When a brand becomes a platform its virtues radiate in a hundred directions. They spark more innovations, often in distant quarters, then fold back to raise the platform even higher.
It’s interesting amazing to watch the iPhone make mobile the complex processes that once required a computer and an office.
Here’s a demo of Autodesk’s SketchBook Mobile. It will set you back a hefty $2.99 at the App Store.
Jason Kottke has a nice overview of the disruptive potential of smartphones, using the iPhone as an example. He compares the current state of smartphone development to the early stages of the Internet. If correct, that comparison would leave a lot of headroom for smartphone disruption. Even if you believe that smartphones occupy a totally different market space, you may still be in the crosshairs.
Somewhere, a few coders may be planning to replace your brand with an app.
Apple’s iPhone has raised the bar for mobile brands in many ways, but perhaps Apple’s biggest iPhone brand advance is its ecosystem of developers to keep new mobile apps coming at a furious rate. To compete with the iPhone you now have to have your own app store and a powerful developer ecosystem crafting waves of irresistible apps. That’s a fairly high hurdle. Palm, Nokia, Research in Motion (BlackBerry) and Google (Android) are all chasing Apple in the brand ecosystem race.
I would argue that what is happening in mobile brands today presages what will happen to brands in general as mobile apps become the currency of culture. Going forward, the true measure of a brand will be how it transitions from the showcase to the commons, as brands use mobile platforms to enrich and extend social networks. As I’ve noted previously, brands will be recast as applications, as unique ways for customers to get things done. Brand creativity, imagination, moral sense and powers of expression will be embedded in the apps, not imprisoned in a package or an ad. The more these apps surge forth from the ecosystem, the more universal the brand.
In the mobile universe, your brand ecosystem now makes up a large part of your identity. Customers know you, experience you, and view you through your ecosystem. It tells the world how alive you are, and where you’re going. You can’t really be a “smartphone” without one.
Palm still faces major brand ecosystem challenges for its new Palm Pre smartphone. It is paying the price in reduced sales. Eric Savitz at Barron’s reports on market research that says Pre sales will likely fall below estimates, raising questions about Palm’s ability to compete with Apple and RIM (BlackBerry). A key factor is Palm’s slow development of competitive apps for the Pre, and the slow roll-out of the Palm Pre Application Catalog. These are critical ecosystem issues.
The Palm Pre software development kit (SDK) was released to developers a month after the Pre was launched.
As the flood of iPhone apps demonstrates, your brand ecosystem helps you innovate, too, keeping your brand fresh. There’s something new every day.
For Palm, this is another critical issue, as noted by the Globe and Mail:
“[Lack of apps] is going to be a huge Achilles heal for Palm,” said Carmi Levy senior vice-president, strategic consulting with AR Communications. “What it’s done is compromised the company’s ability to capitalize on the bump that you usually get when you launch a new device. So there’s huge amount of publicity surrounding the launch and then a couple months later things settle down because you’re not getting headlines like you used to get. It’s during that critical phase that application availability drives attention.”
Apple, of course, has changed the brand game in mobile. Customers now expect handsets to be slick mini-computers, with the ease of use and applications of advanced computer technology. Handsets are now exemplars of innovation, not ham-fisted compromises. That places the mobile game clearly on Apple’s turf. It makes the brand ecosystem element all the more critical for Palm and other mobile players. To out-brand Apple you have to out-app Apple—somehow.
First gradually, and now suddenly, brands are migrating to the social sphere as methods of creating value. In this process they increasingly share concepts and processes with other innovation and design disciplines that are breaking new ground.
Sylvain Cottong has put together a nice overview of UX design, service design and design thinking and how they inter-relate. His presentation on SlideShare contains many classic diagrams from these fields, and some I hadn’t seen before. The presentation makes a good reference source for brand builders. At some point the best of these and other disciplines will be wrapped in a (meta) brand methodology, based (naturally) on the art of creating customers.
The ColaLife Aid Pod sure seems like a great example of “design thinking.” It’s a set of lightweight, form-fit containers designed to carry medicine inside Coca-Cola shipping cases, piggyback style, as the cases are transported from distributors to villages in Third World countries.
See the video.
Here’s the skinny from ColaLife:
ColaLife is a campaign to get Coca-Cola to open up its distribution channels in developing countries to save lives, especially children’s lives, by carrying much needed ’social products’ such as oral rehydration salts and high-dose vitamin A tablets. For the latest on the campaign, please visit the blog. ColaLife is an independent and purely voluntary movement backed by thousands of supporters on its Facebook Group. ColaLife is not an organisation.
With this very clever (and designerly) idea, ColaLife is extending the Coca-Cola brand. Brands are collaborations in context between companies and their communities. In this case, the ColaLife folks envision a context where the Coca-Cola transportation network can also function as a brand of health. Getting needed medicines to people is a major distribution problem in many Third World counties. Being able to piggyback medicine distribution on an available (and reliable) transportation network is a plus—and potentially a life-saver.
In many respects, the Coca-Cola brand is a brand of distribution. You can “like” Coke because you know you’ll always be able to find it. ColaLife presents Coca-Cola with an opportunity to leverage this key element of its brand.
In the near future you’ll be able to build your brand with an app. No, check that. In the near future your brand will be an app. It will re-define itself as a personal brand application on a smartphone or similar device, where it can deliver unique brand value to customers 24/7. Apple’s current iPhone ad campaign, “There’s an app for that,” provides a glimpse of this brand future.
In other words, there’s a new brand game in town. Can your brand set the agenda here?
As I’ve noted previously, we’re now entering the era of personal brand applications (PBA’s). Personal brand applications are software applications on portable digital devices that enable customers to do more, and to be more, through the brand. They represent the intersection of high technology and brands in the palms and pockets of people, everywhere, and the chance for brands to be closer than ever to customers.
Personal brand applications are important because they forge a new 1:1 brand/customer relationship. Through this relationship they have the potential to create new classes of customers from the ground up, in new market spaces. In this process they can undermine traditional brands built on ad campaigns, images, messaging and mass media saturation. Most importantly, personal brand applications free brands (and the brand team) to use the full fruits of their imagination—and to use the brand to lead.
As applications, PBA’s are immediate and direct. They deliver results customers can use, now, and they build core brand trust in the process. While traditional brand campaigns may work wonders in building awareness and shaping perceptions, they’re not engines of brand trust. Personal brand applications are. They can accelerate and energize brand trust, compressing what used to take years into shorter time frames.
Since I first wrote about the concept of personal brand applications two years ago, we’ve witnessed amazing advances in wireless technology, digital handsets, user interfaces, online services, and software systems and platforms that tie everything together. With Apple’s iPhone, App Store and iPhone developers leading the way, we’re now are seeing a first flush of innovative smartphone apps that foreshadow the personal brand applications to come.
In many ways a personal brand application is the ultimate brand relationship, where the brand operates as both a trusty sidekick and a trusted advisor, as close as a second skin. PBA’s do more than “connect” the brand with customers. They transform the brand into a proactive customer platform of choices, directions and actions, helping the customer at a personal level to accomplish objectives and deal with life’s challenges. The brand becomes a central means (and platform) for customer growth and development.
Because they operate on hand-held devices that are wireless, Internet enabled and “always on,” PBA’s are personal, portable and persistent–the critical three P’s for brands going forward. In many ways they’re the ultimate brand presence. Think of them as perpetual touchpoints where the brand plays an active role in the culture, context and creativity of an individual’s life, day in and day out.
For brand builders, the current media frenzy about Twitter can only mean one thing: either it’s the last stage of massive fad fever before Twitter implodes, like Oprah’s latest diet, or Twitter actually enables people to enrich their lives in new dimensions–in which case brands better pay attention.
My bet is that it’s more of the latter than the former. There are revolutionary brand platforms waiting to be be built on Twitter—but only if brands take a strategic approach to Twitter, one predicated on creating customers through innovation and value delivered. This means moving beyond the routine marketing and PR uses of Twitter that make up most brand uses at the moment.
Twitter is a form of networked communications that’s fast, direct and highly granular, with the power to link individuals and groups through their immediate experiences. As such, Twitter stands as an innovation challenge for brands, which have typically been built on non-collaborative broadcast models. To leverage Twitter’s potential we’ll need to create new structures of brand interaction, new forms of brand value, new brand relationships and new Twitterized brand platforms. All this will require new brand strategies to incorporate Twitter’s unique strengths.
For brands, the last thing we want to do is to pour old wine into the new Twitter bottle. That would cripple its potential. Approaching Twitter as just another marketing, advertising and PR outlet, as a linear descendant of direct mail, email and blogs, is poor brand strategy— as we’ll discuss below.
Twitter is important because it can change the context of brands, from one-sided inducement and persuasion (in the classic model) to a two-way street of shared experience, shared values and shared discovery. In the big picture of things, brands are collaborations in context. Twitter enables brands to create more collaboration, and more context.
Structurally, Twitter has the potential to turn brands inside out, transforming brands from symbols and icons to a seedbed of customer innovation, where what customers co-create with the brand returns more value than the purchase price. In this process, Twitter can grow customer value in a non-linear dance, which is much more agile and adaptive than regimented brand campaigns from the top.
To date, most brands have used Twitter for standard marketing, sales, promotion and publicity purposes. For the most part, this really has been putting old wine in new bottles.
Twitter’s “celebrity mode” certainly won’t last long. Nielsen reports high rates of Twitter defection after initial celeb-fueled excitement. Twitter’s value lies deeper than the glitterati.
For an overview of standard marketing and PR uses of Twitter, see two Mashable posts here and here.
A while back I set forth a three-phase history of brands, as an evolution from mark, to media, to means. I noted that the end of the “media” era was at hand, and that the days of mass market advertising and mass market brands, where brands were little more than stylized sales stimulants, were drawing to a close.
The current recession may have accelerated this process.
David Armano has some great diagrams and analysis of how the recession is upsetting traditional advertising and marketing models. This sea change is also impacting the traditional concept of marketing-driven brands, where brands were often developed to manipulate customer behavior in a credit-fueled economy. That era is also fading into the past.
In my view, the current recession leaves brands in a perfect position to supersede the sales culture of marketing with a value culture of innovation and personal relationships. This is brand culture instead of sales culture. Instead of being part of a persuasion package, driven by advertising, brands can become a means of personal growth and expression, with brand platforms creatively designed to transform the personal growth of customers into value added back to the brand. A creative culture of brands is a far more productive environment than the often cynical and exploitative selling culture of advertising.
And, as I said previously, everybody wants a brand experience. Nobody wants a marketing experience.
All this means we have to re-think brands, of course–which is the very purpose of this blog. Going forward, brands are re-conceived as a shared context of value between a company and its customers. Their purpose isn’t to sell, but to unlock customer growth, innovation and opportunity. These deliverables are then networked back to the brand, raising its value and expanding its innovation horizons.
What makes this possible is the advent of always-on digital technology. Think of the iPhone, and its successors. Thanks to digital technology, brands can take the form of “applications,” interactive enablers that are personal, portable and persistent. Instead of being creations of mass-market media, brands become enablers, as a second skin.
The current recession may also accelerate the end of the “consumer” era. That “era” was invented to justify a relentless sales culture based on ever-expanding credit. Thinking of fellow citizens as “consumers” treats them as little more than sheep with credit, and now the credit is gone. A “consumer” mindset also depersonalizes company innovation, lowering standards and making breakthrough innovation increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
Creating customers, on the other hand, is the springboard of innovation, and of business strategy. And that’s where brands come in.
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