroon — Flickr