Brands Create Customers

Earlier this year, in a post called Interaction design: the new key to brands, I laid out a method of brand building predicated on carefully structured customer interfaces and interactions, across a broad arc of customer experience. A new site, the Usability Body of Knowledge, promises to be a useful resource to brand builders creating value through customer interfaces and interactions.

The four key brand interfaces:

As I noted in my earlier post, the key interfaces for brands are:

1. Between company and customer
2. Between product and customer
3. Between customer and customer
4. Between the customer today, and what he or she wishes to become tomorrow.

And as I then added:

Interaction designers will be asked to help companies craft effective digital platforms to build their brands across the four brand interfaces noted above. This is no small challenge. These digital platforms will be expected to drive the interactions that grow the customer, grow the brand, and grow the business.

The task is complex, too. Not only are different types of interfaces involved at the digital level, there are also different customer contexts at each interface, multiple technologies at play, and many forms of brand interaction. Brand vision, roadmaps and deliverables are central to the mix.

How does “usability” apply to brands?

We don’t usually think of “usability” as an element of brands, but think it has an important brand context. I see brands as platforms and programs that make culture (or “life”) more usable for customers. Brands that cling to the box or consist of shallow symbols and slogans rate low on the usability scale. Brands that raise customers to new levels rate much higher. In other words, brand usability takes root when brands are trans-product forces that open doors and empower customers to try new things and to plumb new shapes of self. Great brands flourish as usability tools.

Conventional brands often fail miserably at this task, which is why a fresh approach to brands holds such market-changing potential.

Hat tip to the invaluable Sensorytumble.

As brand builders, we do everything we can to create “timeless” brands. In the heat of this effort, though, it’s easy to forget that the first step to becoming a timeless brand is to make time for customers. To begin this process, a brand must recognize that its customers are not external “targets” to be aimed at. Customers are part of the brand essence, just as much as the company and its products.

Factor your customers into your brand

You make time for your customers when you include their interests in key decisions you make affecting company policies, innovation, product performance, quality and trust. The time you spend factoring your customers into your brand is time well spent. Your unique brand emerges when your customers are part of you—and vice versa. In this bond, there’s no room for competitors.

A case in point: modern watches

When it comes to making time for your customers, modern watches (some pun intended) are a case in point. I’ve come across an excellent example that I’ll detail below.

Brands function on customer time

Consider the above wristwatch. With four dials, it’s a work of engineering and watchmaking art. This particular model doesn’t need batteries, nor does it need to be wound. It’s solar powered, and can run for months once it’s been charged by light. It’s a precise chronograph, yet can also operate 300 ft. below the surface of the ocean. Similar models feature perpetual calendars, alarms, and multiple time zones. As power-packed timekeeping machines such watches work all sorts of miracles—once you figure out how to set them properly.

The set-up is the rub

Alas, the set-up is the rub. Brands function on customer time. A brand of powerful watches that doesn’t embrace customers as part of its brand essence is effectively taking its product off its customers’ wrists. From a brand perspective, the greatest feature of any watch is the customer who wears it. That person sells the brand ten times over by showing everyone what a great piece of gear it is.

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If you haven’t yet read the recent post by Peter Merholz called Designing for the Sandbox, you should do so. It proposes a flexible structure for designing customer experiences, where a fair amount of leeway is given to customers themselves to shape their own meanings.

Peter writes:

People who design experiences often believe that in order to succeed they must exert complete control. And while in extremely rare instances they might be afforded the opportunity to dictate an entire environment (say, in a casino, or a theme park), when designing for the real world, for the ebb and flow of actual lives, such control is impossible.

Customer experience is connections, not control

Peter suggests that the effective richness of an experience lies in the connections it provides, not in the control it exerts:

In fact, the best thing a designer can do is dictate as little as possible. Because the point isn’t to control, it’s to connect–to weave your offering into the complexity of people’s life experiences, to allow them to figure out how to make sense of your offering within their world.

To this I’d say, “Yes, indeed.” From a brand perspective, your brand fabric is part brand, part customer and part context. It’s a living thing, too, always in the process of growing itself. Dictating your brand cannot grow your brand.

The role of the “sandbox”

The approach Peter calls “designing for the sandbox” can be part of the answer:

… I’ve been calling this “designing for the sandbox.” This acknowledges a space for content, tools, and people to interact and create their own meaningful experience. This is not a monolithic creation, that dictates how the content, tools, and people best interact. …

The sandbox and the “brand as means”

The sandbox approach meshes with what I’ve been propounding as “the brand as means,” where the brand rises from a dictated message mode to become an enabling platform for customers. The brand enables customer connections, and many levels of customer interaction. (See: Interaction design: the new key to brands.)

What’s in the brand sandbox?

I see the brand sandbox as a shared, collaborative space where the brand and customers work and play together to shape their respective futures. (Both parties benefit.) The main tools are those that facilitate interaction, initiative and innovation. Although we call it a “sandbox,” it’s an infinite kind of sandbox, with horizons for big thoughts and big actions. (For brands, every sandbox is a Sahara.)

So, to answer the question, “What’s in the brand sandbox?” I’d say the best short answer is: “a special kind of freedom.” Customers can use this freedom to grow and transform themselves, and in the process, to grow the brand. This, of course, all comes back to the brand agenda.

Blogs are a foot in the sandbox

When a company starts an interactive blog (or blogs) with customers and stakeholders, it is putting its foot in the sandbox, so to speak. As shared connections and interactions, such blogs can become productive forms of customer experience.

There’s also a good amount of “brand sandbox” in the processes I’ve described called designing customers, creating customers, and growing customers from the ground up.

And what’s in your brand sandbox?

Ironically, what makes your brand stand head and shoulders above the rest may be the sandbox you provide beneath your customers’ feet. The brand wars are also sandbox wars.

Photo: .michael.newman. — Flickr

Everywhere around us, the expanding digital universe is rapidly transforming the world of brands, with new digital tools pushing aside yesterday’s symbols, slogans and “timeless” icons. In place of conventional top-down “branding” campaigns we’re seeing breakthrough brand innovation from below, with small companies, not big corporations, reinventing brands and re-defining brand building itself. They’re growing brands as organic, 1:1 collaborations in context, and in value, across multiple customer fronts.

Digital brand leverage: the shape of brands to come

It appears likely that the future of brands will be driven by digital brand leverage—in the form of direct links between value creators (or content creators) and customers, bypassing intermediate brand structures, and middlemen. What makes this possible are two recent developments: 1) digital technologies that facilitate close interaction between companies and their customers; and 2) collaborative brand practices that unify companies and customers through a shared vision and mission.

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As brand builders, we’re sometimes tempted to believe that our brands are linear, that they’re straight-line beams of context and meaning that we project upon the world, with the power to bind customers to them. In this view, customers themselves become a linear function of the brand, perfectly aligned and predictable. They’re a blank slate that we illuminate, and guide.

A dialectic of meaning that’s gloriously non-linear

Of course, that’s not the real world at all. In the real world brands are a dialectic of meaning that’s gloriously non-linear. They derive much of their energy, imagination and innovation from customers, in ways that are perfectly unpredictable. You may plot your brand roadmap as a row of brightly colored cones, but non-linear customers will carve their own routes over, around and through them, creating new brand realities (and value) as they go.

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As I discussed in a previous post, companies are increasingly turning to digital brand platforms, programs and applications to augment brand interactions and brand experience, and to deliver new forms of customer value. In this post I want to focus on a new type of digital brand application which I call (in my best generic English) personal brand applications.

What are personal brand applications?

Personal brand applications are software applications that deliver unique brand value to customers in ways that are personal, portable and persistent. Their intent is to form a brand partnership with the customer, with a depth of interaction far beyond conventional channels of brand communication. They become the customer’s virtual sidekick, mentor, confidant and guide. They watch the customer’s back, they go where the customer goes, and they are “always on.”

As a complement to other brand programs, personal brand applications are a new way for brands to connect with customers 24/7. They are 1:1, direct and immediate. They have the potential to forge deep brand connections that can transcend the influence of advertising, packaging, “branding” and similar old-school brand modalities.

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At Dcamp in Palo Alto last Saturday I made it a point to see Sarah Allen’s presentation called “Cinematic User Experience.” It featured slick UX technology from Laszlo (blog) that enables a user’s web experience to approximate the unitary experience of seeing a movie. When a website is created using Laszlo technology, everything unfolds in front of you in the context of a continuous dialogue or story. Instead of discontinuously jumping from web page to web page, you use tabs to unfold additional views that quickly appear in the context of your present web space. You become, in essence, the director of your own web experience. Very interesting approach. Brand builders should check it out.

Brands and the cinematic experience

Sarah’s presentation got me thinking about “brands and the cinematic experience.” As soon as she finished, I grabbed a Peets coffee from the food table, stepped outside to the cool shady courtyard (the Bay Area is unconference Nirvana) and scribbled 20 minutes of notes and diagrams. I usually link “cinematic” to the phenomenon called “persistence of vision,” that peculiarity of the human eye (or brain) that enables us to watch 24 discrete frames per second and translate them into continuous motion, instead of chaos. A movie becomes our own “fiction” of those 24fps.

In a brand experience, we interleave frames from the brand with frames from our own lives, effectively editing our personal “demo reel” with cuts of brand context, images, brand fx, grainy b/w clips, or whatever the brand brings to the table.

Brands and “persistence of context”

Brands, of course are very different from motion pictures, but they do share some “persistence” qualities. Brands operate in a zone that I would call “the persistence of context.” Products come and go like individual frames of a movie, but a brand provides a “persistence of context” that keeps customers in touch with the core narrative (value dialog) that’s taking place. This is largely because brands are created in the context of the customer, not that of the product, or the company.

The brand narrative is all about the customer

Yes, the brand narrative (all those frames of context) is about the customer. The brand narrative is a brand interaction in which the brand frees the customer to experience new facets of life. (If the brand is any good, it should have the power of an awakening, and a revelation.) Through the brand, the product tells a special customer story. Or, more generally, brands plot a customer course, and help the customer shape his or her own unique narrative. The brand narrative is never a top-down “telling.” It’s a collaborative process of discovery.

“Cinematic” or “landscape”

Question: Is “cinematic” the right metaphor for brands? Maybe not. Brands might be more “landscape” than they are “cinematic.” The cinema is a passive theater. Landscapes invite exploration. Brands have a lot in common with vast spatial expressions: topographies, maps, horizons, worlds. What’s clear to me is that mankind was not made for piddly caves. (Or silos.) We crave the wide open spaces.

And the point of brands is to create new customer spaces.

Breaking through the prescribed heavens

See that guy in the banner at the top of the page? He’s breaking through the veil of the “prescribed” heavens to gaze into a wondrous vault of the real universe. What he sees is only the first layer. Beyond that glorious vault there is another vault, and then another. Brands are the rips in the firmament that enable us break free from the dictated world into a world of discovery. When you “create a customer” with your brand, you enable him or her to break through an imposed veil to grasp a larger truth and a larger reality. Brands are the dynamic adventure that rips through the static here-and-now.

Brands as metaphor

Brands are the metaphors of products, and of customers, and of customers “customizing” products. I’ll say more about this in another post.

Brands: portrait view, or landscape view?

After thinking about cinematic and landscape views a bit, it dawned on me that we could go a step further and analyze brands as to the type of “page view” they represent: portrait view, or landscape view. Traditional brands are hierarchy-driven, much like the standard “portrait view” page, a hierarchy of top to bottom. They put the brand at the top and their customers on the bottom. Customers become brand derivative, within a brand silo. The traditional brand agenda is to lock them into the page.

The landscape view of value-based brands

In contrast, value-based brands are “landscape view” because brand innovation and customer opportunity need the wide open spaces of a landscape, the opposite of the restrictive silo. Landscape brands are full of new vistas, fresh horizons and soaring vaults of heavens, where brands and customers can collaborate to create new value. They’re superior to portrait view/silo brands because customers themselves are creatures of landscape mode. They want their brands to open out, so they can leverage the brand experience to grow themselves.

Semi-bottom line

I will have to get back to these thoughts at a later date. There’s more here than I can sort through at the moment. I would say, though, that if you’re in the process of designing and developing brands, get the biggest cinema display that your business can afford. You might as well envision your brand through the widest customer eyes—across the widest customer spaces.

Photo: mikefats — Flickr

Note: updated August 11, 2007

Added photo and some new material, links and new heads.

Note to self: Instead of updating an old post, write a new one. Well, a new one on this subject is now in the queue.

Most people don’t realize it, but brands are code. At the core level, brands have much more in common with software development than they do with logos and product identities. In fact, brands should be viewed as an extension of the product development process rather than as a separate, multi-media “add-on” just before launch.

This is because brands are much more than symbols, slogans and promises. Brands are programs to get things done. And as programs, they’re built of . . . code.

In this snapshot, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why brands are code, beginning at the outside and working in.

Unlocking brand code

First, some interesting similarities:

• Brands have architectures.

• They have roadmaps.

• They have platforms

• They have programs.

• They have interfaces.

• Brands are executables.

• They have developers, and end-users.

• And most importantly, they have brand API’s.

Brands have a language, too. In fact, they are written in only one language. It is called CUSTOMER. It is a language that is infinitely interoperable.

What brand builders code

At a basic level, they code the customer’s needs into the product. In this process, they also code the whole customer into the company. This enables customer DNA to flow through a company, through its employees, operations and innovations. At a more advanced level, brand builders code new freedoms into the customer through the brand, enabling customers to be more, and to do more. In effect, they create a branded customer platform that advances the customer beyond what products alone can provide.

Brands as executables

Brands are not static images or frozen icons. Brands are action-oriented. They get things done. In other words, brands are executables. Every brand is a “.exe.” When you execute on brand, you raise the customer to the next level. Brands do this through value transforms embedded in the code.

How brand code works

Simply stated, brands are code for creating value. Their architectures, platforms, programs and interfaces transform the value inherent in the product into value realized by the customer. (This is no easy task.) At their best, brands do this in such a satisfyingly brilliant way that the customer leaves his or her old customer shell behind, and embraces the new brand going forward. When a great brand connects, there’s no turning back.

How exactly does a brand do this? First, brand building begins at the core of a company. Brands are not add-ons after the fact. Brands are a process of architecting customer progress into the product. Yep, the operative word is “progress.” The goal of a brand is to advance customers to progressively higher levels, so in future months and years they will be demanding all those cool innovations you have up your sleeve. Thus, brands are forward-focused. They are part and parcel of your innovation strategy.

Unzip your brand

So, if brands are code, how do brand builders create and deploy this code? You can find some initial guidelines in Unzip Your Brand.

Companies are often a bit unsettled when I tell them that brands are mostly interfaces.

They prefer to think along traditional lines, with brands as a promise, a persona, identity or symbol, or even a company’s reputation.

No, I tell them, brands may possess all of those elements, but basically brands are interfaces. In fact, they’re interfaces along three distinct fronts:

1. Company and customer
2. Customer and customer
3. Customer and customer’s future

In the big picture of things, brands help people interoperate with the universe. That is the Big Interface, and that’s where great brands shine. Why would your brand aspire to anything less?

A closer look at three brand interfaces

But for now, let’s look at these three, workaday brand interfaces.

Company and customer: your brand is the interface that helps you put more customer in your company. That pays dividends up and down the line. Instead of chasing customers, you join them.

Customer and customer: your brand is the interface that brings your customers together, creating that critical mass of you-in-them that rushes forward on customer initiative and imagination. Customers can help build your brand, if you let them.

Customer and customer’s future: this is the most important brand interface of all. This is where you create and grow your customers, connecting your customer with his or her potential. The customer you grow today will be the customer that desires your products of tomorrow, when he or she is further removed from commodity-land. If your interface is merely an ad campaign, or inventory dressed as a store, chances are your customers won’t go far.

And what about Brand APIs?

A Brand API is an application program interface that enables your brand to connect with customers, to involve them in their future and yours, and to deliver to them the freedoms they need to grow. It’s a set of tools, links and platforms that invite customers to join with your brand to grow.

Brands as applications

In days gone by, brand programs were largely considered to be communication programs. That led to legions of look-alike, do-nothing brands that were locked in their labels. In 2006 and beyond, with competition from every quarter, a brand has to function as an application program that helps customers get where they want to go. The brand does so within a company’s overall Brand Operating System (Brand OS). (See our New Brand Glossary for more details.) The Brand OS consists of Brand Platforms, and these contain the many brand programs that I call Brand Applications. The Brand API is the multi-function portal that opens all these applications to customer interaction.

The key benefit of a Brand API is that it enables access, teamwork, collaboration. It enables 360-degree initiative. It’s the hand you hold out to customers as you yell, “Grab on!”

If customers like where you’re going, they’ll fasten their grip.

For a more detailed discussion, see:  Interaction design: the new key to brands

Note: updated August 13, 2007