About 45% of the nation’s commercial air fleet is equipped with in-flight wireless Internet, with several airlines, including Virgin America and AirTran, offering the service fleetwide, according to In-Stat.

The nation’s airlines collected about $155 million in 2011 from charges to use onboard Internet and are expected to collect $225 million this year, said Amy Cravens, a senior analyst for In-Stat.

Coming soon: Hotspot Airlines

Brands that help us be more productive and proactive have signal advantages over brands fashioned as stylized sales stimulants. In planning a trip we’ll be searching Kayak and the rest for Wi-Fi flights. We’re looking for Hotspot Airlines, no matter what the name and livery say on the side of the plane. And not just any Wi-Fi mind you, but high-speed Wi-Fi at reasonable cost with the least amount of airline baggage dumped into the connection.

Fly a lot of miles and earn a free Wi-Fi upgrade. That would be nice.

A new kind of airline brand experience

The prevalence of onboard Wi-Fi changes the nature of the airline brand experience. With affordable Wi-Fi a flight becomes an online experience more than an “airline” experience. We arrive at our destination totally refreshed, having engaged ourselves for hours on end aloft, rather oblivious to the sardine can that got us from point A to point B.

Definition of “vertically integrated value”

A brand developed as vertically integrated value is one where company, products, services and brand all operate in a singular, clear and coherent context to make the customer better off. It’s the brand that integrates the “company context” with the “customer context.” And it’s the value delivered that gives the brand real traction.

Creating vertically integrated value

How does a company go about creating vertically integrated value through its brand? We can identity four basic steps.

First, it helps to understand that “the brand goes in before the brand goes on.” We produce brand value from the vision, talents and dedication of company employees. We don’t tack on a “brand” just before the product is ready to ship. The brand is a method to create value from the very core of the business. (In the big picture, the brand is company potential X customer potential.)

Second, and most critically, we structure the brand as a customer-facing application. This helps cultivate and focus the company’s creative energies into deliverables with the desired strategic impact. (We want to create customers beyond the reach of competitors—in ways where our customers can become our most powerful competitive weapon.)

Third, we employ a value-based brand model. See here and here.

Fourth, we integrate the brand mission with the company’s principles of operation.

Vertically integrated value at Amazon

Amazon provides us with a current example of the brand as vertically integrated value. In this  interview of Jeff Bezos by Steven Levy we can observe how Amazon is structuring its products and services to work closely together within a singular customer context, in a tightly focused brand operation. The charts in the article are especially revealing.

Amazon’s vertically integrated brand experience

Amazon’s brand challenge is to deliver its vertically integrated value as a seamless and satisfying brand experience while constantly reinventing itself. Amazon has grown from “online bookseller” to become an online seller of everything, a hardware manufacturer of digital readers and tablets, a publisher, a digital streaming service for music and movies, a movie studio, and a digital cloud storage and infrastructure service for startups and corporations. That’s a vast territory for a brand to cover. It could have been disjointed, inefficient and clunky, but Amazon seems to have made it click.

See also:

• The simple secret of Apple’s brand strategy
• Brands as collaborative strategies

Brand and customer on the same page, writing it together

In a joint venture the brand and the customer are on the same page, writing it together. Customers are not a passive “audience” for brand theater. The two are allies. They’re co-explorers. Sidekicks. They’re a team, solving mutual problems in a context of collaboration. The joint venture enables trust, feedback, idea flow, cooperation and co-creation. This stands to be a far more productive approach than the brand modeled as a “communication” between separate parties. In the latter case, brands are often reduced to a persuasion tool, a product wrapper, a pie-in-the-sky promise or campaigns to manipulate emotions.

The brand as a joint venture to create value

“OK,” you might say, “I can see where the brand might be structured as a joint venture, but what is it a joint venture of?  What’s the purpose?”

Good question. Simply stated, it’s a joint venture to create value, for both the customer and the company. As I’ve written previously, brands are a method to create value above and beyond the product proper, with the entire brand working as a customer-facing application, with all the focus, power and outcomes that applications can deliver. We shape the joint venture so that customers can add value back to the brand as they themselves advance to richer realms of living, and to new ways of being and doing. The customer is an active part of the application, too. The joint venture structure fits hand-in-glove with the brand-as-application strategy.

A context of getting things done

As a joint venture we place the brand in a context of getting things done. The brand is action-oriented, not persuasion-oriented. It’s not about “aligning” customers to the brand as if they were medieval serfs to be pumped with doctrine and kept in a static universe of perpetual dependence. (That’s what your competitors try to do, and that’s what makes their brands vulnerable.) As a joint venture, the brand can envision and create new market spaces where company and customer are both significantly better off. In a joint venture the brand agenda is one of creating new customer freedoms, not imposing another set of customer controls. The brand steps up with the vision, the path and the tools to get there, as set forth in the brand journey.

Strategic objectives of the brand as joint venture

What’s the strategic objective of this joint venture?  It is to use customer insight, initiative and innovation to advance customers beyond the reach of competitors. In essence, the brand and its customers get together to gang up on competitors, especially those who aim to capture, corral and control customers using the brand as a mental and emotional silo. There’s no future for customers in that kind of brand desert. As a joint venture the brand enables customers to transcend the limitations imposed by competitors, reshaping the market, or creating entirely new market spaces where customers are better off. A classic example is how the iPod teamed with music lovers to route around the expense and restrictions of the CD format, reinventing the music industry in the process.

The joint venture and brand experience

Customers today value brands by the totality of experience they provide: before, during and after the sale, and including the behavior of the brand itself as a responsible world citizen. When we construct the brand as a joint venture we “socialize” the nature of brand experience itself, making it participative and interactive. Brand experience becomes not what the brand “does” for customers, but what customers and the brand create jointly in pursuit of common goals. In short, we co-create brand experience, giving it two potent drivers instead of one.

Strategic advantages from the brand as a joint venture

As a joint venture the brand delivers the following strategic advantages to company and customers alike:

1. It unites them—creatively and pragmatically—in a common context, with a common goal. Each gains a market ally.
2. It replaces “buyer-seller” (and brand as persuasion) with team effort—and brand as mutual enabler.
3. It creates new avenues and opportunities to circumvent (or disrupt) incumbent brands.
4. It’s a team of equals where the end product (a customer who’s strategically better off) helps advance the brand to market spaces where competitors can’t follow.
5. It’s a full-blooded, and full-bodied, collaboration in context, content and in value. It facilitates brand innovation, especially non-linear brand breakthroughs.
6. The joint venture is not confined to today’s products. It’s geared to an arc (or narrative) of customer development. The brand isn’t selling a product. It’s developing a customer. (Personally I’d say it’s “creating a customer,” but let’s give Steve Blank proper credit.)
7. The joint venture not fence customers in. It’s a platform (or innovation engine) to develop new brand frontiers.

Further reading

As further reading on developing the brand as a joint venture with customers:

• Position the customer, not the brand
• A brand is not a lure (and customers aren’t fish)
• FAQ: Creating your brand as a customer-focused application
• Brands as collaborative strategies
• How great brands change the game

Here’s how that might happen:

TV ads that hound you in the aisles

These days many people resolutely skip ads on TV using the remote or the DVR, or simply find their content on the Web or via social media, where ads are less intrusive. Imagine how these people might feel when they zip off to the supermarket and find nonstop ads beamed at them from little TV screens up and down the aisles, everywhere they turn. What they so thoroughly avoided at home now has them trapped in the store. It’s like a scene from The Twilight Zone.

Perhaps this is a preview:

What kind of brand experience is this?

If I’m at a grocery store being assaulted by sales pitches from rows of tiny TV screens, some at shelf edge, I have to ask myself, “What kind of brand experience is this? Why are these products doing this to me? Why is the store doing this to me? These are name brands, and this is a name brand store. Why is it now a creep show pumping ads? Don’t these brands know any better? Where’s their respect for me?”

The alternative is easy

Maybe this is why a lot of people head on over to Trader Joe’s. At Trader Joe’s there’s basically one brand for the whole store and its products. That brand conveys respect, and in so doing earns respect. It’s a much smaller store than a supermarket, but one’s personal space is honored as infinite.

For brands, that idea is obvious.

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.

Photo credit: slgckgc — Flickr

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?

Brand strategy first, social media second

Many brands (like Burberry) are moving beyond traditional mass-market advertising toward networks powered by social media. That stands to be a positive shift, but only if it’s anchored in a customer-focused brand strategy. It’s brand strategy first, social media second. There is no social media magic that can make a brand “come alive” from below. A brand cannot flip a social media switch and expect a stronger brand to bubble forth, like Champagne from water.

This raises another question for Burberry’s new networking site: What are the terms of Burberry’s intended brand engagement?

Social networks are not old marketing in new bottles

For brands, the value of social networks is that they have game-changing potential to create new customers and new markets, beyond old marketing structures. Thus the promise of Burberry’s initiative. As many companies also realize, social networks entail a culture change in brand approach. Pouring old marketing wine into new (social media) bottles won’t work. An “old” marketing approach will view social media as nothing more than a new sales and PR channel. In effect, social media becomes “social media advertising and PR,” a platform for using customers to advertise to themselves. In this “advertising from below” approach, the only connection desired from customers is the sale.

Unfortunately, when companies reduce social media to this level, brand trust often dissolves as customers perceive themselves as being (cynically) used to sell things to their friends.

In social media, the customer is an ally, not an “audience”

Companies are beginning to understand that the brand transition to social media ultimately involves a re-casting of the customer relationship. In social media, the customer is an ally, not an “audience.” The audience model is a carryover from obsolescent marketing thinking, as if the brand were an “act” in front of a crowd. A brand that considers customers an “audience” often finds itself resorting to theatrics to make an impression. Do these work? They can, for a time, but at the cost of a stagnating brand on a shrinking stage.

As allies, customers can add value back to the brand—many times over. It will be interesting to see how Burberry handles the “customer audience vs. customer ally” question.

A potential pitfall: Burberry outlets

One concern for Burberry is that members of its new network may be bargain hunters that flock to Burberry’s factory outlets. This outlet mentality can turn the brand conversation into a downward spiral of discount and price, where the hot topic is, “What’s the best deal?”  The network can then become a force for commoditizing the brand. As soon as someone saves big bucks on a particular item, the entire network will know it, and may shop on price accordingly.

Setting the Burberry brand agenda

One question the official launch will answer is, “What’s Burberry’s brand agenda?” Burberry’s brand agenda will guide its customer approach, and will help answer most of the questions above. For more on setting the brand agenda, see here.

The Burberry brand journey

Perhaps the easiest approach for Burberry is to incorporate social media into a Burberry brand journey. In this strategy the brand becomes a force for joint cultural innovation with customers. Burberry leads this (shared) brand journey as a creative, social, moral and cultural driver in defining new horizons for its customers. In this role Burberry is “out of the closet” and into the veins. Burberry becomes “innerware” instead of “outerware.”

In this option, social media plays a key role as part of personal brand applications.

A Burberry smartphone app?

Burberry might also develop a smartphone app to give its customers unique cultural advantages beyond the merchandise. What might these be? A leading brand of style and fashion would surely know.

Note: I’ve covered related issues in Twitter and brand strategy.

Photo:  nino63004 — Flickr

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