Brands Create Customers

Today’s creative challenge is to craft a compelling brand identity for these awesome fire retardant shorts. In our hectic web-driven lives we sometimes forget to guard our shorts from spontaneous combustion, misdirected hellfire or the errant match. But these things do happen. The question is: will your shorts survive?

Inferno-free

Thanks to modern technology, fire retardation is an exact science. Notice that the shorts remain completely and blissfully inferno-free. They most certainly can be worn another day.

Feel the flames

The referenced “Burning Boy” label may be a bit too literal for the miraculous powers of this product. Where’s the metaphoric leap to catapult these shorts into the realm of meta must-haves? We need a brand that makes one feel the flames, the habanero heat on privates in peril, the elemental ignominy of, “Yow! My shorts burned off!”

Be sure to pass any guarantee through legal.

NOTE: The world would be a far more interesting place if brands were left to artists. An artist, Christian Northeast, created “MacGregor’s Fire Retardant Shorts.” Yes, it’s a work of art—all of it. And it’s a good one. Don’t go looking for these shorts at Nordstrom’s, or Goodwill.

You can see more of Christian’s work at his website. Through his site you can purchase his book.

Hat tip:  The J-Walk Blog

Image: Christian Northeast

Raymond Pirouz brings us a charming little video on the story of the ASICS brand, told in origami. The piece was done by German ad agency Nordpol+ Hamburg and origami artist Sipho Mabona. More creative details here.

A brand is at its best when it doesn’t pitch or posture or pretend. It simply becomes a metaphor on the world, endlessly inventive, buoying customers along.

Be picky. Better yet, cook your own.

Meanwhile, there’s Short of the Week. And check out their resources.

Photo: Cheekybikerboy — Flickr

These are links for brand builders pursuing creative contexts for brands, as well as radical new (root) connections with customers. I’ll try to post such links a couple of times a month.

Brand identity: go cosmic, or go home

For a nice identity fix, check out these spiffy tattoos from young scientists. They may not win any design awards, but that’s not the point. They’re emergent identities—symbols of fundamental truths, processes, or discoveries that shape the universe, and humankind. They’re identities that transcend market offerings and shopping carts.

In comparison, many conventional brand identities seem small-minded and transitory. That’s because they aim too low. They’re commerce, not cosmos.

Some corollaries: In brands, the biggest universe wins. Go cosmic, or go home. Identities chained to products risk becoming dead-end DNA. They can’t evolve, and they’re doomed to perish.

Brands radiate possibilities

Benjamin Zander elucidates the principle. Does your brand enable major breakthroughs in the lives of customers? Does it take customers to places they couldn’t reach without you? Is your brand a new world of possibilities?

Put your brand on the map

Google Maps now makes it possible. The creative context is up to you.

In brands, the back is the new front

Touchscreens are an emergent interface for a whole host of new digital devices such as the iPhone. However, designing small touchscreens is tricky because one’s fingers can easily block the interface elements on the screen itself. Solution: use the back of the device for touch inputs, rather than the front. You make things happen from the “working” side.

There’s a metaphoric analog here for brands: While every brand likes to strut its display side, it’s often inputs through the back end of the brand—the customer side—that move the brand forward. Every customer is a “capacitive interface,” with back-end customer inputs more valuable in the long run than the dazzle of up-front campaigns.

Store brands lift grocers in troubled times

Conventional packaged brands from “name brand” manufacturers were once the measure of what brands were supposed to be. Now they’re in danger of becoming obsolescent, if not obsolete.

Conventional packaged brands tend to fall short on two accounts. First, they can’t match the experience level of retail brands, who are far closer to the customer. Second, retailers can shape their brands to the context of their total offering, and to the whole customer. To see what this means, traipse on down to Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, two stores that act like communities. When your brand is confined to a package, it stands alone.

Moreover, a store experience can differentiate the customer. That’s a far more valuable experience than package brand dress that merely differentiates a product from its neighbors on the shelf.

How a Steve Jobs approach might transform Detroit auto makers

Small chance of this ever happening, but Robert Cringely scores some good points on the strategic importance of brand focus and customer experience.

I especially like this line: “Apple is worth more than any of the car companies and for good reason: Apple has a future.”

Yes, indeed. Your brand holds the keys to your future. For decades, Detroit brands have been pseudo brands, little more than stylized sales stimulants. Lately they’re being reduced to progressively puerile ad campaigns. Customers are taking their futures elsewhere.

In brands, culture trumps commerce

The gist of a brand is its contribution to culture. Thus, brand builders pay attention to thinkers like Michael Shanks, a leader in reappraising past cultures and their living heritage, especially in terms of processes of adaptation and innovation.  He’s helping transform archeology into a discipline of foresight, rather than hindsight.

Brand builders are culture creators. The more your brand adds to the culture, the better its chances to self-seed and take root. A brand that isn’t a new context of culture is effectively DOA.

Also: the Stanford Humanities Lab, a brand builder’s sandbox.

Brand values are craft values

The new book is called The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett. It explores “deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values,” which just happens to be the very stuff of brands. Well, real brands, not pseudo brands. Brands predicated on craft have a material and spiritual advantage over synthetic brands (fictions) predicated on selling. When companies lose their craft, they wind up in dire straits, like those brand-deficient Detroit automakers.

Merlin Mann has announced that he’s “shifting gears” at his famed 43 Folders personal productivity site. In effect, he’s reinventing the 43 Folders brand. The site is changing from a brand of personal productivity to a brand of personal creativity. It’s brand deliverable is changing from improving one’s core efficiency to improving one’s creative output—and one’s personal relevance in the world.

The shape of a new brand

The new 43 Folders brand approach is evolving as we speak, but we can glimpse its general shape and direction. It’s RIP for “productivity pr0n.” The new focus of the site, in its own words:

43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.   . . .

This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.

Right now, 43 Folders is focused on an arc about how to improve the quality of your career and life by managing your attention in a way that allows you to work your ass off on the creative projects that matter most to you.  . . . .

I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want to help you figure out how to make those things even better. That’s pretty much it.

The person the new brand will create

It appears that the new person that the 43 Folders brand intends to create will be one who can enjoy a creatively-focused life in the context of a workaday world. This is a trans-cubicle, integrated approach that opens up a lot of possibilities. Defining oneself as a creative individual who articulates a passion can dramatically refocus one’s life; it can actually make certain mainstream “productivity” issues irrelevant. One’s life jumps to a whole new level.

Some questions

1. It’s not clear yet if the new approach will concentrate on workaday people with passionate hobbies, or also lean toward serving artists and creatives. Will this be a new 43 Folders for the “creative class?”
2. The original 43 Folders approach helped spawn a “productivity process” movement where process took center stage. People flocked to GTD and joined the Moleskine militia. However, a strict focus on productivity process can be limiting to an individual’s growth. Will the new approach be more “philosophical,” with less emphasis on process? In other words, will the journey take precedence over the journal?
3. Who might serve as a model practitioner of this new approach? Every new brand should bring to life a new model of customer, someone who incarnates the brand and serves as a reference.
4. A brand “arc” or a brand journey?
5. What are the brand possibilities inherent in a DIY approach? How might these trump factory brands? This might be the basis for a multithreaded brand from the bottom up.

The incumbent challenge

Of course, there’s one dark shadow hanging over this new 43 Folders initiative. The last word on creative productivity has already been uttered, and immortalized, by Father Guido Sarducci, two decades ago. It’s hard to top that.

Illustration: Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook entry for a flying machine. (Leonardo could have used 43 Folders. He was notorious for starting many projects and finishing very few.)

In business, the company that listens best often lasts longest. The brand approach to business teaches that you don’t have to be the loudest, flashiest or most intrusive voice to build the strongest customer base. You simply have to listen to what your primary partners—your customers—have to say.

After all, they’re your brand partners. And they’re saying it for your benefit.

The New York Times has an example: Believe it or not, someone’s listening.

Listening is the province of brands

Listening is the province of brands. While marketers may lapse into sales pitch mode at the drop of a hat (full disclosure: mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), brands listen as marketers never can. That’s because brands are structured as joint ventures with customers, where listening is as fundamental as breathing. A brand is an active collaboration in context, and it is the brand’s ability to listen that keeps that collaboration alive.

Listening is the province of brands because brands are a team effort, a pursuit of shared objectives and mutual goals. Do we listen closely to our teammates? Yes we do—without giving it a second thought. Listening comes naturally to brands because it’s a basic function of teaming and working together.

Listening is part of the brand experience

Listening is a also vital part of the brand experience. Let me clarify that: how you listen to your customers is a big part of their brand experience. A “rich” brand experience is one rich in listening and conversation, where communication flows freely. The deeper the brand, the deeper the listening. (In many respects, the engine of sustainable brand growth is not the big campaign, but the many individual instances of listening and conversation along the way.)

Brands that thrive on listening

The brands that listen best are often bottom-up brands structured as platforms to advance and grow customers. These brands tend to be hands-on, direct and participative. The more they listen to customers the more they can learn, and translate that learning into innovation. While they may utilize surveys and focus groups, the ultimate goal is real-time listening through front-line employees, where company and customer forge the leading edge of the brand.

Such brands treat customers as friends and allies on a shared brand journey. They listen intently, step by step.

Image: Self portrait, Vincent van Gogh — Wikimedia Commons

Every brand is a journey. Through the brand, customers can discover new aspects of themselves, new strengths, new abilities, new ways of being and doing. The quality of that journey—how enlightening, how enriching, how transforming—is a function of the brand vision, and the brand imagination behind it. A superficial brand might take customers as far as the cash register. A deeply engaging brand takes customers to a whole new world.

Brand builders create the brand journey

It’s the job of brand builders to plot the customer journey that their brand provides. What truths can the brand journey reveal? What frontiers does the journey explore? What depths does it plumb? What’s the spirit? The tone? The texture? All these questions, and many more, dance across the brand builder’s palette.

The brand journey is a creative act: for the brand, and for customers.

Brand journeys are joint ventures

Brand journeys are joint ventures where brands and customers interact to advance one another. They’re dialogs tuned to new experience and to emergent truths. As they unfold they connect customers to themselves, and to one another, sometimes through the brand, and sometimes beyond it. Interesting brand journeys ask questions. Absorbing journeys take risks. Anything is possible.

Develop a “journey reel” for your brand

Thanks to recent advances digital imaging, a brand can now visually represent the kind of unique journey it offers. This takes the form of the “journey reel,” a metaphoric and interpretive expression of the brand journey using the powers of motion video, animation and digital imagery. The journey reel lays out the kinds of adventures and experiences (and mysteries) that await. The journey reel itself is part of that experience.

Not a sales pitch

A journey reel is not a promo or a sales pitch. It’s neither selling nor telling. It’s the expression of a brand’s self awareness, its culture, drive and direction, and where it might take customers. It’s the brand identity set in motion.

Visual elements of a journey reel

What might a journey reel look like? There are some themes and visual cues in this short animation demo reel by Alphonse Swinehart. I stumbled across this by accident, and it is not about brands per se, and certainly not intended as a journey reel. But its creativity is provocative. (A really brazen brand might do a flip book, but that’s another story.)

Journey reels promise to be a new art form, compact and compelling. As I come across expressive elements that might work in a journey reel context, I’ll post them here.

A series of reels rather than one

A journey reel must start somewhere, but a brand that’s going places with its customers will not let the journey reel stop. It will conceive its journey reels as a series, or as sets, building one upon the other.

The journey reel is personal, portable and persistent

I’d imagine that the best channels for journey reels would be those most intimate and personal to customers. That means an iPhone, iTouch, PDA or something similar, downloaded from the Net. A journey reel is made to accompany the customer: portable, personal and persistent. And it’s made to be shared.

Brand journeys mixed and remixed

Of course, customers can record their journeys, too. Brand journeys become customer journeys. All can be playing on digital devices around the world, shared, mixed and remixed in a matter of minutes. When your brand connects, brand journeys mingle.

Map image: Martin Waldseemuller

Brand builders are generally very familiar with the concept of “whitespace” used by designers. In design, whitespace is usually defined as the space between elements in a composition. This is not “empty” space but an organizing force in its own right, one that can add considerable power and emotion to a design or layout.

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.