Brands Create Customers

If you haven’t already read Jon Kolko’s “Our misguided focus on brand and user experience” in Johnny Holland, go and read it now. It will challenge at least some of your beliefs about brands. Others it will politely throw out the window.

I’ll have more to say about Jon’s essay in a future post. At first glance Jon may seem a bit harsh toward brands, but his critique is directed toward brands of contol and manipulation. I see his essay as aiming for the same positive/creative/liberating brand outcomes that I set forth in in this blog.

The Financial Times reports that Burberry will soon launch its own social networking site, to be called Art of the Trench. This is a major step that all brands will be watching, because the future of brands will be written with personal platforms and social media. A Burberry social network could be a pioneering and potent force in advancing the Burberry brand, and its customers.

Brand strategy and social media

In this post I’ll take a quick look at the brand strategy and social media options available to Burberry in its new initiative. In large part, at least as I see it, the challenge for Burberry goes far beyond social media proper. It’s a challenge of brand innovation. Does Burberry intend to pour old marketing wine into this new social media bottle, or will it use social media to reinvent its brand to create new customer value? That’s the big question.

Pre-launch site and Burberry context

Here is Burberry’s pre-launch site, to give you a flavor. From reports, the new network is intended to make Burberry more attractive to customers by providing a Burberry-themed platform for social communication and interaction. Burberry already has 660,000 “friends” on Facebook to draw from.

For some Burberry context, watch the 9/16/09 “Customer of the future” Financial Times video interview with Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts here. (Actually, watch the entire set; it’s illuminating.)

Burberry customers and the site

Burberry intends the site to be a form of online brand experience for customers.

“These might not even be customers yet. Or they may be a customer for a bottle of fragrance or for eyewear. But these are the customers who need the brand experience, who need to feel the brand. That word-of-mouth spreads through their social networks and continues to be a positive conversation [about Burberry] . . . that is so powerful.”

Source:  the FT article above.

Post pictures of yourself in your Burberry trench

At this point we don’t know the full extent of Burberry’s “social networking site.” Will it operate like a slimmed-down, brand-focused Facebook, or will it be more of a (conventional) fan site. Initial reports say the Burberry network will enable Burberry customers to post photographs of themselves in their Burberry trench coats. That seems more like fan site territory, the low end of social media. (The high end is collaboration and value co-creation.)

Potential downsides of a fan site approach

To the extent that Art of the Trench becomes a fan site, (not that it would) what are the brand downsides? The biggest downside is the opportunity cost for missing the possible brand advances through a real social network, especially one focused on value creation. Beyond that, fan sites can be brand limiting unless customers themselves are allowed to show their creative modifications to brands, or brand uses. Is Burberry open to customer mods?

The brand is more than the clothing

If Art of the Trench focuses on pictures of customers in Burberry coats, one might then ask, “What’s the sustaining attraction?” The clothes are the same. And how will all those blurry amateur pics represent Burberry’s chic fashion sense, not to mention its exacting quality? Loopy pics might damage the brand. Finally, how deep is the customer “brand experience” in seeing photos of others in Burberry outfits? Might this undercut the Burberry identity so ably set forth in exquisite photos and videos of Burberry-adorned models?

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It appears that brand builders have a powerful new process to help them build strong brand relationships. The design methodology called service design gives every indication of being a robust methodology for delivering high levels of brand value. In fact, as a method of value delivery it may be more effective than traditional brand practices based on communications and persuasion.

Service design and the evolution of brands

The service design approach meshes nicely with the process of how a brand creates customers. It also fits rather neatly into the final stage of the three-phase evolution of brands. In that model we see brands begin as marks, proprietary symbols originally branded on shipping casks. The second phase is an age of brands as media, where mass media advertising and messaging drove brand development. In the present era brands are emerging as a means, as strategic enablers that help customers (and companies) move to the next level in their planned growth.

Service design and “brands as a service”

As a design discipline, service design focuses on maximizing positive user experiences through high-value touchpoints. Brands use much the same methodology. In fact, we could design a brand as a service of value innovation, aimed to unlock more value than a product alone could provide. To be sure, every brand also needs a well-constructed identity and a command of relevant metaphors, but beyond that it’s largely a mutual value creation effort between company and customer. As a service the brand rolls up its sleeves to do meaningful work, delivering results customers can use.

The creative context of service design

At its most rudimentary levels, service design is about helping companies and organizations deliver better services. That’s valuable in itself, but conventional services are often conceived too narrowly, as little more than interactive tasks. They’re prosaic by intent, often because companies lack the vision to leverage them creatively (and strategically).

There’s no reason we can’t design services in a more creative context, in which new realms of expression and proactive behaviors open up to customers and to companies alike. We could define the service as a means of discovery. (It’s part of a shared brand journey.) A service (like a brand) is a collaboration in context. Reinvent the context. Shape it to enables the customer to be more, and to do more. Free it to deliver layers of meaning in addition to elementary function.

Service design is more strategic than traditional brand myths and symbols

Because service design is customer-focused and results-oriented, it contains more strategic potential than traditional brand myths and symbols. Brands built on symbols, myths and stories are not strategic. They’re customer dead ends. Their usual goal is to end innovation and lock customers in place. In so doing, however, they often lock the company in the same corral, creating advantages for competitors. In contrast, service design can easily incorporate strategic brand goals into its processes, advancing customers into new market spaces that competitors can’t reach.

A brand is how you experience a company

There is significant overlap between brands as enablers and the goals of service design. For instance, check out this interview with Peter Fossick, who teaches service design at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Everything is moving toward service design. Design is becoming more intangible, less about product and more about the experience of the product. Look at Vélib’, the bicycle rental program in Paris. The technology is ancient–it’s a bicycle, after all–but the program is so brilliant thanks to the service architecture. I’m not saying we’ll stop inventing new products. I’m just saying that designing the experience of the product is becoming just as fundamental as the product itself.

Include the experience of trust in a product offering and you are well on the way toward building a brand.

Service design: creating the customer platform

Professor Fossick also makes this interesting observation about Apple:

You know, Apple really had an enormously difficult time with hardware in the nineties and earlier this decade. They seemed to be focusing too much on product, without considering the product experience. Then–whop!–iTunes, really even more so than the iPod, changes all that. That’s not a music player. It’s a design of the user’s interaction with sound.

One might even argue that in spite of the vaunted product design ethos at Apple, the core of the Apple brand is the (software) service to customers that Apple delivers–first in the Mac OS, then  iTunes and now with the iPhone and its wondrous apps. This enabling service creates a platform of customer experience that makes everything else possible.

Also see: Interaction design: the new key to brands

Hat tip: John Schneider (Twitter @johnfschneider)

Whole Foods has taken initial steps to create a personal brand application (PBA) that can strengthen its brand ecosystem and develop deeper brand relationships with customers. Potentially, it’s a PBA that can radically differentiate Whole Foods and its customers from the Safeway’s of the world, raising Whole Foods customers to a level of brand experience that other grocers can’t match.

Personal brand applications

Personal brand applications are software applications that deliver brand value on smartphones and similar digital devices. As brand applications they do things, and they’re personal, portable and persistent (always on). They enable the brand to be a partner, sidekick and mentor to customers 24/7.

(You can read more about personal brand applications here, here and here.)

Being enabled is a high-level brand experience

Personal brand applications enable customers to do more, and to be more, consistent with the brand’s vision and innovation roadmap. This sense of enablement is a brand experience. It’s proactive, not passive, the experience of a newly empowered partner and participant. It’s a tremendously powerful and often liberating feeling.

Brands that aim to amuse, flatter, entertain or otherwise “delight” customers are no match for brands with the power to enable.

What the Whole Foods PBA does

The (free) Whole Foods PBA is based on the iPhone/iPod touch platform. It enables customers to enjoy tasty and nutritious food by providing a comprehensive database of 2000 recipes, including nutrition information and tips for preparing meals from what one has in the fridge. As Whole Foods describes it:

Searchable by ingredient, special diets, and other elements like “budget” and “family friendly,” each recipe contains detailed preparation instructions and nutritional information, which can be copied and pasted, saved as a personal “favorite,” and emailed from within the App itself.  The App also includes an “On Hand” feature where customers can enter ingredients and get back meal recommendations.

The brand context of the PBA

At first glance this may seem like a pretty basic smartphone app that helps people chose and cook good food. However, there’s tremendous brand potential in the context of the PBA, where Whole Foods and its customers can team and collaborate in the daily process of eating healthy food and living sustainable lives. That’s a very different brand context than the traditional “grocer” + “shopper” context of supermarkets. It’s a shared context of value chock full of opportunities for personal growth and new market creation.

Whole Foods becomes more than a supermarket brand

The PBA makes Whole Foods more than a brand of organic foods and natural products. Its certainly helps raise Whole Foods beyond your basic supermarket brand. Through the PBA Whole Foods becomes a brand of healthy choices, healthy living, creative cooking, nutrition, sustainability and taste. All this happens at the personal level of the customer, via the iPhone/iPod touch. Brand and customers share and act within a unified, holistic vision, accessed on a daily basis. This shared context extends far beyond the store proper.

A PBA that builds brand trust

An added value of the Whole Foods PBA is that it can help build brand trust at the personal, interactive level. It integrates Whole Foods into a customer’s daily life as a trusted partner. And if Whole Foods ever decides to offer new products down the line, such as health insurance or life insurance, it can leverage the platform of trust created in part by its PBA.

Changing the retail future

Personal brand applications have the power to change the retail future. A retailer can combine store brands with personal brand applications to gain more brand presence (and brand clout)  with customers than packaged “name brands.”  The PBA becomes the connective tissue between retailer and customer, a low cost substitute for the billions of dollars spent by national packaged brands to advertise their goods. The PBA puts the retailer and the customer on the same page, writing it together.

Related post: Brand platform innovation at Whole Foods

Photo credit top : kalebdf – Flickr

Photo inset: Whole Foods

An article that every brand builder should read is Branding Youth in the Totalitarian State in Design Observer. The article is based on Steven Heller’s new book: Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State.

The article raises all sorts of interesting questions about the relationships between propaganda and brands, and on the “totalitarian” nature of brands themselves.

1. Are brands a form of propaganda?
2. How are brands different from propaganda?
3. Are the best brands “totalitarian” in concept and in execution?
4. Is every brand builder a closet fascist, inventing a new world order for customers?
5. What are the strategy downsides of brands conceived and executed as propaganda? What other brand models could disrupt them?

I’ll tackle these questions bit by bit in coming posts.

Two brand models: containment vs liberation

As part of this discussion maybe we can assess different models of brands, among them a persuasion or propaganda model, and a contrasting liberation model. A persuasion or propaganda model would try to shape customer thoughts and feelings so as to contain customers, to keep them in place so they continue to be “loyal” to the brand and purchase the product.

In contrast, a liberation model of brands might aim to free customers to be more proactive for themselves, on the premise that greater sales will flow from a more proactive culture, where customers are active players in product development rather than a passive audience. (This model assumes a company can lead by innovation into a proactive culture, and that can be a very risky assumption.)

Two previous posts along these lines:

• Managing the brand agenda for customer growth
• Some brands go medieval on their customers

Totalitarian brands—and brand builders

To a certain extent, every brand builder has a totalitarian mindset. (Yes, admit it.) We conceive of a “total” unified and integrated brand experience where the brand identity is carefully composed and actively expressed. We make sure that every symbol, slogan, color, theme, touchpoint, etc. is set forth to maximize the brand effect. Behind every logo is a torchlight parade.

Personally, I tend to be a super-totalitarian in this regard, but I always have to ask myself: does this approach leave sufficient room for the customer? Since we’re trying to build the brand through the customer, shouldn’t we also focus on building customers themselves so their freedoms can create new markets for us?

Limits of a totalitarian brand strategy

Some questions: Can a brand be too totalitarian? Does a totalitarian approach create passive customers who are a dead end strategically? Can we build a totalitarian brand from the bottom up? Does a totalitarian brand just hold customers back? Or can it set them free?

More to come.

NOTE: See also the Youth under fascism site, which is the source of the poster above.

We don’t often think of brands as “incubators,” but incubating customers turns out to be a critical part of the brand mission. As a matter of fact, it’s strategically vital.

The logic of incubating customers

Let’s begin by observing, first and foremost, that brands are creative partnerships between companies and their customers. They’re a team effort, bottom-up as much as top-down. As such, brands have a vested interest in incubating as many energetic, diverse and free-thinking customers as possible. These are customers who can push the product envelope and the brand envelope into new forms, formats and markets. In so doing, they add value back to the brand from a dozen different directions, and help drive the business forward.

Strategic incubation

As warm and fuzzy as “incubation” might sound, brands incubate customers for reasons that are strictly strategic. The payback from incubating customers is competitive advantage. Your goal in incubating customers is twofold. You want customers who can:

1. Augment your R&D
2. Carry your business into new markets where competitors can’t follow.

The customers that your brand incubates today may drive your strategic platforms of tomorrow. By incubating customers your brand becomes a means of innovation, organically developing new contexts of product and service value.

The incubator model: an innovation platform

There’s a very specific brand vision behind the incubation process. That vision understands that customers are much more than mere “buyers” of products. They’re potential innovation partners who can pay bottom-line dividends far into the future. Thus, we employ an incubator model that’s much more than heat lamps and a comfy nest. In brands we incubate innovation, and we design the brand as an innovation platform for customers. (Brands belong in the innovation department far more than they belong in the marketing department.)

Brands as innovation tools

Brands are, of course, the premier tools to create (and incubate) customers. Brands enjoy this special status because they encompass creative, social, personal, emotional and moral dimensions. These are all potential innovation levers. This special scope grants brands a transcendent power to transform customer lives—in the right directions if the brand is morally and socially grounded.

A reference model: Y Combinator

One reference model for brand builders is that of startup incubators, the boutique companies who help fledgling entrepreneurs turn raw ideas into business. Treat your customers as brand entrepreneurs, because that’s what they want to be, and that’s you need them to be. A useful model to examine in this regard is the successful business incubator Y Combinator. Brands would do well to learn from their vision and focus.

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Back in 2003 a prominent Windows user tried to download a new Windows application to his machine. The download did not go well.

Bill Gates fired off a blistering email to top Windows honchos detailing his experience, and his frustration. You can read that email here.

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