Brands Create Customers

In a previous post, Brand lessons from the BP oil disaster, I framed my discussion by asking: Did BP fail its brand; or did the brand fail BP? In this post I’ll explore these two failure modes in greater depth. A brand failure like BP’s might arise from using the wrong brand model, which no amount of execution can save, or by employing a correct brand model but failing to implement it properly, especially at the management level.

What caused the BP brand to go off track?

I’m looking for causal factors that might explain why the BP brand went off track, resulting in the blowout disaster and massive pollution. Future hearings, investigations and court cases should provide us with much more data than available now. This is a preliminary snapshot, nothing more. My goal is to posit some basic brand rules applicable to all brands, in whatever business or organization. I’m using BP as a provisional case study.

(And to those who might argue, “You know, you really can’t separate brand strategy, brand model and brand execution” I’d say I agree philosophically, but I’m forcing such a separation here for analysis purposes.)

How can a brand “fail the company?”

The brand itself can fail the company when it’s the wrong brand approach for the business. This is a brand model/brand strategy issue, as I see it, in which a brand can fail the company in two ways. The first is when the brand model can’t advance the company and its customers beyond the reach of competitors. The brand doesn’t create competitive advantage, and the business suffers as a result. In the second (and far more serious) case, the brand fails to optimize internal operations, and in so doing actually increases business risk. The result may be a quality breakdown, or even a business breakdown. In both the first and second cases, a company has the wrong brand model for the job.

The perils of an “image campaign”

My “sense” is that brands most often fail the company when the brand is positioned as a stylized sales stimulant, in an “image campaign” of advertising and promotion. The resulting brand isn’t part of the meat and bones of the business. When stressed the core business can founder, with notable weak points being innovation and quality.

Signs that a brand might fail the company

Here are some specific signs (as I see them) where a brand might be in danger of failing the company:

1. The “brand” is defined as a media campaign that promotes the brand identity. It exists as part of the company’s persuasion and promotion package. (E.g., “Beyond Petroleum.”)
2. The brand doesn’t state what it values, and why. (And the brand is no guide to what’s right and what’s wrong inside the company.)
3. The brand makes no commitments.
4. The brand doesn’t define a clear chain of accountability.
5. The brand is largely decoupled from day-to-day operations. As a brand, it’s mostly symbols and slogans. It is not a working brand.
6. The brand relies heavily on myths and make believe, further divorcing it from day-to-day realities. (The brand also plays little role in innovation, quality and value creation.)
7. There’s nothing visceral in the brand for employees (and customers). It has a “Wizard of Oz” feel to it. Lots of smoke and mirrors, and a very big curtain.

How can a company “fail the brand?”

Let’s now look at the other side of the question: How can a company “fail the brand?” Here we assume a brand that’s properly structured within an effective brand strategy. The brand is OK, but the company prevents it from achieving its objectives.

Signs where a company is in danger of failing its brand

Here are some specific signs (as I see them) where a company might be in danger of failing its brand:

1. Management believes that the brand’s sole purpose is to make the company look good. The brand has no internal value beyond the “image appeal” it can generate externally.
2. Management positions itself above the brand. It doesn’t exemplify brand values in its actions, nor does it lead the brand by example.
3. No one in management is accountable to the brand. (Or accountable to brand values.)
4. The brand does not fuel the corporate culture. It’s decoupled from business decisions.
5. The brand is treated as a form of communication, rather than a method of optimizing operations. It’s kept as a messaging layer.
6. The brand team (if there is one) has no authority. It’s marginalized into a feel-good adjunct of marketing and corporate PR.
7. Management treats the brand as a financial “asset.” In this accounting mode the brand loses its position as a core value-set and tool for best practices.

And in BP’s case, perhaps “both”

In my previous post on BP (link above) I suggested that, based on preliminary indications, BP’s brand failure in the Deepwater Horizon blowout was probably a combination of both failure modes: a brand that failed the company, and BP management that failed the brand. Maybe more of the first than the second,. In time more facts will help clarify what actually transpired prior to the blowout, and may reveal other brand issues as well.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue — Flickr

In an example of brand innovation Google Labs has released App Inventor for Android, a desktop (browser) application intended to make creating Android apps fast and easy. According to Google, no programming knowledge is required. One simply drags and drops blocks of pre-packaged code into a composing screen, and the app is generated.

At this point the App Inventor is fairly rudimentary, and the demo apps appear somewhat simple. Wait a few months, however, and we all might be surprised with the apps that  result. One observer calls App Inventor “a game changer.”

An excellent example of brand innovation

I see App Inventor as an excellent example of brand innovation. With App Inventor Google is putting more power in the hands of Android users. It’s enabling them to do more of what they want with Android, shaping apps to their personal or particular needs. These will be apps in the pure context of the customer, and as such they can build significant brand depth. They’re also at the edge of the brand ecosystem, and that gives the brand new territory to enter and explore. That’s what personal brand applications are all about.

Personal Apps or Corporate Apps?

Google provides an example of a personal Android app in the video below, but there’s nothing stopping businesses from developing their own Android apps for sales, marketing or operations. A delivery business might find use for such an app, because one of the functions is geo-location. And if the Android OS powers the (rumored) Google tablet, these apps may work on the Google tablet, too. That could open up more possibilities.

Types of applications possible

Quoting from Google Labs:

	Because App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are. You can build an app to help you remember where you parked your car, an app that shows the location of your friends or colleagues at a concert or conference, or your own custom tour app of your school, workplace, or a museum.
	You can write apps that use the phone features of an Android phone. You can write an app that periodically texts “missing you” to your loved ones, or an app “No Text While Driving” that responds to all texts automatically with “sorry, I’m driving and will contact you later”. You can even have the app read the incoming texts aloud to you (though this might lure you into responding).

App Inventor in education

App Inventor may have important educational uses. See the video here from the University of San Francisco.

Google video and demo app

Here is an introductory video from Google showing the app development process and a completed app:

One thing fairly certain about brands is that brands that live in the past eventually stay there. Brands innovate, or die. In other words, your brand is not your legacy. Your brand is your tomorrow. It’s your brand innovation that writes your future. Backward-facing brands are kaput.

Apple’s brand story: wildfire innovation

Apple understands this principle and innovates like wildfire, advancing its customers to new realms of value: iPod, iPhone and now iPad. Each step forward explodes the limitations of legacy approaches. In their place Apple enables new ways of being and doing, in new contexts where customers are better-off. That’s what brands are supposed to do.

Microsoft: chained to a legacy brand

In contrast to Apple’s ardent innovation, Microsoft is chained to a legacy brand, its brand of market power stemming from the desktop monopoly that Microsoft forged in the 1990′s. Microsoft drags this legacy everywhere, like an anchor, in a vain hope of installing the past on the future.

Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t make its old brand form fit the new multi-platform world. The Microsoft brand, initially a liberating force in corporate America, now creeps like a pall. It’s heritage hangs likes a curse. There’s brand failure everywhere, most recently with the Microsoft Kin, a highly-touted mobile phone scrapped just two months after launch.

These failures weigh heavily on Microsoft employees, the makers of Microsoft’s future. Their comments on the Kin debacle in Mini-Microsoft describe a backward-facing brand in full dysfunction.

A brand application is a way for brands  to solve important problems for customers, just like a software application. The most popular brand applications these days are “apps” on portable media devices, such as smartphones. What we have in the photo above is a slightly different kind of application. It’s an innovative, inexpensive add-on unit from MIT that can perform simple, accurate eye tests using a smartphone. The unit could help people in remote areas obtain the prescriptions and the eyeglasses they need.

The unit is designed to be dead simple to use, accurate, and cheap. Here’s the full announcement from MIT.

If the device works as intended, this is a brand application that can change the world. It can help give sight to millions of sight-impaired, a tremendous boost to their lives and local productivity.

So, whose brand is this?

Whose brand is this? Well, it could be yours (assuming you work out a deal with MIT). If you want to do some good in the world, this is the kind of brand application just waiting to be picked up by a sponsor or foundation. It’s meant to be used, not sold. A company doesn’t have to be in the eyewear or ophthalmology business to adopt this device (or something similar) as a brand application. Nokia could do it. So could Google. Or Starbucks. Or Toyota. Or any other brand with global reach.

Your brand isn’t what you sell—it’s what you value.

A first step in brand strategy is to understand that your brand isn’t what you sell. Your brand is what you value. (This is a liberating realization.) You can show the world what you value through the brand applications that carry your name. Brand applications can make a tremendous difference in the world. Can they also open up cross-market and new market opportunities for the brand? Of course. Brand applications are strategic tools.

Show people what you value as a brand and they will value you. The app that carries your name could be anything. What’s important is what it does, and how that makes a difference.

Another potential brand application

I previously described a potential cheap, simple and direct brand application here.

Photo credit: MIT Media Relations

Patent information sites like Patently Apple (which covers Apple’s patent and trademark activity) remind us that patents often point toward larger strategies, or sets of strategies, beyond the details of the patent itself. Such patent-fueled strategies can have powerful downstream effects on competing brands in the same or adjacent markets. That’s why every brand sharpens its competitive analysis at the substrate (patent) level. My rule of thumb (erring on the conservative side) is that “Today’s patents are tomorrow’s brand strategies.” From a brand perspective, a patent can mark a potential path toward a new kind of customer, in a new customer platform, in a new market.

For the patent illustrated above, see Patently Apple’s full discussion here. The comments are informative.

Which way does this patent point?

While a site like Patently Apple is no substitute for in-depth competitive analysis, it may sometimes reveal the strategic brand intent behind new patent activity. In reviewing a patent, one might ask these questions: What new kind of customer could this patent create? What’s the intended platform? What customer dots does it connect? Can it lead to a new level of customer experience?  Could it change the current customer context and in so doing change the game for current market players? What new market(s) might it create?

It’s the customer inside the patent that counts

From a brand perspective, it’s the (latent) customer inside the patent that counts. In the best of worlds, a patent would  be conceived and executed within a strategy of brand innovation, so that the patent protects a unique domain of customer creation. In effect, the patent is the legal launch of a new kind of customer.

It also should be noted that sometimes the latent customer inside a patent may not be apparent to the patent applicant. This leaves the door open for competitors with better customer vision.

Mapping patents to a customer canvas

The real challenge in a brand analysis of patents comes in mapping patents to a forward-focused customer canvas, one containing different models of newly-empowered customers that the patent(s) might create. It’s always exciting when a patent points toward a new kind of customer beyond the conventional marketing model, where the patent itself is but one tiny step in a far-reaching roadmap—or better yet, brand journey.

Image source: Patently Apple

Sometimes the very form of a brand can become its limiting factor. The world leaps ahead on other innovations, and the old form factor/brand begins to languish. It can’t sync with the new.

The digital tablet may revive traditional media brands

If being out of sync was part of old media’s problem vs. Internet upstarts, new digital tablet technologies may breathe new life into old publications. Conceivably, new digital tablets could lead to new and better forms of storytelling, and new ways for traditional media brands to connect with customers.

A Time Inc. digital magazine concept

Take a look at this Time Inc. magazine concept on a digital tablet:

Of course, not many of us look forward to swiping pages of Sports Illustrated on the flipped around screen of a laptop tablet, as shown here. We want the convenience, immediacy and intimacy of a smaller digital tablet we can easily read on the couch or the train, freely flowing text, pictures and context with our fingertips.

That same tablet might contain all of our media subscriptions, our personal library, and maybe even our textbooks for a new form factor of college.

For more on what Time Inc. is contemplating with this new format see TechCrunch. And Wonderfactory.

The iPhone is such a powerful platform that it’s creating new markets every day. Is the iPhone a platform for interactive storytelling for children? Absolutely. Just check out this video of the “Phone Book” from Mobile Art Lab in Japan. (Mobile Art Lab site is in Japanese.)

Simple and amazing.

Found at Everyday UX.

Hat tip: @fusion_com_au

Apple’s relentless pace of innovation has already disrupted the music and mobile phone industries. Given the scope of Apple’s technology development, are universities next in line to be disrupted by Apple’s far-reaching digital platforms?

NOTE: See our updates here and here. The latter discusses the iPad.

A speculative disruption scenario

In this post I’ll sketch a purely speculative disruption scenario suggested by Apple’s current and projected technology innovations. It appears that Apple may soon have a seamless system of hardware, software, services and online infrastructure to become a pivotal player in higher education. As such, Apple itself may become a brand of education.

That said, I have no evidence that Apple might even desire such a role. My hypothesis is simply that such a role might be available to it.

Apple’s potentially disruptive resources

In the field of higher education, Apple’s potentially disruptive resources would include the following:

1. A method of organizing and managing huge amounts of online content and curricula
2. A convenient means of delivering educational content and curricula to students
3. Portable digital devices that students can use for digital textbooks, lectures and course materials (if some speculations are true)
4. A transaction system for collecting tuition and fees
5. An administrative system for maintaining student records.

Specific Apple resources would include Apple’s online iTunes University, Apple’s (rumored) forthcoming “iTablet” (for multimedia lectures and textbooks), its online iTunes store for transactions, and its platform of digital services for record keeping.

Apple as disruptor in music, mobile and perhaps publishing

We all know how Apple’s platform innovations disrupted the music industry with iTunes, the iTunes Store and the iPod. Apple subsequently changed the game in mobile communications with the disruptive platform of iPhone and App Store. Publishing may be next on the list if Apple’s rumored “iTablet” turns out to be a superlative e-reader, perhaps optimized for textbooks, and structured within a disruptive platform. Imagine Apple as the world’s default digital publisher, connecting readers with content producers. You may be buying your books, magazines, newspapers, music, movies and videos through iTunes, all downloaded in a few seconds to a spiffy Apple portable device with Apple’s famed ease of use.

For this to happen Apple would need a gigantic new data center—which it just happens to be building. It might suggest a mobile future for iTunes U.

Universities: tradition bound

Let’s now consider universities, those valued institutions whose basic structure and functions have been relatively unchanged for centuries. Are there equal or better ways of imparting high-level learning that don’t require the traditional four-year, classroom-based system of lecture-driven instruction? Is there an alternate means where instruction can be raised to the highest levels of interactive, multimedia learning, perhaps customized to student learning styles, and where costs can be contained, instead of spiraling upwards? And might there be a common digital platform where a university’s teaching and knowledge could be scaled worldwide, opening up massive new markets?

Apple’s foot in the collegiate door

Apple already has a foot in the collegiate door with its iTunes U on the  iTunes Store. (Yes, they’ve put a university in their store.) The iTunes U features steadily growing numbers of  (free) podcasts of complete courses from leading universities, plus many specialty lectures . Currently these are targeted to the iPod and the iPhone.

I’m a real fan of iTunes U. It has gems like this.  In its present form, though, iTunes U wouldn’t seem to have much disruptive potential. It’s mostly audio podcasts, and a lesser number of video podcasts. It’s wonderful that Apple makes it available. It’s a credit to participating universities as a means of expanding their educational outreach, as CNN notes.

Looking downstream, however, the emergence of new (and integrated) Apple technologies might position iTunes U as a potential disruptive force in higher learning.

A disruptive iTunes U scenario

Could Apple transform iTunes U into a global digital university, setting the world’s highest standards for interactive digital learning? Given Apple’s current and forthcoming technologies it may be possible to reposition higher learning from institutions of place (ye olde universities)  to an integrated system (and network) of instruction. This could be a system of online education orchestrated and operated by a central source, so that the learning modules could be of consistently high quality and be available anywhere, anytime, on convenient portable devices.

Apple’s potential partners in a distributed model of learning

How would this new digital model of learning be organized? It would need a core technology partner, and the closest company to fits that bill is probably Apple. It would need university partners, perhaps a gold list of the top 25 universities from around the world. Together they would offer premium (paid) curricula and courses downloadable via iTunes U.

Course materials (lectures, textbooks, exams, study guides, reference materials, etc.) would be optimized for the (rumored) Apple iTablet/e-reader.  Assuming that the Apple e-reader is an interactive device capable of web graphics, text, animations, movies, links, etc., these new courses would stand to be far more compelling than their classroom ancestors. They would also be much more engaging than the current podcast model.

An iTunes U disruption package

Here, then, is a hypothetical iTunes U disruption package, conceivably purchased from the iTunes U store for use on Apple’s “iTablet” (as speculated).

1. Digital textbooks (designed as multimedia/interactive books)
2. Digital lectures(designed as multimedia/interactive presentations)
3. Digital course materials (movies, music, art, etc.) outboard of online textbooks or lectures
4. Online student discussions, group exercises, team collaboration and uploads
5. Sign-ups, downloaded materials, fees and tuition paid via the iTunes U store.

As a student, you’d visit iTunes U, chose your course or courses, pay the fees, and download everything to your portable device. No lines. No waiting. No “semesters.” Order a logo sweatshirt, and you’re good to go. This may cost less, deliver more learning, and be far more convenient than attending a traditional university.

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