Brands Create Customers

If expectations come to pass, 2010 may indeed go down as “the year of the tablet,” with Apple’s (rumored) new tablet and similar devices re-defining—and re-powering—the printed page. Digital tablets stand to reinvent the magazine, too. Digital magazines will be deeper and richer than their paper predecessors, and they can be downloaded in seconds. One of these new magazine types will be the brand magazine, a creative communication between you and your customers. Where your website is informational, your brand magazine will be interesting.

What’s in a brand magazine?

Think of your brand magazine as the diary, notebook and map of your shared brand journey with customers. An interesting brand (i.e., a truth-seeking brand) will attract the truth-seeking writers and designers to make a tablet-enabled brand magazine possible. There’s no room here for PR fluff, recycled ads or sales pitches. That’s what your block-headed competitors do, and that’s also why 99% of brands will be constitutionally incapable of producing brand magazines of their own. They aren’t interesting. You are.

You and your customers, interacting with the world

Your brand magazine details how you and your customers interact with the world in a creative dialectic. The tablet concept below shows how a new interactive tablet format might work. The deep insights behind your brand can flow freely to customers, be mediated by customer experience, and return all the richer. In the tablet universe articles become engagements, which become explorations, which become epiphanies, large and small. Brand epiphanies are what we’re after.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

The above concept was developed by Bonnier R&D in conjunction with BERG. More information on the concept here.