Brands Create Customers

I use multicolored sticky notes when mapping out a customer brand journey, but even when a layout is complete, and quite useful, it’s still a static 2D display. Here’s a clever way to animate (or imagine) a customer path. This is how I see a brand journey come to life in my mind’s eye, with the customer moving from Point A to Points B, C, D and beyond.

parkour motion reel on Vimeo.

Also nice to see our old friend the flip book get a new lease on life. (If you’re a brand, your mission is to help customers escape the flip books where life [and other brands] have them trapped.)

This stop-motion movie was by Serene Teh, a design student in Singapore.

If expectations come to pass, 2010 may indeed go down as “the year of the tablet,” with Apple’s (rumored) new tablet and similar devices re-defining—and re-powering—the printed page. Digital tablets stand to reinvent the magazine, too. Digital magazines will be deeper and richer than their paper predecessors, and they can be downloaded in seconds. One of these new magazine types will be the brand magazine, a creative communication between you and your customers. Where your website is informational, your brand magazine will be interesting.

What’s in a brand magazine?

Think of your brand magazine as the diary, notebook and map of your shared brand journey with customers. An interesting brand (i.e., a truth-seeking brand) will attract the truth-seeking writers and designers to make a tablet-enabled brand magazine possible. There’s no room here for PR fluff, recycled ads or sales pitches. That’s what your block-headed competitors do, and that’s also why 99% of brands will be constitutionally incapable of producing brand magazines of their own. They aren’t interesting. You are.

You and your customers, interacting with the world

Your brand magazine details how you and your customers interact with the world in a creative dialectic. The tablet concept below shows how a new interactive tablet format might work. The deep insights behind your brand can flow freely to customers, be mediated by customer experience, and return all the richer. In the tablet universe articles become engagements, which become explorations, which become epiphanies, large and small. Brand epiphanies are what we’re after.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

The above concept was developed by Bonnier R&D in conjunction with BERG. More information on the concept here.

You’ll soon be hearing more about Taiwanese handset maker HTC. The company is making the leap from white label manufacturer to a brand in its own right. Marketing Week has the story.

For years HTC was best known as the maker of Windows Mobile handsets re-branded by carriers. Unfortunately, Windows Mobile has fallen far behind the iPhone and Google’s Android in mobile software innovation. For its own brand, HTC’s future probably lies more with Android as things look now. HTC’s new Android phones could equal (or better) the new Motorola Droid, assuming that HTC can use the latest version of Android that Google offers. (See this review.)

From enabling partners to enabling customers

HTC’s transition from white label manufacturer to a fully-fledged brand is a transition to a new level of business. In HTC’s case, it’s a transition from enabling mobile partners to one of enabling mobile customers directly. You can see this transition taking shape in HTC’s presentations, and in their advertising.

I may use the word “transition” to describe this change, but brand-wise, it is really a leap. Customers want that leap, too. They want the leap in value that brands can deliver.

HTC’s brand challenge

HTC’s brand challenge is the two-part challenge faced by all white label handset makers. First, HTC has historically been perceived as a maker of feature phones, where product features told the story. However, brands are about customer stories, not features. Specs count, but customers multiply.

Second, the handset itself is only one-third of the mobile phone experience. The handset is tied to the experience provided by the carrier, and by the brand of operating system. As its own brand, HTC must find a way to stand taller than the carrier brand and the brand of operating system in the eyes of customers. It cannot be “a Verizon phone,” nor can it be “a Windows Mobile phone” or “an Android phone.” It must command a context that is purely and uniquely HTC, a context that works wonders for customers.

A cultural transition leap

As a brand, a new HTC will emerge from the old. The transition leap from a manufacturing culture to a brand-enabling customer culture is not easy. Old barriers must fall; new freedoms must rise. From the looks of things, HTC has already made progress along this path. The real brand connection begins when the company and its customers are on the same page, writing it together. HTC’s task is to find that page, and begin a new book.

From “handset maker” to “computer maker”

The “handset” market died in 2007 when Apple redefined the mobile world with the iPhone. The iPhone is not a “handset.” It’s an amazingly powerful computer that fits in the hand—and makes phone calls. It’s the most user-friendly computer ever designed, and now boasts 100,000 apps. For HTC to succeed as a brand, its products cannot be “handsets.” They must be computers. Indeed, they must be better computers (for the customer) than the iPhone. To reach this brand level HTC cannot simply “think outside the handset.” As a brand, HTC must live outside the handset, in a new customer context.

From product to platform

As HTC builds out its brand, the nature of its products will change. They will cease being “products” per se and will grow into platforms for the HTC brand. Building on these platforms, HTC can deliver multiple layers of value direct to customers.

HTC’s brand strategy options

In general, HTC will need to sidestep the carriers, sidestep Android and Windows Mobile, and create its own customers. To do this, HTC must change the brand game. And it must create a new kind of customer. Trying to be “the best Android phone”  or “the best Windows Mobile phone” will limit HTC’s brand potential.

Mobile brands are now platforms for customer-driven applications. The challenge is not “How many features can we offer?”  The challenge is how to enable 110% of the customer. Brands need that extra 10%. Brands are agents of discovery; they pull customers to richer worlds. A strategy canvas can help.

Brand deliverables

HTC’s Sense UI is a strong step towards personalizing the mobile phone experience. It certainly demonstrates HTC’s ability to work with the underlying OS to extend the user experience within an HTC brand vision. At a deeper brand level, HTC will need to offer highly engaging apps exclusive to HTC customers. As a brand, HTC is in the app business. The apps will build the brand in ways that hardware cannot. (For more on HTC Sense, see this highly informative interview (video).

Toward a new context of customer

As a brand, it’s entirely within HTC’s power to create a new context of mobile customer. In this context, what the phone does is less important than what it enables customers to do, and to be. As a handset maker, HTC was shipping devices. As a brand, it will be shipping culture.

Image: HTC Hero via User Honza — Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to innovations in mobile software we can now use our smartphone camera as a lens to discover new layers of context in the scene before us, ideally a relevant, personalized context that’s not visible on the surface. Two examples of this emerging technology are Wikitude and Layar.

Brand layers: shapes and shades of meaning

Since this is a blog about brands, I look at this new technology as a way to create brand layers, planes of brand sensibility (taste + intelligence + awareness) that can enhance situational user experience. Such layers can turn the smartphone into a lens that reveals new perspectives, new depth, new shapes and shades of meaning. The agent of these goodies can be a brand—if it has the smarts to be co-creating an interesting brand journey with its customers.

A form of Personal Brand Application

I’d consider the brand layer a form of Personal Brand Application. It may be a web-based mashup of sorts, but what counts is the intelligence and passion that drive it. These are the key ingredients to make it relevant to the user.

Travel apps are a natural for brand layers, but you don’t have to be in the travel business to offer such a layer. Every brand is in the customer business. Find a unique way to bind customers to you in a creative context that fills a need. Think how Absolut made itself into a “brand of art.”

Magazines as brand layers?

It may be that magazines and other forms of declining print media renew themselves as brand layers, creating new value on digital devices by adding contextual layers to otherwise “flat” environments.

Not billboards and a sales pitch

Given where brands are today, I’d say that maybe the top five percent of brands could develop effective brand layers on smartphones.  Brand layers are culture. They’re not sales, marketing, PR, “image,” or some kind of compressed “brand theater.” The last thing you want from a brand layer is cheesy billboards and a sales pitch cluttering a three-inch screen.

“Augmented reality” is in its infancy

This new technology of “augmented reality” on smartphones is in its infancy. We have no way of knowing if these first steps will be the next steps.

The measure of success

The best brand layers will sync the cultural intelligence of the brand with the cultural needs of the user. It’d be nice to download a layer when exploring Beacon Hill—or ambling through Père Lachaise. A good layer means that a particular brand and I are on the same page, writing it together.

Photo:  Wikitude

Every brand is a journey. Through the brand, customers can discover new aspects of themselves, new strengths, new abilities, new ways of being and doing. The quality of that journey—how enlightening, how enriching, how transforming—is a function of the brand vision, and the brand imagination behind it. A superficial brand might take customers as far as the cash register. A deeply engaging brand takes customers to a whole new world.

Brand builders create the brand journey

It’s the job of brand builders to plot the customer journey that their brand provides. What truths can the brand journey reveal? What frontiers does the journey explore? What depths does it plumb? What’s the spirit? The tone? The texture? All these questions, and many more, dance across the brand builder’s palette.

The brand journey is a creative act: for the brand, and for customers.

Brand journeys are joint ventures

Brand journeys are joint ventures where brands and customers interact to advance one another. They’re dialogs tuned to new experience and to emergent truths. As they unfold they connect customers to themselves, and to one another, sometimes through the brand, and sometimes beyond it. Interesting brand journeys ask questions. Absorbing journeys take risks. Anything is possible.

Develop a “journey reel” for your brand

Thanks to recent advances digital imaging, a brand can now visually represent the kind of unique journey it offers. This takes the form of the “journey reel,” a metaphoric and interpretive expression of the brand journey using the powers of motion video, animation and digital imagery. The journey reel lays out the kinds of adventures and experiences (and mysteries) that await. The journey reel itself is part of that experience.

Not a sales pitch

A journey reel is not a promo or a sales pitch. It’s neither selling nor telling. It’s the expression of a brand’s self awareness, its culture, drive and direction, and where it might take customers. It’s the brand identity set in motion.

Visual elements of a journey reel

What might a journey reel look like? There are some themes and visual cues in this short animation demo reel by Alphonse Swinehart. I stumbled across this by accident, and it is not about brands per se, and certainly not intended as a journey reel. But its creativity is provocative. (A really brazen brand might do a flip book, but that’s another story.)

Journey reels promise to be a new art form, compact and compelling. As I come across expressive elements that might work in a journey reel context, I’ll post them here.

A series of reels rather than one

A journey reel must start somewhere, but a brand that’s going places with its customers will not let the journey reel stop. It will conceive its journey reels as a series, or as sets, building one upon the other.

The journey reel is personal, portable and persistent

I’d imagine that the best channels for journey reels would be those most intimate and personal to customers. That means an iPhone, iTouch, PDA or something similar, downloaded from the Net. A journey reel is made to accompany the customer: portable, personal and persistent. And it’s made to be shared.

Brand journeys mixed and remixed

Of course, customers can record their journeys, too. Brand journeys become customer journeys. All can be playing on digital devices around the world, shared, mixed and remixed in a matter of minutes. When your brand connects, brand journeys mingle.

Map image: Martin Waldseemuller