Brands Create Customers

Have you noticed that those pre-fab neon OPEN signs (above) seem to be just about everywhere these days? I sure have–and I’m convinced they’re bad for local brands, and ultimately, bad for local business. I would even say this : the best way to kill a local brand is to stick one of these neon OPEN signs in the window.

The most commanding visual feature of the store

I’ve witnessed a slow invasion of these signs in local storefronts in the small city where I live. The signs are typically from Costco or Office Depot, and they pretty much look the same. The newer ones are actually LED. They’re bright, and they all seem to wind up being mounted at eye-height in the middle of storefront windows. In many cases, they’re the most commanding visual feature of the store.

The neon OPEN sign eclipses store identity

Shopkeepers may swear that these signs are the cheapest way to attract customers, but the signs can actually work against a store’s best interests. When you walk or drive past a block of stores tagged with the generic neon OPEN, the identity of each store recedes behind the sign. You see the sign, not the store. The potential brand depth of the store disappears.

Along a street, what grabs dulls the eye is the one-dimensional monotony of sign after sign: OPEN, OPEN, OPEN, OPEN. The line of signs can eclipse the store identities themselves.

Strong local brands don’t need neon OPEN signs

From my own observations, strong local brands rarely display these off-the-rack OPEN signs. Strong brands don’t need them. In fact, they’re stronger without them. You visit these stores because of who they are and the experience they deliver. You don’t need a garish OPEN to point the way.

Strong local bands typically command a price premium and legions of loyal customers. They are knit into the fabric of local life. A face-full of neon OPEN would erode their customer bond.

The brand message of the generic neon OPEN sign

The generic neon OPEN sign signifies a weak brand identity. It tells potential customers that the most important aspect of the business is that it’s OPEN–as if the state of being “open” is all that customers are looking for.

The neon OPEN sign carries these brand connotations:

1. We’re OPEN. What more do you need to know?
2. This is a business of transactions, not relationships.
3. Lower your expectations. (We’ve lowered our expectations of you.)
4. Our OPEN sign is what brings you in, and will bring you back.
5. Imagination is not valued here.

A visual language of commodity

If these store-bought neon OPEN signs represent any particular visual language, I would say it’s the language of commodity. The signs speak to a commodity ethos: commodity goods for commodity customers.

When a business becomes a brand of OPEN

The worst consequence of generic neon OPEN signs is that they condemn many local businesses to a being brands of OPEN. Brand identity, quality, ambiance, customer interaction and other value-creating brand relationships are obliterated by the neon gaze.

The generic neon OPEN sign cheapens customer experience. It says, “This is a place of commodity, not character.” Sadly, the customers who return are those who will do the least to make the business grow. Even worse, a generic neon OPEN sign condemns a store to a future of competing on price. It may never reach the brand take-off point.

Photo: John Charlton — Flickr

In general, when we’re designing an identity experience we want that experience to be seamless. That is, all the identity values of the maker will map directly to corresponding identity values of the user. Thus, the user (buyer) actually buys himself or herself when they make a purchase.

Well, that’s the goal. Middlemen do get in the way.

Photo: peevee@ds — Flickr

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.)

Honda (a very strong brand) provides an excellent example of one of my favorite brand maxims: Strong brands lead the customer; weak brands chase the dollar.

Honda’s brand leadership

Honda’s brand leadership is the subject of a recent New York Times article, Honda stays true to efficient driving.

During the glory days of big pickups and sport utility vehicles, one automaker steadfastly refused to join the party.

Despite the huge profits that its competitors were minting by making larger vehicles, Honda Motor never veered from its mission of building fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly cars like its Accord sedan.

“I remember being at the Tokyo Motor Show in the mid-1990s and talking about the environment,” said Ben Knight, head of engineering at Honda’s North American division. “The reaction was there’s no return on that.”

But in today’s fuel-conscious automotive market, Honda is reaping the rewards for its commitment.

No major automaker in America is doing better than Honda, whose sales are up 3 percent for the first seven months of this year in a market that has fallen 11 percent. …

Strong brands have a vision of how the world is evolving, and what customers need (and will need) to keep pace. And strong brands lead by example.

Behind every brand is a philosophy of value

We can also observe that behind every brand is a philosophy of value. This may be implicit, or highly articulated, or simply latent, in need of elucidation. But it’s there.

“Honda is a philosophy-driven company,” said Tetsuo Iwamura, president of Honda North America. “Even when the large S.U.V.’s and trucks were big sellers, they did not fit with our philosophy.”

At its heart, a brand philosophy is a customer philosophy. The brand is the enabler.

The value of brand leadership

Brand leadership is the ability of a brand to lead customers to a qualitatively better life. It means that a brand aims to do what’s right for customers. Over time, brand leadership builds brand trust—a critical foundation for market leadership.

Brand leadership and brand vision

A key element of brand leadership is brand vision: the ability to see your company’s future through your customer’s eyes. This sets in motion a long-term strategy for the brand—case in point: Honda.

Brand leadership and brand identity

A brand that leads builds its identity through its actions, as Honda has done, and is doing. The result is an enduring identity that can itself become a customer platform for wider social and environmental initiatives. When brand context becomes social context, the identity has arrived.

Photo: E — Flickr

[Updated June 22, 2011. Original post July 11, 2008.)

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 2008 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 sometimes “totalitarian” nature of brands themselves. As I see it, the key questions are as follows:

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 totalitarian, inventing an all-encompassing new world order for customers? (Behind every logo is a torchlight parade.)
5. What are the strategy downsides of brands conceived and executed as propaganda, or as “totalitarian?” What other brand models could disrupt them?

I’ve also discussed some of these elements in the various posts referenced  below.

Definition of “totalitarian” brand

For this discussion I define a “totalitarian” brand as follows: “A totalitarian brand is a brand that totally subsumes the customer into the brand, erasing the individual and the individual’s capacity for proactive, independent action.” In other words, in a totalitarian brand approach the brand wants to impose its will upon the customer. The customer becomes a creature of the brand. The brand intends to “own” the customer—body, mind and soul. ((And wallet.)

The customer as “true believer”

I would also suggest that a totalitarian brand approach is one that wants customers to be “true believers.” The brand seeks mindless followers—perhaps because mindful followers might see through it. I would define “true believer” as a one-dimensional person fanatically devoted to a cause, an organization or to another person. A true believer is a follower with a capital “F.” (You might also substitute “fan boy.”) In the eyes of the true believer, the leader can do no wrong. And thus, true believers add no value to the brand. They don’t interact with it to make it better. In fact, they typically magnify its shortcomings. A brand with true believers typically doesn’t innovate, or innovates narrowly, and may be its own worst enemy. True believers are not strategic.

True believers and “yes” men

It seems to me that a brand of true believers will be just as effective as a company of “yes” men. In other words, not very productive. Eventually both become an anchor, the opposite of a game-changing force. (And it may be that true believers are the products of yes men, who are simply cloning themselves.)

Two brand models: containment vs. liberation

As part of this discussion we can assess two different models of brands:  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 capture, contain and control customers, to keep them in place so they continue to be “loyal” to the brand and purchase the product at desired price points.

In contrast, a liberation model of brands aims to free customers to be more proactive for themselves, on the premise that greater sales will flow from a more proactive and productive customer culture, where customers are active players in product development rather than a passive audience. This model assumes that a company can gain market advantage via product and service innovations that create a more proactive culture, where customers leave behind old paradigms. It’s a method that uses customer initiative to disrupt competitors. Apple shows that it can be done, and quite profitably, too.

Some related posts along these lines:

• Some brands go medieval on their customers
• Brands as collaborative strategies
• A brand is not a lure (and customers aren’t fish)

Customers as puppets—or proactive partners?

The “totalitarian” approach to brands might also be contrasted to an “innovation” brand approach. In other words, do we want customers as puppets (controlled in the totalitarian model) or as proactive partners who move the brand forward? The puppet approach calls forth the salesman’s dream of “shooting fish in a barrel.” The drawback to the puppet approach is that it locks the brand in place and makes the brand incapable of the innovations that could take customers to the next level, leaving competitors in the dust. When the next level appears—and it inevitably will—customers move on, and the brand is left holding the strings.

Brands of puppets

Brands that position their customers as puppets eventually become brands of puppets. In terms of “total customer control” that may be a totalitarian ideal, but it doesn’t hold much future for the brand. I discussed this issue in Position the customer, not the brand. In essence, the puppeteer shares his fate with the puppet. Creating brand dependencies often means that innovation is placed on the back burner, leaving the brand further exposed to disruption.

Social media and totalitarian brand strategy

How does social media affect the concept of a totalitarian brand? Good question. Social media is bottom-up, whereas totalitarian brands are classically top-down. It certainly looks hard for traditional propaganda to work in an open social media setting. But (closed) Facebook now has 500 million members, and is becoming an alternative to the (open) Web itself. Is it possible for Facebook to be a totalitarian brand? Or is Facebook simply an all-inclusive platform where advertisers can have total access to customer data? It may be that Facebook is just the barrel, and Facebook users are the fish.

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

In an editorial, today’s New York Times takes issue with political forces attempting to change the American brand from one of freedom and opportunity to a brand of fear.

A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.

An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat. . . .

The politics of identity

There is a real brand identity issue here, too: the possibility that “America” is being subdivided into opposing nations of “Us” and “Them:”

The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.

In recent years we’ve seen how politicians can create and exploit public fears to fracture a national identity for narrow political gain. The results are often devastating to the public and the brand.

“Pragmatic and welcoming”

In many ways the US Constitution defines the American brand. To use a phrase from the Times editorial, that brand is “pragmatic and welcoming.” The Constitution creates a platform of freedoms and rights that enables citizens to make the most of their opportunities, using their initiative and creativity. In many respects, that’s the American Way that sets the US apart. We’re a platform for achievement in a world where too many national brands are little more than ginned up identities used for public control.

Brands as collaborations

It seems to me that the strongest “country brands” are collaborations, where people are on the same page because they’re writing it together. These are places of vibrant culture and adaptation, where tradition becomes a platform for the new. Some elements are frozen in time and kept as static “icons” (often for the tourist trade), but the national brand itself floats upon a living, breathing culture, one that’s encouraged to grow.

Harvard Business Review has published an online case study on authenticity, called Authenticity: is it real or is it marketing?

The case is mostly about identity, rather than authenticity per se, but it’s worth a read.

“Authenticity” can mask deeper problems

In general, I’m always skeptical about discussions of brand “authenticity” when they extend beyond matters of legal provenance. Generalized concerns about authenticity often mask deeper problems of brand identity, character and customer creation. They also typically frame brands as “media” and as a subset of marketing, which can limit brand innovation. Finally, authenticity debates usually focus brands on a static company “essence” when what most brands need is an existential approach predicated on joint customer action.

Brands designed to enable new customer freedoms avoid authenticity problems ab ovo. Building a brand community does the same. Brands designed as stylized sales stimulants will have authenticity issues up the wazoo—as would be expected.

Creating customers: a most authentic strategy

As I see it, companies with strong programs to create customers rarely have authenticity problems. Such brands can leverage company character, and can lead by example—always the most “authentic” customer creation strategy. It’s only when a company lets itself be led by media campaigns that its fundamental character takes a back seat, and things can fall apart. Campaigns that try to sell “authenticity” are doomed to fail, just like campaigns to “shape brand perceptions.”

When your brand has been reduced to a “perception,” your authenticity is reduced to a campaign. Customers see through the hype, and go elsewhere.

A worthwhile look at one aspect of these issues is Dana Thomas’s Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster.

Hat tip: David Weinberger