Brands Create Customers

Here’s a clever YouTube video that’s making the rounds. A guy (in Norway) can’t play the drums, or the piano, yet he crafts an amazing video where he’s a whiz at both. He makes it happen through stop motion and a massive number of video and audio edits, using his home PC. Quite fun, and eminently watchable.

His YouTube video was posted in November and has been visited over 1.5 million times, referenced by the Wall St. Journal and discussed to the Nth degree on Slashdot. Don’t be surprised if you soon see ad agencies copying the look and feel. (They know where their future lies.)

Creativity from the bottom up

While YouTube has its share of self-indulgent debris, it also hosts some fairly creative video productions (like the one above), generated at the grassroots level. These shouldn’t be arbitrarily dismissed as low-end, “user generated content.” They’re creative works from creative people now freed from a system once geared to big budgets.

The result will be more creativity, not less.

A creative challenge for brands

So what does all this mean for brands? Where’s the brand imagination to carry these new formats to the next level? What can brands do to make them better? (Please, please, please, not that ultimate kiss of mediocrity: product placement.)

It’s time for brands to move beyond the broadcast advertising paradigm and to reshape themselves as a creative force in their own right. In the world of online everywhere, there’s no reason brands can’t be allied with customers in creating and promulgating new forms of expression.

Waiting for the next Absolut

Thus, if you wanted your brand to be the next Absolut, you might tie it, ever so subtly, to the creation of a whole series of quirky/clever/charming and recursively over-the-top videos made by people with a fresh slant on life. Forget product placements. Just place the videos in the hearts and minds of hip people like you.

And yes, that also means your brand is the new network.

If you want your brand to innovate, you need to make it hackable. You have to cultivate brand hacks. Make your brand so your customers can grab it, bend it, and extend it, adding their initiative and intelligence to develop new forms of brand value.

Brands, culture and customers

Donna Bogatin has a nice post on how customers “configure culture” by altering product offerings—or inventing their own products—to meet their needs.

Donna cites a Radar Research report that lists these elements as typical of “configurable culture:”

1. Instantaneous
2. Editable
3. Global
4. Networked
5. Multi-sensory
6. Interoperable
7. Archival
8. Customizable
9. Hackable

These are also the qualities of a brand on the move.

Use brand API’s to cultivate brand hacks

The easiest way to cultivate brand hacks is to invite customers into your brand via brand API’s. Brand API’s are interactive application program interfaces. They provide convenient latch points for customers to grab onto brands and proactively shape the brand to their needs, in the process advancing themselves through the brand. The best brand API’s help convert customer initiative into brand initiative, through better brand content, context and value.

Make this process a team effort where your brand is a method for solving shared problems. Shape it as a partnership where you and your customers are on the same page because you’re writing it together.

Hack the context to create new value

When you develop your brand as a platform for brand hacks, the hacks you aim for are new contexts for your brand and your business. In other words, brand hacks are ways that customers can extend the scope of your business, by finding new applications and contexts of value. Through brand hacks, customers become your allies in innovation. And innovating a new context can be just as valuable as innovating a new product—and sometimes more so.

Brands are code

We should never forget that brands are code. The more brand programmers you can enlist, the more avenues your brand can explore.

Automobile brands are like fresh fruit to customers. They’re gloriously peeled, chopped, blended, juiced and grilled.

What emerges is the brand anew, resurrected, ethnographically evolved, stronger than ever.

Brands are timeless . . . on customer time.

Photo: tandemracer — Flickr

In crafting a brand, brand builders need to shuttle effortlessly from trail blazing to the transcendent, which is no small task. This is the first in a series of posts that will explore some of the tools that can help make the art of brand practice somewhat easier—and maybe a bit more fun.

Help for the brand story

The TV Tropes Wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing TV scripts. You may not envision TV scripts per se in your brand, but you certainly envision character, plot, drama, structure and a winning brand story. If your brand employs narrative, and intends to convey new and special meaning, this site might come in handy to help you frame your efforts. If you use it critically, it can help you expel media clichés, and clichéd thinking, from the forward march of your brand.

Special section on brand tools

Eventually I’ll set up a separate section on Brand Tools that can serve as a standalone reference. If you can think of any sites or sources that might be helpful, please chime in.

Every craft and every profession needs a patron saint. Your patron saint is the spiritual power and muse to tune your senses, watch your six, and ease the path ahead. It’s someone you can commune with on the Ducati, in the midst of a do-or-die decision, or while laying out the bills for a case of 2004 Antinori Tignanello.

People graced by a patron saint have that special glow. Their inner dashboard radiates a confidence of connection.

So, who’s the patron saint of brands?

Dionysus: patron saint of brands

That’s easy. It’s Dionysus, the edge-god of art, passion, creation and wine, Mr. Wild Side himself, ecstasy in excelsis, musician, dancer, fount of thoughts unbridled, lust undying. Like great brands, Dionysus unfolds the untamed. He pushes limits. In a world of tepid convention, he’s the sensual feast of free.

Not for the meek

Dionysus is not for the meek—but neither are brands. He’s a non-stop force of creative destruction, blasting the current context for something bigger and better, shredding, melding, re-shaping, re-birthing. He may be momentarily satiated, but satisfied—never. He doesn’t let brands coast, or calcify.

Brand-builders can’t have limits

Dionysus is the perfect patron saint for brands because brand builders can’t have limits. Their mission is to bring products to life, pushing, pulling and transporting customers beyond the grind, into new contexts of living. Brand builders don’t just strut upon a stage; they cook up new stages. Dionysus fuels their brew. (Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne above captures some of the Dionysian fire.)

The Dionysian license to create

Vital question: If you’re a brand builder, does having Dionysus as your patron saint grant you the license to let your senses soar and your creative juices run wild?

Vital answer: Only if the essence of your creation is a higher form of customer. (Brands aim high. Don’t waste your powers on trivia.)

Dionysian brands

There are brands, and then there are Dionysian brands. Dionysian brands are a ferment of mind and matter. Instead of being some concocted add-on, or a cheap-rent façade, they’re primordial and potent, delivering visceral value, procreating customers, infusing every synapse of company being. They’re passion from the core. You, the brand builder, are the music, the grapes and the dance. Step one is to Unzip Your Brand.