Brands Create Customers

When a brand introduces itself, every customer should rightfully ask: “What can I learn from this brand?”

The answer should be, “A lot.”

Strong brands are leveraged sources of learning

Strong brands are leveraged sources of learning. They’re not pedants, of course. They’re bottled fire, beams of light and life that spark awakenings and foment revelations. They have something to say, and they aren’t shy about saying it. That’s why they’re brands, and not labels.

Brands have the wisdom to bring products to life

Brands have the wisdom to bring products to life. A brand in this mode is more than a stylized sales stimulant, or a pre-packaged “experience.”  For starters, it’s interesting. (That alone sets it apart.) It has a history of deeds (exploits, scars, triumphs) instead of a puffed-out bogus “narrative.” It asks the questions that other brands can’t.

Imparting brandly wisdom

As the brand engages and interacts with customers it imparts its brandly wisdom. This is the combined insight and intelligence of its makers, every iota of value they fused to the product and the brand to move customers forward.

Brandly wisdom is the sensuous set of smarts that creates customers—and helps customers re-create themselves. You see it in the details—and in the vision.

Expect tectonic truths that blink

Brands don’t “teach” as much as they lead by example, forging new dialectics with you and me. As a customer, expect tectonic truths that blink. Spiritual leavenings. Flashes of far horizons. Worlds de-packaged, unwrapped, laid bare for you to clothe.

Brand experience is shared wisdom

Brand experience is shared wisdom. It leaves the customer—and the brand—wiser.

Photo: amarola — Flickr

Honda (a very strong brand) provides an excellent example of one of my favorite brand maxims: Strong brands lead the customer; weak brands chase the dollar.

Honda’s brand leadership

Honda’s brand leadership is the subject of a recent New York Times article, Honda stays true to efficient driving.

During the glory days of big pickups and sport utility vehicles, one automaker steadfastly refused to join the party.

Despite the huge profits that its competitors were minting by making larger vehicles, Honda Motor never veered from its mission of building fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly cars like its Accord sedan.

“I remember being at the Tokyo Motor Show in the mid-1990s and talking about the environment,” said Ben Knight, head of engineering at Honda’s North American division. “The reaction was there’s no return on that.”

But in today’s fuel-conscious automotive market, Honda is reaping the rewards for its commitment.

No major automaker in America is doing better than Honda, whose sales are up 3 percent for the first seven months of this year in a market that has fallen 11 percent. …

Strong brands have a vision of how the world is evolving, and what customers need (and will need) to keep pace. And strong brands lead by example.

Behind every brand is a philosophy of value

We can also observe that behind every brand is a philosophy of value. This may be implicit, or highly articulated, or simply latent, in need of elucidation. But it’s there.

“Honda is a philosophy-driven company,” said Tetsuo Iwamura, president of Honda North America. “Even when the large S.U.V.’s and trucks were big sellers, they did not fit with our philosophy.”

At its heart, a brand philosophy is a customer philosophy. The brand is the enabler.

The value of brand leadership

Brand leadership is the ability of a brand to lead customers to a qualitatively better life. It means that a brand aims to do what’s right for customers. Over time, brand leadership builds brand trust—a critical foundation for market leadership.

Brand leadership and brand vision

A key element of brand leadership is brand vision: the ability to see your company’s future through your customer’s eyes. This sets in motion a long-term strategy for the brand—case in point: Honda.

Brand leadership and brand identity

A brand that leads builds its identity through its actions, as Honda has done, and is doing. The result is an enduring identity that can itself become a customer platform for wider social and environmental initiatives. When brand context becomes social context, the identity has arrived.

Photo: E — Flickr

If you want to change the game in a market, one of the best ways is to use your brand to change the customer. Your brand can raise the customer to a whole new level, far above the status quo, and far beyond the reach of competing technologies or practices.

Take a look at what’s happening this summer at the Google Teacher Academy.

Going to school will mean “going to Google”

Google is on its way to becoming a dominant brand of education. As we’ve said previously, in the near future a student may “attend” Harvard or Yale or Michigan State, but that student will likely spend most of their time “in” various Google applications.

Going to school will mean “going to Google.”

When you are the “enabler,” your brand has arrived

Another way of looking at Google’s strategy is to consider how Google’s sets of online applications are becoming a standard “enabler” of learning. Being an “enabler” is the highest form of brand. It means that the value that you deliver is precisely what your customers need to get ahead.

General Motors has announced that it is now “reviewing” the future of its super-sized Hummer SUV brand. A 60% plunge in sales in May focused GM’s attention on the brand, which had been slipping in recent years as gasoline prices soared and social criticism of the brand became more pointed.

GM’s options

According to industry analysts, GM’s primary options are to downsize Hummer vehicles to achieve better fuel economy, introduce some sort of hybrid or alternative-fuel power plant, or sell the brand outright. The downsizing process had already begun with the Hummer H2 and H3 models. Hummer concept cars are even smaller. If GM closes its two Hummer plants in the US, the only remaining Hummer production facilities would be in South Africa and Russia. That would leave a marginal presence.

Holes in the Hummer brand strategy?

The announcement by GM was not a total surprise. The Hummer had been hurting. Why, though, did Hummer paint itself into such a brand corner in the first place? Where was the brand strategy to advance the business beyond easily foreseen challenges? Indeed, future business books may cast the hulking, gas-guzzling Hummer as a brand that fell seriously behind the customer curve, if not grievously out of touch with reality. “Hummer” may wind up as a textbook case of how not to craft a brand.

Let’s take a closer look at the Hummer brand strategy.

Brand strategy, vision and approach

As we’ve noted many times before, a brand is “company potential X customer potential.” In reviewing a brand strategy we always begin with a set of diagnostic questions about the brand approach and its objectives, as they involve the customer. The following are some of those questions:

1. Is this brand part of the solution, or part of the problem?
2. What kind of (proactive) customer is this brand trying to create?
3. Where is this brand leading its customers?
4. What’s the vision behind the brand? What is it a brand of?
5. How does this brand innovate to create more customer value?
6. How is this brand a platform for customer growth?
7. How does the brand collaborate with customers?

There’s neither space nor time to answer these individually, so what follows are some general comments.

Gross vs. green

Since its inception, the Hummer brand has been a conspicuous flash point for condemnation by “green” activists and conservation groups. They view it as a threat to the environment because of its large size, unregulated emissions and heavy fuel consumption. It’s almost as if GM invited the waves of green opprobrium as a way of differentiating the brand—as a politically incorrect, crush-all-comers beast, positioned for those who felt threatened by an eco-friendly world.

Strategically, though, why bring out a brand with so many anti-green connotations when the vast majority of world brands—and GM itself—was beginning (in the 1990’s) to go gung-ho green, with the (green) writing clearly on the wall?

This was a battle that “gross” could never win. What was GM’s brand vision? Hummer certainly seemed to be leading customers toward a dead end.

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There’s an interesting brand story unfolding in the airline industry: the customers are driving the brand. Airline passengers are pushing to raise service standards and improve airline/passenger relationships, while the airlines trade group is resisting them at every turn.

The real issue: depth of brand commitments

The surface issue is a highly publicized charter of “passenger rights” for passengers stuck on airplanes delayed for long periods on the tarmac. The real issue is the depth of brand commitments that airlines are prepared to make to passengers. While the airline industry has played hardball on the issue, at least one airline (JetBlue) is creating new brand avenues to position itself much closer to customers.

Airlines vs. passengers

The recent news is that the Airline Transport Association (ATA), the airline trade group, successfully challenged a New York law that required airlines to provide food, water, clean toilets and fresh air to passengers trapped in a plane delayed on the ground longer than three hours. (Currently, airlines have no such obligation.) The ATA challenged the state law on the grounds that only the federal government can regulate air travel. A federal appeals court agreed, and rejected the law. Other states are considering similar legislation—or at least they were until the appellate court ruling.

Who is holding passengers back?

The airlines make a good point in that it makes sense to govern them with a single set of laws, not a state-by-state patchwork. Fair enough; let federal laws prevail. But are the airlines ready to propose a passenger rights alternative at the federal level? Something to protect the industry brand and prevent negative brand experiences. An airline proposal might even specify general standards for passenger treatment, to weed out the low performers who give the industry a bad name.

No ATA proposals

The answer is unfortunately, “no.” No ATA proposal seems forthcoming. In fact, the the ATA has opposed such legislation at the federal level, too, with considerable success. As USA Today has noted:

. . . Measures moving through Congress to mandate better airline behavior have been so weakened that they are almost meaningless.

The airline industry, which opposes new mandates, has lobbied with great success. While it can’t seem to scare up a bag of peanuts to feed stranded fliers, it coughed up millions to fuel lawmakers’ campaigns and to finance its lobbying activities. . . .

. . . If airlines put as much effort into meeting customers’ needs as they do into lobbying against consumer laws, then perhaps there might be fewer horror stories.

Horror stories and the brand

We’ve all heard the horror stories. Hundreds of airline passengers are stuck for hours on an aircraft delayed on the tarmac. Passengers can’t leave. Food runs out. Water is scarce. Toilets overflow, and fresh air dwindles. In such abhorrent conditions, passengers suffer, airline brands take a serious hit, and brand trust evaporates.

It’s these horror stories that helped spark the “passenger rights” movement, and continue to fuel it. Since the airline industry doesn’t forthrightly address them, more horror stories are inevitable. They’re brand disasters waiting to happen.

The brand implications of “passenger rights”

The issue of “passenger rights” never would have emerged had airlines (and the industry) done a better job of managing their brand relations with passengers. The rise of “passenger rights” as a public and political issue is really a sign of a general brand breakdown at the airline level. It signifies that passengers can’t trust airlines to do what’s right. (Think about that for a moment.) It steals brand initiative from the airlines themselves, and it puts airline brands on the defensive, where they’re in no position to create new value.

The airline industry pays a high price for not addressing the “passenger rights” movement head-on with creative brand programs. The movement magnifies every airline misstep through the media, requiring ever larger cadres of PR and lawyers to contain the media fallout.

A strategy of low brand innovation

The airline industry backed itself into this corner by following a strategy of low brand innovation. This is a strategy sometimes found in declining industries that devote their resources to lobbying politicians for concessions, rather than creating new customer value. For the airlines, this is a strategy designed to protect less agile airlines from market challenges. As a strategy it can be “made to work,” only because passengers are captive customers: they have no choice but to fly to their destinations.

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Time for another chapter in my continuing carve through traditional brand practice. Today I’ll boldly propose that a focus on “differentiating the brand” can be a misguided approach—even though it’s the primary thrust of a vast majority of brands. The problem with “differentiating the brand” is that it’s never enough. It’s a half-measure at best. What a brand really needs to do is to differentiate the customer. That’s how a brand gains traction. It’s that new and different customer that will carry the brand forward. Your brand is the endless wave that makes it happen.

Opening the brand to new opportunities

“Differentiating the customer” opens a brand to new opportunities of value creation at the edge of the brand. Instead of the brand being a top-down, hermetically-sealed means of control, it becomes a customer infusion, vibrant and vigorous, speeding forward on customer feet. A brand that differentiates its customers can tap into customer initiative and innovation to explore new brand territories and discover new markets.

Your ability to differentiate the customer can make your brand a personal ally of those ready to conquer new realms of experience.

There’s no better place for a brand to be.

The old way: differentiate the brand from rivals

In the traditional brand approach, the brand is “all about the company,” and “brand differentiation” is all about competing head-to-head against rival brands. “Differentiating the brand” in this manner becomes a major goal of the brand team. Working from an inward vision, the team does everything it can to make its brand stand out from the competition. Ergo, the conventional brand approach: a unique identity, positioning, emotional appeal, brand experience, brand personality, promise, packaging, loyalty programs, slogans, visual and audio signatures, look, feel and everything else that might give the brand special appeal.

Conventional assumptions that can limit the brand

Unfortunately, the conventional approach to brand differentiation makes critical assumptions that have can have serious brand-limiting consequences.

1. It assumes that the brand is a form of communication; it employs a media model of brands. This can reduce a brand to messaging, when customers need an enabling model of brand that delivers new customer capabilities.
2. It assumes that a brand is part of an “offering” that needs to attract customers. The brand sits on a shelf, on a screen, or at a location where potential customers interact with it, and hopefully fall under its spell. This assumption can reduce a brand to a stylized sales stimulant, with little power to change the game.
3. It assumes that the brand is the predator and the customer is the prey, the more passive the better. The customer is there to be hooked; the brand is part of the lure. The problem with this assumption is that predators don’t build communities.
4. It assumes that the brand is all about the company and the product. By minimizing innovative diversity from customers, the brand risks becoming an inbred monoculture with a single point of failure.

In general, these assumptions influence companies to homogenize customers into commodity categories such as “consumers” so they can be “targeted” with media campaigns.

Alas, you can’t differentiate customers when you view them as commodities.

Company potential X customer potential

As I’ve noted previously, a brand is company potential X customer potential. The problem with all those assumptions above is that they differentiate only one half of the brand: the company half on the left side of the X. In a whole brand strategy, you are far better off with an enabling model of brand (that seminal X ) that fully includes the customer as an active brand component. The right side of the X can produce a decisive brand advantage.

Creating a new and improved customer

In other words, the last thing we want to do is to slap “New and Improved” on the brand package and leave it at that. Through the brand, we want the customer to be new and improved. We want to move the locus of the brand from the company and the product into the customer, so customers open the brand to initiative and innovation from below, and can extend the brand beyond the reach of competitors.

This means letting go of the brand as a self-centered media object and embracing the brand as a dynamic collaboration with customers. When you create the conditions for customer success you create the conditions for brand success.

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For strategic purposes, strong brands plan out the customers they’ll be creating three and five years ahead. These days, brands are thinking about those customers in a radically different context: after peak oil.

Most brands were birthed in an age of cheap oil

It’s easy to forget that most current brands were birthed in an age of cheap oil. In fact, many brands are predicated on cheap oil. These would include brands of motor vehicles, airlines, travel, hotels, destinations, and fast food, not to mention credit cards and insurance. They also include a whole slew of less obvious retail brands built around car-based shopping—especially in the far-flung suburbs, the American cheap oil nirvana.

The brand ride on cheap oil is over

There’s mounting evidence that we’re now reaching the point of “peak oil,” after which easily recoverable oil is on the decline. Some say we have passed it. With oil currently around $100 a barrel, and the US price of gasoline over $3 a gallon, the brand ride on cheap oil looks to be over. Even if oil prices stabilize, they won’t return to the balmy days of the 426 Hemi and midnight runs to the IHOP.

For brands, this probably means, among other things:

1. Cars become more of a “cost”—and a different lifestyle lever
2. Micro trumps mega
3. “Excess” is decay
4. Brands should take a hard look at their energy assumptions

A brand vacuum waiting to be filled

So, what should brands do? They can’t ignore high energy prices, or look the other way as customers wince at the cost of a fill-up at the pump. Customer wallets are hurting, and many customer lifestyles will soon be riding on fumes. Their world is shrinking—somewhat—and they need new brand contexts to bring it together.

Yes, peak oil doesn’t have to mean “peak brands.” Peak oil is a brand opportunity. It’s a brand vacuum waiting to be filled. To provide customers with new forms of meaningful living, a brand might develop new contexts of energy and lifestyle as part of its competitive strategy, with the brand as a new customer ally going forward.

Every brand needs an energy strategy

Brands that ignore the rising cost of oil do so at their own risk. In other words, every brand now needs an energy strategy. At a minimum, every brand will eventually become a brand of energy conservation and energy efficiency, in some unique context, with appropriate brand programs. Brands that lead decisively in this new context will fare better than those who stubbornly cling to yesterday’s assumptions.

Brands as energy producers

There’s much more to it than that, however. After peak oil the nature of brands will change. Brands will have to create customers who can prosper in a universe of less oil. Better yet, brands will need to become energy producers.

Yes, that’s correct. Brands will need to become energy producers.

Observe the electric meter to the left. Imagine that meter attached to your customer. The dials and wheels spin to indicate energy usage. The mission of your brand will be to add energy into the customer so that the meter moves in the opposite direction, meaning that the customer gains energy from the brand. This will be a creative, cultural energy that offsets the rising price of oil and oil-based products.

Brand energy is customer energy

So, how does a company produce such brand energy? It’s a creative process that taps into multiple customer needs across multiple dimensions. Brand energy is customer energy. Use your imagination to find the context that’s best for your business, and your customers.

Some potential avenues:

1. Your brand 1) creates customers, and 2) creates the customer energy to help customers lead uniquely rich, fulfilling lives. Your brand makes up the shortfall in fuel with an abundance of carefully-crafted cultural steps.
2. Redefine energy. It’s not what a customer “burns,” but what a customer creates.
3. A brand’s energy strategy is not “doing more with less.” It is a different kind of “more.”
4. A rising cost of oil need not impede a rising level of living. The brand maps out new riches, and helps the customer change gears.
5. Make oil (largely) irrelevant.
6. Create high performance customers who achieve more for themselves via the creative auspices of the brand. Change your customer metaphor from “consumer” to “creator.”
7. Through your brand, enable customers to “forge independence,” not just “save energy.”

Post-carbon brands for post-carbon cities

Professor Gregory Clark has outlined a quality of life scenario in the post-peak oil era. Today’s energy rich societies won’t necessarily be any poorer. They’ll just have to rearrange their priorities so they can be wealthy and prosperous while using far less energy.

Along the same lines, Denmark has taken the lead in developing post-carbon cities, workplaces and environments. Post-carbon brands are sure to follow.

Denmark does seem to be a happy place.

Photo: CoreBurn — Flickr

The Economist has a insightful report on how a billion-dollar industry can collectively fumble its brand, and watch a competitor walk away with its customers. The industry in question is the recorded music industry, which is now caught in a disastrous tailspin. The article isn’t about brands per se, but it shows how an archaic and dysfunctional business context can produce an archaic and dysfunctional brand—that sends customers elsewhere.

What is the context of your business?

Every company (or industry) must ask itself: What is the context of our business? Their answer to this question will define their effective brand. This may not be the brand they publicize in symbols and slogans, but it’s the real brand that customers deal with (or work with) on an everyday basis.

To develop this context, a business (or industry) must start by answering these questions:

1. What unique forms of value do we deliver?
2. How can we innovate to deliver more?
3. How does this value enable customers to create more value for themselves?
4. Where are we leading our customers?
5. How can advancing our customers build our competitive advantage?

If the context of your business is money . . .

The music industry never asked itself these questions, ignoring the fact that in the 1990’s hundreds of technology companies were making answers to these questions the core of their business. The music labels believed that the context of their business was money, not customer value. Specifically, the context was to rake in as much cash as possible by controlling artists and customers through a well-oiled, and well-protected, profit machine.

A cramped and coercive brand

Unfortunately, the industry didn’t realize that its profit context was effectively becoming its brand. Sadly, it was a horribly cramped and coercive brand, one that alienated artists and customers alike. It was often perceived as a brand of avarice. It was so strong that it also blocked the industry’s ability to transform itself, and to innovate. Not surprisingly, customers left in droves. Eventually, artists began to look elsewhere, too.

From the Economist:

IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realized the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Toward a context of value

From a brand perspective, the context of a business (or industry) can never be money alone. Money, or profit, is a customer result. The context of a business is the form(s) of value that the business delivers to customers, and how that value engagement can help customers advance themselves, and the business.

This context of value lays a solid brand foundation. It makes brand building easier, and more effective, with customers, employees and partners.

Where the recorded music brand now thrives

What happened to the recorded music brand that the traditional music labels let slip away? It now thrives at Apple, reinvented, re-cast and rejuvenated. Apple had the brand vision to see where new technology could take recorded music, and customers, in new value engagements. Thanks to the iPod and iTunes, recorded music has never been more popular, nor a music brand more prevalent.

Photo: Mulad — Flicker

The short answer to this question is yes—absolutely. In our information age, a company’s brand acts as a vault of security for customer privacy. It’s a first line of customer trust. Strong brands protect customer privacy. Weak brands leak. Or worse, they’re information sieves, and can’t be trusted.

Protecting privacy builds customer trust

Yes, customer privacy is a brand issue, and a critical one. Simply stated, safeguarding customer privacy is a key part of a company’s strategy for building brand trust in the digital era. Customer privacy and brand trust are deeply intertwined. As products, brand programs and customers increasingly interconnect, interact and share information, customer privacy issues will increasingly determine which brands emerge with customers on their side.

Protecting privacy confers strategic advantage

The digital age has raised the bar on brands, and protecting customer privacy is becoming a new form of brand value, with strategic implications. Brand platforms can gain strategic advantage as they become strong privacy platforms. This is especially true as brands grow through customer initiative and innovation. Brands that actively team with customers on a platform of trust can develop more traction than brands that treat customers as a demographic resource to attract advertisers.

Facebook’s privacy faceplant

To witness how important privacy has become to the world of brands, we need look no further than Facebook’s recent faceplant over its widely criticized Beacon advertising program. Facebook’s experience illustrates how poorly conceived and/or poorly implemented privacy policies can threaten to undermine a brand.

The Beacon program tracks what Facebook users do on partner websites and sends that data back to Facebook. There, it is combined with user data (anonymously) and made available to advertisers for better ad targeting. It is also passed along to one’s Facebook friends as shared data, letting them know what you’ve been doing on those other sites.

Privacy issues raise questions about the brand

Facebook pitched Beacon to users as an easy way to share activities and information with friends. But as users realized that their private purchases and activities at other sites could now be revealed on Facebook, and also fed to advertisers, resistance set in. Was Facebook a brand of user enablement and expression, or a brand of information harvesting? And whose side was Facebook on? It wasn’t entirely clear how much control users had over their own data. And to make matters worse, opting out of the Beacon process was not easy.

Facebook clarifies its brand intent—to a point

After several weeks of mounting criticism (see here, here and here) Facebook’s CEO issued a public apology, and began steps to make Beacon elective for Facebook users through a more direct opt in process. This was a major step in clarifying what the Facebook brand stands for, although some critics argue that Facebook still needs to do more.

Ed Felten has a balanced overview of Facebook’s privacy issues and implementation, from which he derives operational lessons for all companies. To Ed’s list, we might add the following brand considerations:

To “monetize” customers is to erode the brand

A major brand challenge facing Facebook and similar social sites is how to balance their revenue needs with their strategies for social growth. Such sites are under pressure from investors to build profitable revenue streams, typically through advertising. The sites feel compelled to capture as much user information as possible, in order to make themselves attractive vehicles for highly targeted ads. But if the sites “monetize” their users by exploiting them as information resources, they risk driving their brands in a commodity direction—because they’re essentially treating their users as (information) commodities.

A social site that “monetizes” its customers often does so at the expense of the brand. To monetize means to make money the first principle of customer relations, whereas for brands the first principle is customer growth. (Brand-wise, monetizing is the opposite of value creation and innovation.)

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Google is taking an innovative approach in building out its YouTube brand, moving the brand in a direction few expected. Instead of plunging deeper into a narrow video essence, it’s creating a new context for YouTube on a broader public stage. Through this brand strategy it seems YouTube aims to become an emergent video network from the citizen up, while forging a new meaning for media.

The public road to a stronger brand

One way to advance your brand is to take a leadership role on an issue of national (or global) importance. To make this strategy work, you pursue a path that’s results driven rather than merely symbolic, one that enables you to add value in clear and decisive terms. You want your brand to become a (distinctive) method for getting (important) things done. You’re after results, not just feelgood “associations.” In this way, your brand becomes an enabler of higher forms of action and understanding—and potentially, a powerful platform in creating new market spaces.

The payoff is that strategically, your brand can extend your company value, and your product value, into greenfield areas of common good. These can change customers, and change markets.

From molten Mentos to the “YouTube Debates”

A good example of this brand strategy is YouTube’s role in the ongoing “CNN/YouTube Debates.” Who would have thought that YouTube, barely out of its molten Mentos phase, would now have a signal voice in the national political process, sharing top billing with CNN, a premier news network?

On the Web the debates are often referred to as the “YouTube debates,” as if YouTube is now an accepted kingmaker on the national political scene. That’s a tremendous brand leap from YouTube’s born-in-a-basement origins a few years ago.

This new debate format is a baby step toward a more participative democracy. It’s far from perfect, and it barely scratches the surface of its digital potential. But what currently stands out is the innovative role played by YouTube, not the mainstream shepherding by CNN.

A brand of democratic engagement

To see where the YouTube brand may be headed, check out YouTube’s new political blog called CitizenTube. YouTube is on the way to becoming a brand of political engagement, and perhaps a brand of political transparency as well. The debates in concert with CNN are only a first step.

You can also see the deeper strategy here. Just fill in the blank next to “Tube” for a new area of YouTube relevance. “CitizenTube” for politics. “SportsTube” for athletics. “HealthTube” for wellness, etc. While a marketing approach would typically create these avenues as static “channels” (for passive, static “targets”), a brand approach creates them as active fields of collaboration and innovation.

How YouTube frames its debate initiative

Here is how YouTube frames its debate initiative:

The core concept behind these debates is to let real questions from real people drive the dialogue. The power of YouTube is that it lowers the barrier to entry to engage in the political process, and levels the platform for political discussion. It used to be that a voter had to live in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Florida to engage with the candidates at this stage of the campaign, but YouTube has broken down those barriers, and has brought more transparency and access to the political dialogue than ever before. We think that politics will never be the same (thankfully).

Make your brand a springboard, not a billboard

The bottom line is that you want your brand to be a springboard, not a billboard. It’s a springboard for customers and partners to break free from current constraints. That’s why we need a new definition of brand, one that’s action-oriented, collaborative and driven by initiative and opportunity.

Our own master definition of brand seems to fit YouTube’s direction rather well:

Brands are avenues of value innovation in a creative engagement between companies and their customers.

And, as we also like to say, great brands are not meant to be seen. They’re a lens on life, and meant to be seen through. A YouTube brand that enables political transparency is a definite plus.