Brands Create Customers

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 their core level, brands have much more in common with software development than they do with logos and product identities. Think of brands as a form of software. In fact, brands should be viewed as an extension of the product development process itself, rather than as a separate, multi-media “add-on” just before product launch.

This is because brands are much more than symbols, slogans and promises. Brands are programs to create customers. 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 between brands and software:

• Both have architectures.

• They have roadmaps.

• They have platforms

• They have programs.

• They have interfaces.

• Brands and software are both executables.

• They have developers, and end-users.

• And most importantly, they have innovation rich 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, brand builders code customer solutions into the product. In this interactive process, they also code the whole customer back 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 rise above commodities and other brands. In effect, they create a branded customer platform that advances the customer beyond what products alone can provide.

Brands as executables

Of course, brands are not static images or frozen icons. Brands are action-oriented. They work for customers, and they get things done. In other words, brands are executables. Every brand is a “.exe.” When you execute on brand, you deliver value that customers can use. Strategically, your brand should be advancing customers beyond the reach of competitors.

How brand code works

Simply stated, brands are code for creating value. Their architectures, platforms, programs and interfaces transform latent product value into value realized by the customer. (This is no easy task.) At their best, brands do this in such satisfyingly brilliant ways 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 roadmap. Yep, the operative word is “progress.” The goal of a brand is to advance customers to progressively proactive levels, so in future months and years they will be demanding all those cool innovations you have up your sleeve. Thus, your brand strategy is part and parcel of your innovation strategy.

Cultivate brand hacks

Agile brands, like agile code, call for iterative development. This is one reason why your brand should cultivate brand hacks as part of its deployment strategy.

Photo: amysphere — Flickr

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