Brands that lack strategy often position themselves as lures to catch customers, as if customers were fish in the sea and brands were a higher form of trolling, the perfect shiny bait with fetching face and hooks aplenty. Alas, a brand is not a lure. And customers aren’t fish.
Customers aren’t fish; brands aren’t lures
Brands fall into a strategic trap when they cast themselves as lures. Brands that try to catch customers like fish can’t create them as brand partners, and creating customers is what confers strategic advantage. Through your brand you create the customers that will drive the business forward. By developing your brand as a customer-focused application (here and here), the customers you create can help you create new markets. They return value back to the brand. By freeing customers from the hooks of mediocrity, the hooks of convention, and the hooks of competitors, your brand can turn them into the proactive partners you need so that you flourish together.
And brand touchpoints aren’t hooks
Please note that just as brands aren’t lures, brand touchpoints aren’t hooks. Brand touchpoints are discrete brand/customer interactions that deliver (or co-create) value. We carefully craft them in strategies to advance customers beyond the reach of competitors—by delivering uniquely meaningful experience that competitors can’t match. The best touchpoints are transformative: they upgrade the identity of customers to new levels, so there’s no turning back to lesser modes of existence. Bottom line: the goal of touchpoints is to move customers forward, not to catch them with hooks. (See: How to define brand engagement.)
The mission of a brand is to teach customers to fish
The fishing metaphor is an apt one for brands, however—if we use the right context. The famous Chinese proverb gives us a clue:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Ergo, we use the brand to teach customers to fish. “Fish” metaphorically, of course. The brand mission is to free customers from constraints, and to advance customers farther and faster than they can advance themselves. We develop brands to enable customers to be more self-actualized, more proactive, more productive, more creative and to be more engaged with life. The more a brand enables its customers, the more the customers enable the brand.
Teaching customers to fish changes the game
When we teach customers to fish we are changing the brand game from all those mediocre brands who position customers as fish, and who design their brands as lures. Instead of the brand being a (one-way) hook, it becomes a cultural enabler. In effect, we are changing the brand game by changing the customer. Customers can repay us many times over with new ideas, experiences and initiatives that we can fold back into the brand.
How does the Apple brand create so much value? In the last decade Apple has introduced an unparalleled stream of breakthrough products, re-defined how people engage the world with digital devices, delighted millions of new customers, built profitable new platforms and ecosystems, disrupted lethargic industries and created rich new markets. With 200 million credit card accounts in iTunes and a market cap north of $300 billion, the Apple brand must be doing something right.
The simple secret of Apple’s brand strategy
As I see it there’s a simple secret behind Apple’s astonishing success in the last ten years. It’s an Apple brand that’s operational, where core brand principles shape the Apple culture and drive the business. Apple is a classic example of the brand goes in before the brand goes on. At Apple, the brand is a systematic and integrated method to create value. It’s a method, not a message. While Apple’s cutting-edge aesthetics, exemplary taste and showstopper keynotes often draw the media spotlight, it’s Apple’s operating brand at work in Cupertino that makes Apple’s strategic success possible.
Two principles focus Apple’s operational brand strategy
From press accounts and public documents we can discern two brand principles that shape and focus Apple’s operational brand strategy. There may be more, to be sure, but these two stand out to me. They steer the Apple brand toward market-leading products and superior customer experiences.
I’ve gleaned these brand principles from comments by Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. They caught my attention because they make profound statements about the Apple brand mission and brand approach.
First, Tim Cook on the Apple brand mission:
We believe that we’re on the face of the earth to make great products . . . in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
Second, Steve Jobs on the Apple brand approach:
We put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and ask: ‘What do we want? . . . “
Let’s now explore the brand implications of these principles.
Tim Cook on the Apple brand mission
We believe that we’re on the face of the earth to make great products . . . in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
I’ve adapted this principle from Tim Cook’s remarks in a 2009 conference call on Apple earnings. (It is two phrases made into one principle.) From a brand strategy perspective, Cook does three things in this principle.
A singular, elemental mission
First, with “We’re on the face of the earth to make great products“ Cook makes great products the singular mission of Apple and its employees, with pursuit of greatness an elemental (face-of-the-earth) calling. This positions the Apple brand to reshape the world. In fact, it demands it. And it’s a context that’s unkind to excuses.
Setting a high standard for the brand
Second, with the mission of “great products” Cooks sets a high standard for the brand. Apple is not in the business of producing “market offerings.” It makes “great products.” There’s a difference. For some implications, see The Apple doctrine.
Apple’s brand goal: make a significant contribution to culture
Third, Cook shapes the Apple mission when he states Apple’s goal is “to make a significant contribution.” A contribution? Interesting choice of words! Does Dell demand that its products make “a contribution”? Acer? Asus? HP? The implied Apple brand goal is to make a contribution to culture. Thus, Apple’s brand mission is cultural: judge us by our contribution to the fabric of human endeavor. (This sets another high standard, and a decisive one in high technology.) Given how Apple has advanced design, music, telephony, computing and publishing, and may help usher in advances in learning via the iPad, the company’s brand intent to contribute to culture would seem to have made a difference. For additional reference, there’s also this picture.
Apple’s cultural context
Within Apple’s cultural context the Apple brand enables customers to engage the world in more meaningful ways. This is a cultural achievement based on what the brand does rather than on what the brand is.
Steve Jobs on the Apple brand approach
“We put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and ask: ‘What do we want? . . . ’”
I have abstracted this principle from a famous 2007 Steve Jobs Q&A (audio file) in which Jobs was asked why Apple did not slap stickers on its products like other PC makers. His comments end with the quote above, which I have slightly abridged.
This is a profound brand approach. The maker places himself or herself in the shoes of the user, and asks, “What would satisfy me?” The brand identifies with the user, empathizes with the user, looks ahead for the user (brand vision) and wants what’s best for the user within the realm of the product or service. A brand that lacks these abilities won’t get far. It will “target” customers with netbooks instead of changing their lives with touchscreen tablets and a new ecosystem of engagement.
A brand puts itself in its customers’ shoes so customers can run faster and farther, leaving competitors behind.
It’s a strategic act when a brand puts itself in its customers’ shoes. A brand puts itself in its customers’ shoes so customers can run faster and farther, leaving competitors behind. While this is simple in concept it’s difficult in practice. You need deep vision, sharp, unrelenting focus and the talent to make it all work. To it’s credit, Apple does.
In Apple’s case the result is a brand strategy that positions both Apple and its customers to win—with a “secret” that’s in plain sight.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad 2 he cited Apple’s commanding lead in the “post-PC” tablet market and stated that the iPad’s competitors were “flummoxed” by the depth, quality, and speed of the iPad’s innovations, as if iPad competitors didn’t really understand what the tablet category was about.
Here are his exact words as he illustrated the iPad’s success — (about 6 minutes into the linked video):
Our competitors were just flummoxed. They went back to the drawing boards. They tore up their designs because they weren’t competitive.
It’s the brand’s job never to be flummoxed
The brand is the sensory edge of the business, and if the brand is flummoxed the business is in very deep trouble. It’s the brand’s job never to be flummoxed, or even close to it. Being flummoxed is an all caps brand FAIL.
What it means for a brand to be flummoxed
For a brand, being “flummoxed” means more than being confused, perplexed and bewildered by new market events. A brand that’s flummoxed can’t figure out what’s really going on, or what its next move should be. It has no clue to the context. It’s at a loss, conceptually and practically. Where the brand should power a company’s most perceptive vision, and sharpest focus, it is suddenly sense-less. It doesn’t know itself. And most critically, it doesn’t know its customers.
You’re flummoxed when you don’t know what game you’re in
As a brand you can’t compete if you’re using the wrong playbook for the game at hand. But you’re flummoxed when you really don’t know what game you’re in. You can’t imagine a winning strategy. You can’t grasp the new logic of moves. You can’t envision the innovations needed. You have no idea where to lead customers. You can’t see through customer eyes. This may indeed be the case if you’re a still a “PC player” in a “post-PC” world. You’re deep into netbooks (a commodity PC) while a competitor is relegating the PC to the dustbin of history.
What can cause a brand to be flummoxed?
A brand may find itself flummoxed for many reasons, but I would argue that the paramount reason is that the brand’s concept of customer is too narrow and too shallow. Often, the brand positions customers as nothing more than “buyers”—for what the business can readily produce. Customers are treated as commodities to be sold to, not as partners in a greater brand journey where they can co-create value with the brand itself. Instead of advancing customers, the brand (in this short-sighted view) tries to capture, contain and control them. In so doing, the brand locks its own imagination into the same dead-end corral.
In this and follow-up posts I’ll propose that the best way to develop brands is to design, structure and deploy them as customer-focused applications. Yes, you should create your entire brand as an application. “An application of what?” you might ask? In a nutshell, your brand is an application of your vision and values. You apply it in a brilliantly crafted program of wisdom, culture, street smarts and tools to advance your customers to richer realms of living, far beyond the reach of competitors. Your brand becomes an application for your customers to succeed, and to take you with them. Their success is your success.
Brands are customer-focused applications for getting things done
It’s always been apparent to me that brands are really customer-focused applications–for helping customers get things done–far more than they’re calculated sets of symbols, slogans and stories to influence how customers think or feel. (I began writing about personal brand applications way back in 2007.) As I see it, we develop brands to help customers achieve outcomes that they can’t achieve through products and services alone. Thus, a “brand” is much more than an identity, a stylized sales stimulant, a promise or a reputation. It’s a deliverable that acts as a supra-product method of creating value, limited only by the brand imagination of the company.
Notably, the brand is a form of innovation rather than a belief system or persuasion package. Critically, it’s an interactive application, too, one that enables the brand to team with customers in the value creation process. As I’ll discuss below, brand applications are essential building blocks for brand platforms, and for building strategic brand experiences.
What (exactly) is a brand application?
A brand application is a method (a series of steps, guidelines, interfaces, interactions, innovations and revelations) to advance customers to richer realms of living. It may accompany products and services, or it may be a framework for them. The brand is the operative vision and value stream. It lays out where the company is going, and the rewards for joining in. The brand journey marks the path.
The goal of the application approach is to make customers better off in a way that ultimately disrupts competitors. As part of the application approach we create customers (here and here) through value innovation in ways that competitors can’t match. Our customers win, and so do we.
For strategic purposes the entire brand can be developed as a unified, customer-focused application (as I propose). Within the brand itself, however, there will be many discrete brand applications. These function like brand programs. Customer service is a brand application. A warranty is a brand application. Note, though, that customer service at Zappos is the whole brand as an application.
Brands gain strategic power as applications
Brands gain strategic power when they’re developed as applications. In traditional brand approaches brands are typically a form of communications. They emerge as calculated messages and meanings to promote sales and customer loyalty. In contrast, the brand-as-application is a comprehensive, collaborative, multi-threaded and multifaceted means of helping customers change their world in reality, not “in the mind.” As an application, the brand emerges as a strategic means of action, a change agent and deliverable on par with products and services. As applications brands stand to be far more productive than a brand “essence” showcased as a glorious–yet static–identity.
Your entire brand is an application—inside and outside the company
One of the strengths of the brand application approach is that your brand becomes a coherent and consistent method of value creation inside and outside the company. You are one company, one application, one brand. The brand becomes your operating mode rather than a media construct. As an application it fuses strategic vision, employee creativity, quality, productivity, and desired customer outcomes. Brand applications lay the foundation for a company “Way” of unique vision and values. Conversely, when the brand becomes “image” instead of application, we wind up with sad examples like BP.
A big difference in brand approach
When we develop brands as applications we take a dramatically different approach than used for conventional brands. Here are the main differences:
Brands are agents of transformation, a means to change the world. They’re not sets of “meanings” to program customer behavior.
The brand goal is to innovate so we can advance customers into richer realms of living where our brand gains market advantage.
Our brand is part of our innovation strategy. It’s a method for creating value through customers. Brand strategy becomes innovation strategy.
The brand team joins the innovation team. They pump brand intelligence into new products and services ab ovo.
Customers become strategic innovation partners, not just “buyers.” They are valued for their insights, intelligence and initiative far more than for their “loyalty.”
There is less need for brand symbols, slogans and stories, and no need for brand magic and miracles. Applications create new realities–an infinitely better result.
There is little need to “position” the brand. The application goal is to position customers to win–in new market spaces where customers and company can prosper. The application is self-positioning.
The era of the brand icon is over. Icons don’t innovate. Applications do.
There is less need for ad agencies. There is more need for app agencies.
The brand ceiling leaps skyward. It becomes: Company Potential X Customer Potential. New brand avenues abound.
Innovative brands already use the application approach
The good news is that many of today’s innovative brands (young and old) already grasp what brands can accomplish as applications. In many respects their brands largely function as end-to-end applications as they focus on delivering market-leading customer experiences. They build their brands outward from their vision, values and core operating principles. Their brands begin as internal applications (operating policies and programs) to produce distinctive products and services. Extending brand applications to customers is a natural follow-through of what makes the company tick. In the larger scheme of things, the brands of Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, FedEx, Costco, Nordstrom and Zappos function as applications. They advance their customers beyond the reach of competitors. They are more focused, more coherent, more disciplined and more distinctive because of it. And customers can tell the difference.
How is it that the Trader Joe’s brand can exert such a fresh, strong pull compared to traditional grocery brands like Safeway? As I’ve noted before here and here, a signal strength of the Trader Joe’s brand is that it’s developed and delivered in the context of the customer. Trader Joe’s is a friendly place, small and intimate, on a human scale with lots of human touches, as close to “home” as retail gets.
In other words, Trader Joe’s is super because it isn’t a supermarket.
How Trader Joe’s implements its brand
You can find a richly detailed account of how Trader Joe’s implements its brand in “Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe’s” in CNN Money/Fortune. The article explains why Trader Joe’s thrives even though it lacks many “features” of the modern supermarket. Yes, those “features” may be illusions of conventional marketing practice. They’re often designed as platforms of advertising and promotion rather than an intimate stage of quality goods and produce.
Products that don’t shout from the shelves
If you’ve ever been to a Trader Joe’s you’ll notice that you aren’t assaulted by packaging pyrotechnics from the shelves, as is often the case in traditional supermarkets (which function as brand aggregators.) Packaging at Trader Joe’s is typically low key and informal, even whimsical. Most products are Trader Joe’s own brand. Since they don’t have to compete for attention they can be more laid back and conversational, witty or wry (try Trader Giotto’s meatballs), all of which produces a more engaging customer experience.
An invitation to discover new goods
At Trader Joe’s you feel like you’ve been invited in to discover new goods from artisans around the globe. The products engage you directly, on their own merits, scripted in humble magic marker. They represent Trader Joe’s. They’re not elements of the media campaigns that interrupt your TV viewing. In this regard the Trader Joe’s customer experience exists in sharp contrast to that of major supermarket chains, where the pitch is more profound than the product, and where customers are mostly confronted with shelves of advertising.
A brand goal: simplify choice, enhance trust
One shops at Trader Joe’s because one trusts Trader Joe’s for the unique selection, and the quality. The Trader Joe’s brand reigns supreme. It’s as if Trader Joe’s were a merchant-curator, hand picking everything from hummus to ham. You may have fewer choices, but that actually makes things better, not worse. Trader Joe’s has done the work for you. A trusted brand can greatly simplify the process of buying. And it tones down the advertising blare.
In brands, less is more
All this is no accident, of course. In brands, less is more. Own the context, and customers will follow. A brand (context) approach can make a decisive difference. For some recent research, check out “A Better Choosing Experience,” an enlightening article from strategy + business.
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:
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?)
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.
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.
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.
