Brands Create Customers

We’ll have to wait a bit for Apple’s iPad killer app in education.

In recent months I made the (speculative) case that a new Apple tablet that integrated textbooks, lectures, course materials and coursework could have a transformative impact on higher education. You can see my reasoning in the following posts:

1. Is Apple positioned to disrupt universities?
2. More thoughts on how Apple’s (rumored) iTablet could reinvent higher education

Like many others I tuned into Apple’s January 27 launch event to see what Steve Jobs and company envisioned for their new tablet computer.

Apple’s education initiative is not ready for prime time

The iPad name certainly works as a learning tool, but about 20 minutes into the launch event it became clear that Apple’s education initiative was not yet ready for prime time. It was not going to happen during this keynote. There was nothing said (or demoed) about the iPad and textbooks, when we know that Apple has been meeting with textbook publishers on how the iPad could raise textbooks to a whole new level. There was also no mention of any learning or education apps, or of an enhanced iTunes University infrastructure, or of key university partners, or other elements that would naturally flow from an integrated education initiative with Apple in a central role.

Ready for the fall semester?

Apple does have some time on its side. The iPad itself won’t be commercially available until late March (for the Wi-Fi version), and in April for the 3G version. This window allows Apple more time to finalize new features and apps, and to establish working relationships with its many partners in an educational iPad ecosystem. A spring iPad education launch could position the iPad as the ideal off-to-school computer for the Fall 2010 semester.

Why buy your kid a crummy netbook when the iPad can be fully integrated with the education process?

A muted launch event

Education is a game-changing market for the iPad, but I didn’t hear the word “education” once in the official video of the launch event. Steve Jobs and others rhapsodized about the iPad as a supremely portable device for browsing, watching videos and movies, reading ebooks, newspapers and magazines, and playing games. The few demos were lackluster or rushed. No wonder the general reaction to the launch event was muted. Where was the game-changer? How did the iPad point beyond itself to some greater good? Where was its unique contribution to culture, to make a difference that matters?

We witnessed the introduction of a beautiful and highly capable tablet computer with no compelling reason to embrace it beyond its (limited) coolness. What crucial problem did it solve?

Why Apple didn’t refer to the iPad and education

If the iPad has so much potential in education, why didn’t Apple at least mention what it planned to do with the iPad in the education arena? It all comes down to impact, and how Apple builds its brand. The Apple brand aims to command every context in which it appears. It’s a diva; it owns the stage. To command a context Apple “reinvents” a key aspect of culture by enabling new ways of being and doing via Apple technology. The brand is transformative. An Apple launch event is therefore a conceptual and paradigmatic breakthrough as much as a technology breakthrough. In this approach, either you launch the complete product and brand ecosystem, and the new paradigm, with all guns blazing and all trumpets blaring, or you keep everything completely under wraps until the time is right. You don’t dribble. A piecemeal launch is worse than no launch at all.

Thus the January iPad launch became a device launch only. The education initiative will follow, in command of its own context, with select partners, evangelists, champions and endorsers, when the time is right.

Two signs of things to come

I did observe two signs of things to come in Apple’s education initiative, however. One was almost hidden in the keynote itself, the other lies in an interview with a highly-regarded VC after the launch.

The intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts

The iPad keynote did reveal a significant sign about what’s coming in education, although it’s tucked away at the very end of Steve Jobs’s presentation. Go to the 1:31 mark on the official Apple video and look at the image on the screen. Steve is discussing how the iPad represents  the “intersection of technology and liberal arts.” Liberal arts? As in, um, a college curriculum? Yes indeed, but that’s as far as he goes. Behind Steve on the screen is a street sign that shows two intersecting streets: Technology and Liberal Arts. How are they related? What’s Apple’s game-changing role? Since when is “Liberal Arts” an Apple focus? All this is brought up at the end of the keynote. We’re left hanging.

BTW, don’t be surprised if this is the first image you see when Apple announces its iPad education initiative. My sense is that it came from a separate presentation.

John Doerr on the iPad’s education potential

John Doerr, one of Silicon Valley’s the world’s leading venture capitalists, sees great education potential in the iPad. Is he in a position to know something? He does manage the $100 million iFund. Check out his initial comments as he’s interviewed by Om Malik just after the iPad launch event. (John’s segment begins a few seconds into the video; that’s David Carr pictured below.)

John says he’s particularly excited about what the iPad can do in education, with the iPad’s potentially “transformative” effect on American education and education worldwide. As I noted in a previous post, an iPad education initiative may enable a student in Oxford, Mississippi to take a class offered in Oxford, England.

Potential scope of Apple’s “killer app” for education

To summarize from my previous posts, the iPad’s ability to combine textbooks, lectures, class materials, course notes, class work and reference materials in an interactive, networked device could make the iPad a handheld university, a portable and immensely powerful learning platform. Combined with an expansion of Apple’s iTunes University, iTunes distribution network, and working arrangements with textbook publishers and universities, the iPad could enable Apple to become a leading brand of education. The “killer app”  is the integrated system (and ecosystem) that Apple brings to the table: the affordable, portable iPad, operating software, apps, partners, iTunes ecommerce for purchasing textbooks and other learning materials, iTunes U for courseware distribution, networking and infrastructure. All this could conceivably power campus learning, distance learning, and elements of non-university schooling as well. The whole soup to nuts.

Why the iPad needs to make an impact in education

After the iPad launch many commentators called the iPad the definitive media consumption device, perfect for web browsing and for buying music, videos, movies, books, and newspapers from Apple’s online stores. This is the iPad as a (mostly) passive device. It creates consumers who sit there and buy things, much like traditional TV.

While there’s obviously great profit potential in such a consumption-focused device, is that the legacy Apple (or Steve Jobs) desires—to create the second incarnation of the boob tube?

I don’t think so. Apple often describes its products as making contributions to culture. To quote Apple COO Tim Cook:

We believe that we’re on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We’re constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

If you want to make a “significant contribution” you don’t settle for a digital consumption device. You aim higher, to a proactive learning platform that improves education and pays cultural dividends many times over, across every country in the world. That’s how you build the brand.

Confession: I do it for the olives. But, you knew that all along.

Herewith is Part III of my infamous brand quotes. As in Part I and Part II, my goal is to separate value-based brands from brands cast as illusions, or brands reduced to stylized sales stimulants. Today many brands are often their own worst enemies, desperately creating make-believe when they should be creating customers. (Hey, is that a quote?)

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In marketing, customers are the target. In brands, customers are the core.

The traditional marketing approach tends to separate the “producer” from the “buyer,” as if they’re separate species, with the producer usually fishing for customers using the brand as a lure. In contrast, the brand approach is holistic, with makers and customers joined in a common core. The brand model is a model of value co-creation, instead of a model of selling. Rather than “target” customers, brands co-create value with them to grow the common core. When customers buy the product they “buy themselves” through the brand.

Within the common core brands should be dynamic, vibrant and visceral. A model for this common core was developed eons ago.  Who might have the brand advantage now?

A brand should be larger than life—but never larger than its customers.

Mediocre brands play it safe and copy one another, using the same copy machine. A brand that’s larger than life breaks the bounds of convention—and scraps the machine. It breathes new life into its customers, in a new context that disrupts the old. It takes its customers with it—as  equals—so they can fuel one another on their shared brand journey.

A brand that’s larger than life makes contributions to culture. It needs headroom for itself—and its customers—to grow. Smaller brands make contributions to spreadsheets.

“Brand awareness” refers to the brand, not to the customer

The conventional definition of  “brand awareness” is that it’s the degree to which people know about a brand and what the brand stands for. However, “brand awareness” has a far deeper meaning for the brand itself. We can think of brand awareness as the brand’s own awareness of its value potential: how the brand can make a difference and lead its customers to a richer life.

A brand is “aware” when it sees the future through its customer’s eyes. The first step to brand awareness is to ask the primordial brand question: “What is holding our customers back?”

When brands are in it for the money, customers will be in it for the price.

Every brand defines the terms of its engagement. When a brand exists solely as a stylized sales stimulant, created to monetize a product at a maximum price, customers are not part of the brand. The brand positions them as tools.

Customers may respond by de-monetizing the brand. They accept the brand for what it is—a gaudy act on a commodity stage—and shop on price. Instead of creating customers, the brand has created  deal-seekers—the worst outcome possible.

To dethrone a brand icon, create an iconoclastic customer

When competing against a brand icon, don’t try to out-icon the icon. Your best bet is to dethrone the  icon by creating a thoroughly iconoclastic customer, one whose new world excludes the old. You radically change the brand topography by changing the entire context of the customer—and the category. This is precisely how iPod/iTunes crushed CD’s and reinvented the music industry.

See here.

Luxury stores sell brand icons. Their factory stores sell brand stereotypes.

Today’s “luxury brands” come in two flavors: the icon, and the stereotype.

If you visit an “authentic” luxury shop in an upscale shopping area, telling your driver to cool it for a few hours, you can experience the brand as it was intended. On the other hand, if you drive 50 miles to the “factory” version of the same brand in an outlet mall, you will experience something completely different. The luxury brand has been reduced to a stereotype–typically the logo writ large, and writ everywhere.

The luxury stereotype flatters the bottom line, but never the brand. It transforms the brand into a “deal.” That’s the last place a brand wants to be.

Photo: Hysterical Bertha — Flickr

Thanks to innovations in mobile software we can now use our smartphone camera as a lens to discover new layers of context in the scene before us, ideally a relevant, personalized context that’s not visible on the surface. Two examples of this emerging technology are Wikitude and Layar.

Brand layers: shapes and shades of meaning

Since this is a blog about brands, I look at this new technology as a way to create brand layers, planes of brand sensibility (taste + intelligence + awareness) that can enhance situational user experience. Such layers can turn the smartphone into a lens that reveals new perspectives, new depth, new shapes and shades of meaning. The agent of these goodies can be a brand—if it has the smarts to be co-creating an interesting brand journey with its customers.

A form of Personal Brand Application

I’d consider the brand layer a form of Personal Brand Application. It may be a web-based mashup of sorts, but what counts is the intelligence and passion that drive it. These are the key ingredients to make it relevant to the user.

Travel apps are a natural for brand layers, but you don’t have to be in the travel business to offer such a layer. Every brand is in the customer business. Find a unique way to bind customers to you in a creative context that fills a need. Think how Absolut made itself into a “brand of art.”

Magazines as brand layers?

It may be that magazines and other forms of declining print media renew themselves as brand layers, creating new value on digital devices by adding contextual layers to otherwise “flat” environments.

Not billboards and a sales pitch

Given where brands are today, I’d say that maybe the top five percent of brands could develop effective brand layers on smartphones.  Brand layers are culture. They’re not sales, marketing, PR, “image,” or some kind of compressed “brand theater.” The last thing you want from a brand layer is cheesy billboards and a sales pitch cluttering a three-inch screen.

“Augmented reality” is in its infancy

This new technology of “augmented reality” on smartphones is in its infancy. We have no way of knowing if these first steps will be the next steps.

The measure of success

The best brand layers will sync the cultural intelligence of the brand with the cultural needs of the user. It’d be nice to download a layer when exploring Beacon Hill—or ambling through Père Lachaise. A good layer means that a particular brand and I are on the same page, writing it together.

Photo:  Wikitude

The ColaLife Aid Pod sure seems like a great example of “design thinking.” It’s a set of lightweight, form-fit containers designed to carry medicine inside Coca-Cola shipping cases, piggyback style, as the cases are transported from distributors to villages in Third World countries.

See the video.

The ColaLife idea

Here’s the skinny from ColaLife:

ColaLife is a campaign to get Coca-Cola to open up its distribution channels in developing countries to save lives, especially children’s lives, by carrying much needed ’social products’ such as oral rehydration salts and high-dose vitamin A tablets. For the latest on the campaign, please visit the blog. ColaLife is an independent and purely voluntary movement backed by thousands of supporters on its Facebook Group. ColaLife is not an organisation.

Brands are collaborations in context

With this very clever (and designerly) idea, ColaLife is extending the Coca-Cola brand. Brands are collaborations in context between companies and their communities. In this case, the ColaLife folks envision a context where the Coca-Cola transportation network can also function as a brand of health. Getting needed medicines to people is a major distribution problem in many Third World counties. Being able to piggyback medicine distribution on an available (and reliable) transportation network is a plus—and potentially a life-saver.

Opportunities as a “brand of distribution”

In many respects, the Coca-Cola brand is a brand of distribution. You can “like” Coke because you know you’ll always be able to find it. ColaLife presents Coca-Cola with an opportunity to leverage this key element of its brand.

Photo credit: Simon Berry