Brands Create Customers

Google’s Android mobile OS stands to have a powerful impact on smartphone brands. As a new mobile platform it has the potential to be both brand disruptor and brand creator, upsetting incumbent brands and serving as a potent platform for a whole class of new ones. We saw this happen when the Microsoft Windows platform dominated the PC market in the 1990′s and beyond, helping new software brands take root at the expense of traditional players. Now—in mobile— it may be Google’s turn.

Android lowers the cost of market entry

Google Android is a free, highly-capable and customizable smartphone operating system that intends to change the game in mobile brands. It’s designed to compete with the iPhone as a smartphone platform, and it’s ready for apps, tweaks, skins and other enhancements by any company desiring a smartphone market presence. By being “free,” Android dramatically lowers the cost of entry into the smartphone market, the fastest growing and most profitable wireless sector. Thanks to Google, a new set of players can enter the smartphone arena, each one building a brand based on its own implementation of Android.

The smartphone is a computer

Who might these new players be? Well, if the smartphone is now considered more “computer” than phone, with computer-like capabilities, then the smartphone market is really a computer market. (Thank you, iPhone!) Thus, we can expect traditional PC brands to pile in, as fast as they can contract out handsets and put their brand imprints on Android.

Here come the PC makers

Stacey Higgenbotham at GigaOm has written an excellent analysis of these developments. As she notes, Lenovo, Dell and Acer are ready to make the smartphone plunge with Android. Given Android’s potential, traditional PC brands may emerge as the new smartphone winners, leveraging their computer and marketing expertise. Traditional mobile brands may be the losers, unless (like HTC) they embrace the new computer context.

Smartphone brand—or smartphone commodity?

Just how strong can these new Android-based smartphone brands become? That’s a good question. In her GigaOm article Higgenbotham foresees the possibility of a largely commoditized smartphone landscape, where a standardized mobile OS (like Android) is combined with standardized smartphone handsets and core apps. PC makers could try to differentiate their Android smartphones by custom tweaks to the OS, UI skins and widgets, but these may not be enough. The result could be a sea of look-alike smartphones competing largely on price, much like current PC’s and netbooks.

The Android brand agenda

What is the Android brand agenda in all this? A company’s brand agenda is how the brand intends to advance (or contain) its customers. Google’s customers are advertisers. Google’s brand agenda for Android appears to be the creation of a large mobile search market for advertisers. Lowering barriers to entry for new smartphone brands and ultimately lowering smartphone prices would serve this goal. Android comes with default Google search. It’s reasonable to believe that it’s optimized for Google search.

A mobile market with many competitors, low prices, and many users would suit Google best. That could well be a commodity market.

Google Android: a brand trap?

Smartphone brands that use Google Android need to keep a sharp eye where they’re headed. Android may turn out to be an “easy in” brand trap in which new smartphone brands gain a quick foothold, then find it hard to maintain strategic identity and pricing power. Without a clear brand strategy of their own, PC makers fighting for smartphone share may ultimately discover that their only option is progressively deeper price cuts. They may wind up working for Google instead of their own shareholders.

A smartphone brand strategy for Android

What’s the best brand strategy for a smartphone that uses Android? Conventional notions of “differentiation” will not be enough. If Android is the mobile platform, new smartphones must become customer platforms as strategic enablers for smartphone users. The smartphone must create a new and stronger customer context beyond the commoditizing pull of Android.

In practical terms, smartphone brands must make the smartphone a context phone packed with cultural discovery and innovation. They must enable uses to be more, and to do more, through the software and services they provide. A smartphone brand must become a brand of cultural and creative initiative anchored by personal brand applications that link the brand and the customer in a shared brand journey.

To my mind, anything less than this is bound to wind up on the commodity floor.

Image: Google Android

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

As a follow-up to my recent post on personal brand applications (PBA’s) on smartphones, here are some rough conceptual examples showing how various industries and organizations might use PBA’s.

As I noted in my post, “The most treasured PBA’s will be exclusive apps of elite circles of achievement.” Real personal brand applications would have much more depth and dimension than I sketch out here.

A conceptual PBA for business publications

A personal brand application from the Economist or Financial Times might help subscribers deftly navigate the global village covered in detail by these publications. If I”m off to a conference in Singapore the PBA might give me an insider’s brief on local airport logistics, where to stay and maybe the best hawker centers for a dash of local food. Tell me the top 10 do’s and don’ts. Remind me how hot it gets and where to go on Clarke Quay (see above). Toss in a Metro map, main local phone numbers, and so on. You know what’s relevant for me because I read your pub. Your PBA is your sharable (neo-Keynesian) savoir faire. It should (in this concept) qualitatively enhance my visit to the Lion City–or any great city.

Would the brand charge for this? Absolutely. This is real value. Make it part of the sub.

A conceptual PBA for an office furniture brand

Office furniture brands already understand that they’re no longer in the traditional “office furniture business.” They’re really in the workspace business, with the many additional opportunities that market affords. They may even be in the innovation business, and in the collaboration business—if their products can contribute in those value-added areas. Hence the strategy set forth in this podcast about Steelcase. The PBA of an office furniture brand might focus on helping customers innovate and collaborate, so the brand becomes a trusted innovation and productivity partner inside and outside the office.

This is what I mean when I call the brand a “value stream beyond the product proper.”

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In the near future you’ll be able to build your brand with an app. No, check that. In the near future your brand will be an app. It will re-define itself as a personal brand application on a smartphone or similar device, where it can deliver unique brand value to customers 24/7. Apple’s current iPhone ad campaign, “There’s an app for that,” provides a glimpse of this brand future.

In other words, there’s a new brand game in town. Can your brand set the agenda here?

The era of personal brand applications (PBA’s)

As I’ve noted previously, we’re now entering the era of personal brand applications (PBA’s). Personal brand applications are software applications on portable digital devices that enable customers to do more, and to be more, through the brand. They represent the intersection of high technology and brands in the palms and pockets of people, everywhere, and the chance for brands to be closer than ever to customers.

Why personal brand applications are important

Personal brand applications are important because they forge a new 1:1 brand/customer relationship. Through this relationship they have the potential to create new classes of customers from the ground up, in new market spaces. In this process they can undermine traditional brands built on ad campaigns, images, messaging and mass media saturation. Most importantly, personal brand applications free brands (and the brand team) to use the full fruits of their imagination—and to use the brand to lead.

PBA’s can accelerate brand trust

As applications, PBA’s are immediate and direct. They deliver results customers can use, now, and they build core brand trust in the process. While traditional brand campaigns may work wonders in building awareness and shaping perceptions, they’re not engines of brand trust. Personal brand applications are. They can accelerate and energize brand trust, compressing what used to take years into shorter time frames.

Technology advances make PBA’s possible

Since I first wrote about the concept of personal brand applications two years ago, we’ve witnessed amazing advances in wireless technology, digital handsets, user interfaces, online services, and software systems and platforms that tie everything together. With Apple’s iPhone, App Store and iPhone developers leading the way, we’re now are seeing a first flush of innovative smartphone apps that foreshadow the personal brand applications to come.

PBA’s: the ultimate brand relationship

In many ways a personal brand application is the ultimate brand relationship, where the brand operates as both a trusty sidekick and a trusted advisor, as close as a second skin. PBA’s do more than “connect” the brand with customers. They transform the brand into a proactive customer platform of choices, directions and actions, helping the customer at a personal level to accomplish objectives and deal with life’s challenges. The brand becomes a central means (and platform) for customer growth and development.

Personal, portable and persistent

Because they operate on hand-held devices that are wireless, Internet enabled and “always on,” PBA’s are personal, portable and persistent–the critical three P’s for brands going forward. In many ways they’re the ultimate brand presence. Think of them as perpetual touchpoints where the brand plays an active role in the culture, context and creativity of an individual’s life, day in and day out.

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Since one martini never seems all that productive, I herewith serve up the second pour of my infamous brand quotes. (Part I is here.)  The purpose of these selective sips is to open minds to a world of brands as deep and rewarding as culture itself.

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Brand sensibility

Brand sensibility is the perceptive power to see untapped value in products and customers, and the creative power to bring that value to life.

Brand builder

A sensible type (see above) who creates new markets by creating new customers—through the brand.

Conventional brand icons are their own worst enemies.

Conventional brand icons are their own worst enemies, trapped in their own rigid molds. They’re sitting ducks for brand iconoclasts, the new non-linear brands that spin up in days to create customers on the fly. The new icon is the stream of value, socialized.

Sustainable brands

Brands fueled by customers.

Brand experience

What the product experience can’t do.

How to determine the context of a brand

To determine the context of a brand, ask what the brand is a “brand of.” For a snapshot answer, simply observe its customers. They tell the truth about a brand.

Brand innovation

Brand innovation is the practice of changing the customer’s world beyond expectations. A brand innovates when it frees customers from the constraints of prevailing brands, or commodities, or conventions.  As a rule, innovative brands make new contributions to culture.

Brand emotion

What brands aim for when they can’t deliver brand experience, or brand value.

Brands as creative engagements

For customers, a brand should be a creative engagement with life, opening doors, revealing truths and enabling new selves to be born.

When the brand is complete, the customer is finished.

Brands must continually reinvent themselves and their customers, or drown in message mire. The brand is a shared, open-ended journey. In the old days, brand essence was set in stone to anchor timeless brand monoliths. No more. Today’s customers move faster than brands. The brand mission is to lead with leaps of meaning. Brands are the new map, and metabolic. Act fast. Think small. And iterate, iterate, iterate.

Brands are code

Brands are code. They are algorithms of adventure, discovery and delight. They are written in a language called CUSTOMER. More here, and especially here.

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Ever since our revered Patron Saint laid down the rule that brand builders must be the life of the party, we’ve been on the lookout for blood-quickening quips to make others raise a glass, raise a few eyebrows, or, worst case, raise a few fists.

Here is my humble contribution: an initial set of brand-related asides, aphorisms and epigrams to heat up a corner conference room or out-of-office bacchanal.

They’re “infamous” because they contravene conventional brand doctrine–and therefore generate hope for brands themselves.

Note: See Part II here.

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Take the brand builder test

The brand builder test: Explain why Capuchin, Capulet and cappuccino are heaven on the lips. (Brand builders know the answer because brands are a craft of culture.)

How the brand relates to sales

If the sole purpose of your brand is sales, your brand will sell you short.

Brand positioning

What counts in brands is not how you position the company. What counts is how you position the customer.

Brands vs. marketing

Everyone wants a brand experience. No one wants a marketing experience.

Brand icons

In brands we want less icon and more innovation. Icons are dead relics. Customers can do better.

Brands that control customers

Brands that aim to contain, corral and control customers create wonderful markets on the other side of the fence.

Brand integrity

The brand is never the face of a company. Faces fib. The brand is the spine.

Brand thinking

Brand thinking begins by asking these three questions:

1. What is holding our customers back?
2. How can we advance our customers beyond the reach of competitors?
3. How can our customers add value back to our brand?

Brands and illusion

♣  Brands made of make-believe fool the company more than they fool customers.

♣  When the brand’s a charade, finances soon follow.

Brands that change the game

If you want your brand to change the game, start by changing the customer.

Brands of emotion

Brands focus on customer feelings when they have no strategy to deliver customer freedoms.

Brand theater

If you design your brand as theater, plan to sell tickets.

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Brand builders have to know their scents, and there’s a trillion of ‘em.

Can you identify this perfume?

Top notes blend mandarin, bergamot and vanillin with subtle green notes. Middle notes are a blend of jasmine, orange blossom, sandalwood and exotic spices such as coriander and marigold. The base is a warm amber mingled with oakmoss, incense and musk.

Well, neither could I. It’s Obsession by Calvin Klein.

A new Fragrance Directory, and Fragrance Wheel

There is now an online Fragrance Directory, with thousands of individual perfumes, and a very helpful Fragrance Wheel (in Flash) to help you navigate the fragrance notes from floral to oriental to woody to fresh.

All thanks to the Fragrance Foundation.

Sharpen your sense of scent and you can take home a FiFi.

Hat tip: ResearchBuzz.

Photo: narumi_k — Flickr

At Apple’s most recent earnings call COO Tim Cook began his portion with a short riff on Apple’s vision and character, to reassure analysts that Apple was in no imminent danger of collapse with Steve Jobs away on medical leave.

We are on the face of the earth to make great products

Some of what Cook said was quite profound. He said this about Apple:

We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not changing.

Not many companies see themselves–and their challenge–in such an elemental context. What’s amazing is that this is an entirely credible statement coming from Apple. They have the game-changing products and services to back it up.

Could Michael Dell say the same thing about his company, with a straight face? How about Steve Ballmer? Would anyone believe them?

Are there people in Redmond placed on the face of the earth to create the Zune? That could be scary.

The brand as destiny

What Apple taps into here is the brand as destiny. It’s the brand as primordial power, a prime mover of creation, culture and context, and never, ever, an add-on.  It’s akin to Dylan Thomas’s, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Great companies know the feeling. The brand is an operating principle that pervades all aspects of the business. It’s a force, and poetry, and something like kaizen.

Tim Cook’s statement at the earnings call

Here’s more of what Tim Cook said when he first spoke during the earnings call. There’s perhaps a wee bit of (excusable) puffery, but the values and the focus seem dead on.

There is extraordinary breadth and depth and tenure among the Apple executive team, and they lead 35,000 employees that I would call wicked smart – and that’s in all areas of the company from engineering to marketing to operations and sales and all the rest. And the values of our company are extremely well entrenched. We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not changing.

We are 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 that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change. And I think regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well. And I would just reiterate a point Peter made in his opening comments that I strongly believe that Apple is doing the best work in its history.

Full transcript of the call.