Brands Create Customers

If you haven’t already read Jon Kolko’s “Our misguided focus on brand and user experience” in Johnny Holland, go and read it now. It will challenge at least some of your beliefs about brands. Others it will politely throw out the window.

I’ll have more to say about Jon’s essay in a future post. At first glance Jon may seem a bit harsh toward brands, but his critique is directed toward brands of contol and manipulation. I see his essay as aiming for the same positive/creative/liberating brand outcomes that I set forth in in this blog.

First gradually, and now suddenly, brands are migrating to the social sphere as methods of creating value. In this process they increasingly share concepts and processes with other innovation and design disciplines that are breaking new ground.

UX design, service design and design thinking

Sylvain Cottong has put together a nice overview of UX design, service design and design thinking and how they inter-relate. His presentation on SlideShare contains many classic diagrams from these fields, and some I hadn’t seen before. The presentation makes a good reference source for brand builders. At some point the best of these and other disciplines will be wrapped in a (meta) brand methodology, based (naturally) on the art of creating customers.