Brands Create Customers

As a brand platform expands, stress cracks can appear between the brand core (perhaps over-controlled by the company) and the active brand edge (a more freewheeling terrain energized by partners and customers). The brand and its innovation ecosystem may be moving in the same general direction, but they don’t always move as one. And they can move at different rates.

Brand stress cracks have to be fixed

Brand stress cracks have to be fixed. If allowed to propagate, they can seriously weaken the platform, and the brand. The issue is rarely one of “brand essence.” It’s typically an issue of process, or of brand value delivered.

A stress crack in the iPhone brand platform

Apple is currently dealing with a stress crack in its emerging iPhone platform. The issue is how Apple approves third-party applications for the iPhone, and then makes them available for sale in its online App Store. Apple hasn’t published guidance on the approval criteria it uses in the App Store, leaving developers in the difficult position of writing software that meets iPhone technical specs but may be rejected for other reasons. The fear of arbitrary rejection has dampened developer enthusiasm for the platform.

A recently rejected iPhone application has become a cause celebre.

The importance of the App Store

Apple’s App Store is the location of this particular stress crack. The App Store is as important to Apple developers as it is to Apple and the iPhone brand. It’s the sanctioned gateway to selling third-party iPhone apps, and it’s crucial to the commercial success of an independent iPhone app developer. Selling iPhone apps outside the App Store conduit is very difficult.

In many respects, the App Store is the engine of the iPhone platform. It may represent a billion dollar market. It’s so vital that Kleiner Perkins has created a $100 million fund to help startups develop apps for the iPhone platform.

Third-party iPhone developers are a part of the brand

Apple needs motivated (and successful) third-party developers if the iPhone is to reach its potential as a broad-based mobile platform. Apple’s third-party developers form a critical part of the brand. Their initiative, imagination and innovation equal that of Apple’s in-house engineers, and they can spot iPhone apps in nooks, crannies and niches that Apple itself could never address. These niches can become selling points and growth avenues as the platform evolves.

The app approval process is a brand process

What’s at issue isn’t Apple’s right to exercise control over new iPhone apps. That’s a given. The issue is the transparency of Apple’s review and approval process. The App Store’s approval process is a brand process, a subset of Apple’s approach to its brand ecosystem and how it works with and nurtures its third-party developers. It’s a bit ironic that Apple should have this problem, because Apple knows this process. It was Apple who first sent out “software evangelists” to bring developers into the Apple brand 30 years ago.

The brand cannot be a bottleneck

One of the first rules of brand innovation is that the brand cannot be a bottleneck. Too much control at the top chokes off initiative and innovation, and eventually chokes the brand itself. Brand value is really a confluence of many streams, from the company, its partners and customers.

Brands that are “curated” as precious objets d’art in a temple tended by brand priests always run the risk of being bottlenecks. They’re too far from rough and tumble markets where active brands discover new forms of value.

Structuring the brand as a shared brand journey

Structuring the brand as a shared brand journey is often a step in the right direction.

A brand solution

The extent of developer angst over the iPhone app approval process indicates that a brand solution is needed. For sure, the iPhone app approval task inside Apple is challenging. There are thousands of iPhone apps that need to be vetted and tested, with a host of legal, technical, strategic and brand reasons why they must be carefully scrutinized. That said, there is a (brand) logical solution out there. Apple didn’t get this far without successfully resolving similar problems in the past.

One developer has proposed a six part solution, which begins:

Publish clear and unambiguous rules for what will be accepted and what will not. I don’t even care if this is a long and detailed document, but it needs to be The Rulebook from which both sides play.

Sometimes the brand ecosystem can lead in bringing problems to a close.

I’ve written about the iPhone brand platform challenge previously.

UPDATE: Here is one third-party developer’s step-by-step experience in getting an iPhone application approved by the App Store.  A total of 22 steps. Not a quick process, but not unreasonable given that Apple found at least one bug in the software. (Hat Tip: Daring Fireball).

Apple’s breakout success with its iPhone exemplifies how an elite company can, in rare and exceptional cases, “bet the brand” on a new product introduction and gain significant market advantage.

Betting the brand is for a select few

Most companies should never even consider “betting the brand.” They have too much to lose, and they’re generally not brand capable for such a high-stakes strategic action. For a small number of companies, however, betting the brand need not be a reckless toss of the dice. It can be a measured risk that favors the prepared brand—with the prospect of market-changing payback. It comes into play when such a company has no other choice but to leverage its brand to seize a compelling market opportunity. It either bets the brand or cedes strategic advantage to competitors.

What is “betting the brand?”

A company “bets the brand” when it risks substantial brand equity in a strategic move to unlock new customer value. In betting the brand a company believes that it can create a new kind of customer by introducing a new brand/customer context beyond the reach of incumbents. The risk in betting the brand is that a failure to achieve brand objectives may cause brand-wide collateral damage.

When a company “bets the brand” it is betting its proposed brand context against the reigning brand context of incumbents. It attempts to raise customers—dramatically—to a higher plane ofexperience. In this process it uses the “chips” of its brand equity. These “chips” are much more than “brand assets,” however, as we’ll see below.

A “bet the brand” scenario may involve changing the brand game.

Don’t bet a weak hand brand

First off, we should reiterate that it’s extremely difficult for a company with an average brand to bet the brand and win. It most likely won’t have the cards. Generally, it shouldn’t even try. Let safer strategies prevail, as discussed here and here.

This caveat would also apply to brands modeled as communications. While these may be rich in stories and images, they typically lack the platform depth (and the will) to raise customers to the next level.

How brands can stack the odds in their favor

If a brand-capable company desires to seize an opportunity with a high-stakes brand initiative, its first priority is to stack the odds in its favor. It will need to insure that its brand has definitive control of both its present context, and of the new context it intends to introduce. This means (at least notionally) that the brand evokes a superior customer model in both areas.

Fundamental steps to improve such a company’s odds include:

1. Architect the brand to create customers
2. Structure the brand as integrated platforms to advance customers in the direction you’re headed. (You want customers already on the way to your new promised land.)
3. Build the brand as an enabler for customer innovation, rather than an “asset” or static icon.
4. Adopt an extensible customer model so that the seeds of “the next big thing” are present in the customer of today.

The Key Posts section in the right column may have some useful links.

A fresh look at “brand equity”

To understand the process of betting the brand we need to extend the concept of “brand equity.” I define brand equity as a company’s strategic ability to create customers. This is an activist concept of brand equity. It is quite different from an accountant’s view, where brand equity mirrors share value, or the conventional concept that brand equity consists of a company’s many “brand assets.” In my view, these conventional concepts are too static. They often exclude customer initiative, and they can constrain brand innovation by ignoring the creative and qualitative elements that can make customers come alive (which is the purpose of brands in the first place).

I prefer to consider brand equity as a force, not an asset. It is the strategic firepower of a brand. And it is primarily composed of brand platforms for changing markets.

As I see it, a billion dollar brand may have multiple portfolios of brand assets, but if those assets are not configured into platforms for creating customers—and changing markets— their strategic value is limited.

Brand platforms power brand bets

A brand is vertically integrated value. When property constructed, a brand is a customer-creating machine made up of platforms of integrated brand elements, all geared to advance the customer through a singular brand vision. (Apple is a good example here, BTW).

Brand platforms give a company the greatest possible leverage in the event it makes a strategic brand bet. In this regard, the best brand platforms are customer platforms. They enable customers to advance themselves, and to add value back to the brand in the process. Proactive customers create more brand equity than passive ones, a crucial advantage when the chips are down. (Note how the iPod brand increases Apple’s market leverage, while Microsoft’s Zune brand, with a retrograde customer model, does nothing for Microsoft.)

The iPhone example

The weblog counternotions does a nice job of enumerating the major challenges that Apple faced in bringing the iPhone to market. (It lists 15 high-stakes issues.)

For Apple, bringing the iPhone to market was one gutsy move: a bold stroke to carve out a strong, sustainable position in a mature market controlled by powerful handset makers and entrenched (dominant) carriers known for their choke-hold on the industry. Apple’s only real option was a blockbuster product that could change the mobile paradigm—with a new brand context of the user.

Apple’s brand bet with the iPhone

It’s fair to say that Apple was betting the brand with the iPhone. An Apple mobile phone was widely expected, with speculation rampant. Anything less than a breakthrough innovation would be grounds for disappointment. Because the iPhone occupies a prominent plank in the strategic customer platform developed by Apple (integrated hardware, software, OS, user interface, applications, services and a new model of digital user), an iPhone failure would be far more profound than that of a single device that simply didn’t pan out. It would have serious repercussions for Apple’s ability to create new customers in the direction it’s heading.

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Don’t be too surprised if in five or ten years the US educational establishment runs on Google, from the neighborhood school to the college campus. Google teams are hard at work making Google the digital platform of learning. Through these efforts, Google is positioning itself to be a preeminent brand of education. You may physically attend Harvard or Yale or PS 27, but you’ll spend most of your time there inside Google applications. In practice, you’ll be going to school in Google.

A Google brand play

The elements of Google’s emerging education brand are set forth in Google for Educators. This initiative is a Google brand play, taking shape before our very eyes. (A brand, let’s not forget, is a collaboration in context that creates new customers and new customer value.) Google is building programs to create customers in teachers, and in students. To build its brand it doesn’t need glitzy campaigns, high-octane messaging, costly Super Bowl ads, celebrity endorsers, iconic symbols, or throbbing slogans. This is a Google brand built from the bottom-up, through customers themselves and their communities.

A brand of deliverables, not promises

Significantly, Google is building its education brand through what it delivers, and by what it does, rather than by what it says or promises. Bands are deeds, not words, and brands rich in deliverables have the inside track to be recognized as brands of integrity and trust.

In education, integrity and trust are fundamental.

Google in the classroom

To see what Google is up to in the education market, look at the links in the above-noted Google for Educators site:

• Tools for your classroom
• Classroom activities
• Classroom posters
• Google Teacher Academy
• Teacher Community

Building the integrated brand

One way to describe a brand is to call it “vertically integrated value.” Google already offers a broad scope of integrated tools for learning, incorporating Google search, Google Docs, and many other applications. These are the building blocks of an integrated brand. Basically, Google is covering everything a student or teacher would want to do in the collaborative learning process, made available from single drop-in cloud.

Students can take notes in Google, write essays, share and collaborate, create special projects, and communicate with blogs, podcasts and videos. Eventually, they will take their tests in Google, too, with stealthy algorithms to keep things honest.

And yes, there will soon be “Google Certified Teachers” who successfully complete the Google Teacher Academy.

A Google brand platform for education

What Google is building with its education initiative is a brand platform. Here is how I define that term:

The brand platform is a structure of integrated brand components architected to create focused customer growth. As a platform, it: 1) serves as a common foundation for brand program applications; 2) allows for greater efficiency in brand program development via shared elements; 3) leverages context and content across the brand; and 4) enables customers to extend the brand through bottom-up brand innovation avenues.

You can see how all these pieces are being fitted together. And you can foresee the pieces to come.

Photo: jisc_infonet — Flickr

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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The Apple iPhone brand is on the move, shaking things up. I’ve written about the iPhone’s potential impact on wireless brands and brand strategy here and here. Now iPhones are flying off the shelves in record numbers, mostly to rave reviews. As expected, the iPhone brand is causing havoc in mobile markets. Surprisingly, it may also alter the landscape for brands in all markets, across the board.

The iPhone creates a new customer

After June 29, 2007, customers in mobile markets are a different breed. Apple has upgraded their DNA—irrevocably. The iPhone changes the “phone experience,” the context of the phone, and user expectations to such an extent that it advances the customer to a new level, breaking the traditional mobile phone mold. Because the iPhone is so new, this break currently appears as a fissure, but it has “chasm” written all over it. What the iPod was to music labels, the iPhone may be to established carriers and handset makers.

What “create a customer” means

The phrase “create a customer” means much more than simply making a sale. I define “create a customer” as follows:

To create a customer means to connect a customer to a larger part of himself or herself through the brand. This is a connection to that person’s potential and/or passion, within the context of the customer’s expected brand outcome. Your brand helps customers to discover themselves, unfold themselves, iterate themselves, and prototype new selves that are now latent, awaiting only the wondrous “developer” that flows through your brand platforms and programs.

The initial feelings of delight, amazement and revelation that iPhone users experience are those of a new customer being birthed.

The iPhone changes the game in mobile brands

When great brands change the game they change the customer.

They redefine the customer and the customer’s world, elevating the customer to a completely new context. In this new context the old game suddenly becomes irrelevant, along with all the companies, products and brands wedded to it.

In the iPhone’s case, it changes the game (and the customer) by giving customers more fluid and more fluent access to the world of their culture. The iPhone does this through the power of a highly expressive multi-touch GUI and a version of the sophisticated Mac OS X operating system. The result is a customer liberated from conventional limitations, even in a 1.0 device. Can the carriers match this? No. Can the other handset makers match this? No. Apple has made the “iPhone experience” the new reference context for mobile devices. Everyone else is now playing catch-up, largely on Apple’s terms.

How the iPhone changes brands in general

The impact of the iPhone brand is not limited to mobile wireless markets. It affects all brands because the future of brands lies in personal brand applications that will run on digital devices . . . such as the iPhone. The iPhone is both a reference application and a reference device. It helps usher in the era of the brand as “means.”

As part of “creating a customer” the iPhone enables customers to create and share their own culture–at their fingertips. This culture-creating capacity is what sets brands apart from raw products and services. It is also what differentiates brands as “means” from traditional broadcast brands limited to symbols and signs. With the iPhone itself as an application platform, Apple enables customers to be more, and to do more, in a context they themselves create. Can your brand do that?

Whatever your brand, sooner or later you’ll be asking yourself, “How does our brand play on the iPhone?”

Will AT&T undermine the iPhone brand?

There’s been speculation that Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T may undermine the iPhone due to the “walled garden” nature of the AT&T brand. There’s some logic to this argument because the AT&T brand is largely predicated on controlling and monetizing customers, not enabling them.

On the other hand, it’s hard to bet against Steve Jobs. He has customers, Moore’s Law, and the Internet on his side. Plus, he’s Steve Jobs. And with the iPhone he has a powerful innovation platform that can move in multiple directions, at a very fast pace. Second and third generation iPhones may make the launch iPhone look elementary and underpowered.

Steve Crandall has some very insightful observations on the marketing dynamics of the Apple/AT&T relationship, and how they may play out.

Photo: Apple, Inc.

Google has been building out its brand platform by adding one strategic plank after another. The latest deals with Web trust and security.

Building trust for the Google brand

Google understands that because a large part of its brand is centered on the Web and Web applications, its long-term success depends on a Web that is generally safe, and trustworthy. A Web that’s rife with deceptions and insecurities could seriously undermine the Google brand, and Google’s business.

Of course, on the wide-open Web there’s only so much oversight that Google—or any company—can manage. But every bit it can accomplish adds to its brand integrity, and to its long-term brand equity. When you and I feel “safe” within the Google ambiance, the Google brand is working.

The new platform plank: security

This week Google introduced its Online Security Blog to solicit discussion and feedback on its latest steps in helping users protect themselves online. This is a vital plank in the Google brand platform. Google has to demonstrate some control over various Web threats if it expects businesses and individuals to leave the (relative) security of their desktops and embrace online Google Apps, one of Google’s main challenges to Microsoft. In the first blog entry Google reveals some of its initiatives against malware sites that can steal sensitive information from a user’s computer. Google already identifies possible malware sites in its search results.

Google’s security initiative is a way of building the Google brand by delivering value customers can use. That’s an approach I call value-based brands. It’s the real deal all the way through. Zero brand fluff.

I’d also guess that somewhere deep inside the Googleplex there’s a whiteboard with Google’s vision of a trusted Web. That vision would also be a vision of the Google brand, with the security plank a key part of it.

Building trust for Google’s AdSense

In a related move, Google is taking steps to clean up the “proxy” websites designed to game Google’s AdSense program. These sites are typically made up entirely of AdSense ads and no original content. While such sites can make money for their originators, and for Google’s AdSense program itself, they seriously clutter search results and offer a negative user experience. As Scott Karp notes, this is an example of Google giving up some “easy money” in favor of measures that can return more strategic AdSense revenue from a “healthier” and more quality-oriented Web.

Raising the brand bar

The Web is a big place. When you operate on the scale of Google, your brand platform will need lots of planks. Google’s latest actions signify that it’s scaling up its brand to support a very large business, with no shortage of platform components. It’s certainly raising the brand bar for Microsoft and Yahoo.

Photo: Incase Designs — Flickr

While brand builders usually craft brands to be as highly visible and as “hot” as possible, disruptive brands often call for a different strategy. Truth is, disruptive brands can be at their best when they’re kept to a low profile, and served very, very cold. Like the underwater mass of an iceberg they attract little notice as they glide into position. Then, when the time is right, they discretely split the seams of the reigning Titanic as it cruises past. One second they hide beneath the surface, and the next second they own the ocean. Bright lights and fanfares would only alert their intended prey.

Can Google disrupt the Microsoft brand?

Thanks to the always insightful David Berlind, we can see a potential brand disruption taking shape in the sea-change confrontation between Google and Microsoft for computing platform dominance. From a brand-builder perspective, this is largely a brand context battle about which brand will define the future context of computing. It’s the emerging Google brand context vs. the prevailing Microsoft Windows brand context. What appears on the surface is far less important than what’s going on down below.

Over several posts David outlines how Google is stealthily creating the infrastructure and applications for a powerful (hosted) brand platform that stands to cause Microsoft serious damage. In the best disruptive tradition, the Google brand is readying itself for this conflict calmly and quietly, barely causing a ripple.

For some background on disruptive brands see this previous post.

What is brand context?

Brand context is an amazing property of brands. It’s the world of opportunity that a brand presents to the customer, the real deal of possibilities that the brand conveys and incarnates, across all human dimensions. For the customer, it can be “the new you, in a better place” that only a brand can deliver. The brand context has the potential to extend the customer’s horizons, and provide a means of reaching them. It’s the opposite of artificial worlds fabricated by hype, spin and mind games. (These are properties of propaganda, not brands.)

Of course, a brand context can also be decidedly negative and restrictive. That invites disruption by a brand context that offers more freedom to customers.

The iPod offers a wondrously rich brand context of music compared to the restrictive context of CD’s. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Microsoft and the PC makers offered a superior brand context in the business world compared to the old way of working with pencil and paper. Now, it’s Google’s turn to offer a more liberating brand context of computing than that provided by a mature Windows Office.

The challenger: Google Apps

The heart of Google’s challenge is a new domain-oriented platform (and potential brand context) called Google Apps, which consists of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar, a forthcoming presentation app, and a basic intranet structure to manage them for domain users. Google Apps is aimed not at individual web surfers but at groups such as organizations, small businesses, enterprises and schools that share a domain. As David explains, Google Apps has many features the average Googler will never see. Its strength is a hosted set of core office applications plus workgroup and application connectivity in a single, extensible package. Currently it’s free for families; other groups can get a free trial through May.

Google goes after the disruptive 10%

As David notes, Google’s objective with Google Apps is to gain market share by offering the key 10 percent of Microsoft Office features that customers use most, at a fraction of what they pay for Office. This 10 percent equates to 95 to 100 percent of the features found in Google Apps. Gee, this might just ring a bell.

The promise of Google Apps

Google Apps holds the promise of being far cheaper and easier to administer than Microsoft Windows, while being largely compatible with it. If it’s reliable, costs far less, delivers equal or better productivity, doesn’t force hardware upgrades (a la Vista), causes fewer headaches, and comes with painless updates, it may indeed usher in a computing sea change for customers.

For Google Apps, brand context is critical

The strategic task for Google Apps is to become much more than low-end disruption. It needs to represent a liberating context of computing, where organizations and individuals can wield more power over their digital platforms and tools, and thus gain more control of their destiny. When we’re talking about these kinds of holistic changes in the customer world, we’re talking about the power of brands, above and below the surface.

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Over the last decade many companies have turned to digital technologies to create new brand relationships with customers, using everything from web sites to online communities to weblogs to Web-based media campaigns. This marks a major change for brands, because it means a significant part of their future will be played out on a digital stage.

What’s the optimal digital platform for brands?

For brand builders, a critical question now becomes: what’s the optimal digital platform for brands, in all their new dimensions? What technology (or technologies) can help us deliver the richest brand experience and the greatest brand value?

Adobe seems to have the inside track

At this point, it would appear that Adobe Systems might have the inside track to be the brand builder’s digital platform of choice. Either by cunning strategy or simple good fortune, Adobe seems to be putting together application platforms that can make a brand builder’s job easier. And we’re not just talking Photoshop and InDesign. We’re talking about digitally-enabled brand avenues with rich connections to customers, reaching almost every computer in the world.

The coming age of RIA’s

One of Adobe’s strengths is its innovation leadership in Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s). These applications use new programming technologies to provide online apps with much of the functionality and user experience of traditional desktop software. (It’s not quite Brand Nirvana, but it’s getting there.) RIA’s will open a whole new world of possibilities for brand builders by removing many traditional Web limitations, while enabling many more layers of customer interaction. The next few years will determine which RIA platform will emerge to define and convey the new stuff of brands.

See our previous post on RIA’s here. And this example.

What brand builders need

Before we check out what Adobe has to offer, let’s review what brand builders need for this new world of digital-based brands:

1. Digital platforms that are open, extensible, standards-based, and include as much of the world as possible.
2. Digital platforms that won’t constrain, corral or limit customers (or, ahem, brand builders).
3. Platforms open to fast innovation from the bottom-up.
4. An integrated suite of applications with voice, video, music, and dynamic action. Apps that free the brand to be the brand.
5. Full functionality for customer interaction and collaboration. Absolutely critical.
6. Apps that are cross platform (cross-OS) so they run on all the computers and digital devices out there. Let no customer be left behind.
7. Apps that are “free” to the customer, making app deployment effortless, if not automatic.
8. Apps that are easy to develop and deploy. (Helps to have an established developer base with great tools, so they doo good work without costing us an arm and a leg.)
9. Apps as light as customers want, or as heavy as customers want. Apps that are infinitely malleable.
10. Apps the customer can adopt as a second skin.
11. Apps that preserve “persistence of context” — so that brand virtues retain their presence throughout the digital experience, online and offline.
12. Apps that enable customers to add value back to the brand. (This may be the most “killer app” of them all).

Oh yes, and after all the above, we’d like the same platform to help us build out our brand programs, so we can use it to train our employees on our brand vision, and deliverables.

Adobe apps that set the brand stage

Given what Adobe now offers, let’s count the ways that Adobe might enable the kinds of digital-based brand connections and programs that brand builders might use to create customers.

• Video over the Internet: Adobe Flash Player video (it powers YouTube)
• Dynamic web applications: Adobe Flash + RIA
• Video on mobile devices: Adobe Flash Lite
• Mobile dynamic content Adobe Flash Lite (apps/games)
• Voice over IP: Adobe Flash player
• Cross-OS desktop applications: Adobe Apollo (mid-2007) + RIA
• Interactive web conferencing: Adobe Connect
• Interactive training: Adobe Connect
• Video presentations/tutorials: Adobe Connect

Much of this is made possible by the ubiquity of the Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on 97% of all computers, and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. The Flash Player was Adobe’s grand prize when it acquired Macromedia in 2005.

Adobe Apollo

Many eyes are focused on Adobe Apollo, Adobe’s coming RIA platform due in mid-2007. It may emerge as the digital brand platform of choice if it lives up to its promise. Adobe is certainly making it a centerpiece of its platform strategy. Apollo may enable your brand to bring things together in unique ways that can create new customers, with vast powers for brand-driven widgets.

Late news here.

Alternatives to Adobe

Of course, you can create a top-tier digital-based brand without Adobe products and services. Google is developing slick online apps using Ajax frameworks, as are many other companies. OpenLaszlo is a powerful open source platform that competes with Adobe, and uses the ubiquitous Flash Player. Microsoft has its (still limited) WPF/E. Currently, though, Adobe’s Flash player ubiquity, application integration, RIA innovation and developer resources make it the digital brand platform to beat.

Brands from the bottom-up

If there’s any shortfall in all these software applications, it’s at the bottom rather than the top. As a brand builder, it’s nice to know that Adobe Flash Lite 3 will enable you to stream videos to customer mobile phones, plus deliver mobile video clips, applications and personalized content. These present outstanding brand-building opportunities. However, brands are more than broadcast. You also want your digital platform to flourish at the customer-to-customer level, so that your brand can also be built from the bottom-up.

This is especially important when customers re-create your brand in their own digital networks, pushing and pulling brand context to yield new value. You want your digital platform to handle these customer interactions that can lead to network effects.

It will be interesting to see how Adobe and other platform contenders extend their brand tools to address this issue.

Links

A excellent link for news on Rich Internet Applications is Ryan Stewart’s The Universal Desktop.

Check out Adobe’s new apps at Adobe Labs.

Photo: TJ-Blog — Flickr

TechCrunch and other sites are reporting that Google is working on an online presentation app aimed to disrupt Microsoft’s ubiquitous PowerPoint at the low end. Dan Farber and Larry Dignan add some market perspective. If real, this application may initiate a brand battle royal between Google and Microsoft.

Disrupting PowerPoint

A Google presentation app has been long rumored as a final step in completing Google’s emerging online office suite as an alternative to Microsoft Office. PowerPoint, of course, is one of Microsoft’s crown jewels, and deeply entrenched in U.S. business culture. Making a dent in PowerPoint would be a huge coup for Google.

In the spirit of speculative brand building, let’s see where Google might take such a new presentation application. As part of its brand strategy, Google would want to do two things:

1. Create a new customer
2. Invest the app with the power of a platform

Microsoft’s brand vacuum is Google’s gain

Google’s challenge is made somewhat easier because Microsoft has often neglected real brand building in its era of market dominance. Microsoft’s market power has blinded it to the value of brands. It has tried to contain its customers as much as possible, assuming that what was good for Microsoft was always good enough for users. The result is a huge PowerPoint application that often overshoots its market, leaving a brand vacuum where a smaller, user-friendly application might fit. That’s a vacuum that Google is happy to fill.

A new Google app for a new customer

An online Google presentation app won’t be as slick as PowerPoint, but it doesn’t need to be. Its job would be to create a different model of “presenter” who would do more with less, aided by a different presentation cachet. The cachet would probably be cross-platform ease of use and collaborative efficiency. (And, OK, free.) Instead of trying to “wow” you with a special effects extravaganza, the Google presenter may be more of a team lead who uses the presentation format to share ideas and concepts. He or she would factor in contributions from those present in person and online, and re-assemble the pieces to speed the team forward. It’s more of a workflow model than a broadcast model.

With the new Google app, presentations could arise out of group meetings, spontaneously produced from available documents. (There’s evidence that the Google app will allow users to convert documents into presentations, and vice versa.)

Redefine “presenter” and “presentation”

In short, Google’s brand approach would be to redefine the context of “presenter” and the context of the presentation itself. It would create a new context for both of these that undercuts the traditional world of PowerPoint. It would shift the context of the presenter from the individual to the team. It would shift the context of the presentation from a one-man “show” to project-based workflow.

Bells and whistles out, results in

I’ll further speculate that Google’s presentation app will focus less on bells and whistles and more on translating ideas into products. From a brand perspective, Google might want to target some important (coin-operated) reference groups as early adopters. Students, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists come to mind. If VC’s were to embrace the new app as a no-nonsense presentation format that they want from entrepreneurs, the app could gain immediate traction.

Positioning will be critical

A Google presentation app might be best positioned as a special form of collaboration, as opposed to the top-down, broadcast model of PowerPoint. Thus, it becomes a working platform for project teams. Its aim would be to help the group focus its priorities, rather than to bend the group to a presenter’s point of view. Its essence is the social and the shared, vs. the conventional “mine” and “me” of PowerPoint. It’s an app made for teams and team players.

Google: the brand of innovators?

If you’re working at the cutting edge of innovation, cranking out fast prototypes, iterating new models and concepts as part of a team, the hierarchical broadcast model of PowerPoint just might divide your efforts, and slow your team down. What you need (as Google might say) is a cross-platform presentation tool to share visualization and ideation, to speed the prototyping and innovation results that can take you to the next level.

In other words, through its presentation app Google may want to become the brand of innovators. Think of all those entrepreneurs working on web-based applications, like the mashup crowd. Or small businesses that want less process and more production. Or any team-based, skunk works operation.

Weakness of the Windows Live brand

Of course, Microsoft might announce a competing online presentation app in an attempt to blunt Google’s initiative. Redmond has strong online capabilities in its Windows Live offerings. But Microsoft’s shaping of the Windows Live brand has been notoriously confusing. As a brand it seems more tuned to the machinations of Microsoft divisions than the needs of customers, a compromise solution rather than a focused brand approach.

This is where all those years of brand neglect exact their pound of flesh from Redmond.

The PowerPoint customer model is getting old

A generation ago, PowerPoint helped Microsoft create a new kind of customer, the incipient manager who used PowerPoint to stand out from the crowd and pave his/her career up through the ranks of the large corporation. That was a major accomplishment for Microsoft, but that customer model is now getting old. Businesses have changed. Work has changed. Unfortunately, Microsoft has kept the old model going in order to sustain the Microsoft Office franchise. In so doing, it has paid a high price in brand innovation: today the Microsoft brand looks backward and inward instead of forward and outward. PowerPoint has become a platform for office routine—and often the most boring routine. It’s hardly the platform of movers and shakers.

Google’s brand opportunity

And thus we have Google’s brand opportunity. Google’s online apps are emerging as a lightweight platform for innovation and project teams, where information is meant to be gleaned from the network and the cloud, shared and iterated, molded into pilot projects and prototypes, and sent back richer. Others see the same opportunity. Where Microsoft has become the platform of status quo, Google may become the platform of innovation. Google’s online apps might even become the “way” of a seamless and free-flowing innovation culture.

Awaiting the real world test

Well, so much for speculation. We’ll see how all this works out in the real world. Google first has to launch an online presentation app with useful capabilities. To make PowerPoint “irrelevant” Google will need to create a new context for the “presenter,” and for the presentation itself. Finally, just being “good enough” won’t be good enough. The new app will have to be the presentation platform of choice for high performance people.

Photo: Ianuiop — Flicker

Apple faces some daunting challenges in crafting an effective brand platform for its dramatic new iPhone. Simply being “cool” will not be enough. Because the iPhone “redefines the phone” (in Steve Jobs’ words) it also redefines the world of the traditional phone customer. It’s up to the iPhone brand platform to define and deliver the new context of that customer, in that vibrant new intersection Apple has created between “phone” and “computer.”

The iPhone brand platform must also deliver a strong value stream as it elevates iPhone customers above traditional mobile offerings. The iPhone’s stunning design certainly suggests that it intends to be more than just a new handset with a flashy GUI. (If that’s all it amounts to, Apple will disappoint many customers.) Given the iPhone’s potential, there are vast amounts of value waiting to be unlocked—at the product level and at the brand level.

In this post I’ll briefly discuss brand platforms, then sketch out some key iPhone brand platform issues facing Apple. These are interesting from a brand practice perspective because the iPhone pushes the boundaries of what brands and brand platforms are expected to do.

The importance of brand platforms

When you’re building a brand, your goal is to create the customers who will drive your business forward. Your brand platform is the central structure of your customer creation strategy. It defines how your brand will deliver strategic customer value. It also governs how you intend to grow your customers in the ways that will make your business succeed, while pre-empting competitors from taking those same routes.

Yes, brand platforms are strategic. I alluded to this in a previous post on how the iPhone works to create a new class of customers for Apple.

Definition of “brand platform”

Here’s how I define a brand platform (from our New Brand Glossary):

Brand Platform

The brand platform is a structure of integrated brand components architected to create focused customer growth. As a platform, it: 1) serves as a common foundation for brand program applications; 2) allows for greater efficiency in brand program development via shared elements; 3) leverages context and content across the brand; and 4) enables customers to extend the brand through bottom-up brand innovation avenues.

Focused customer growth

“Focused customer growth” is the key. A “brand platform” is never a paper exercise, or a simple scheme of brand elements, such as identity, symbols, “brand personality,” promises and programs. It’s an action-oriented platform for advancing the customer via the brand. Indeed, a brand platform succeeds the more it behaves as a customer platform. It’s your structure and strategy for moving your customers beyond the reach of your competitors.

Building iPhone “brand allegiance”

The question, then, is how can Apple use the iPhone brand platform to create and grow customers who will want little to do with the conventional offerings of major carriers and handset makers? For Apple, this will be a matter of building ongoing “brand allegiance” through innovation, along a diverse set of growth points that clearly raise customers above the typical mobile experience. This is a matter of brand deliverables, not hype. It’s a process that could start in the Apple Store, where one could live test the iPhone’s calling features, its Wi-Fi and its Safari browser, alongside the iPod, iMac and other Apple products that are also fully operational and hands-on.

Specific brand platform challenges

While there’s still several months before the iPhone ships, we can already discern some specific iPhone brand platform challenges:

1. Articulate a coherent brand vision that transcends current cell phone/pda/mp3 paradigms.
2. Develop a brand roadmap that synchronizes iPhone innovations with brand program initiatives.
3. Create reference customers or customer archetypes to serve as models for path-breaking iPhone use.
4. Extend the iPhone brand experience beyond that of current competitors.
5. Maintain the Apple brand in a Cingular world.

Some comments on the above:

Articulate a coherent brand vision

During his introduction of the iPhone’s unique qualities, Steve Jobs asked the Macworld crowd if they truly understood its significance: “Are you getting it?” he asked. For the iPhone to reach beyond Apple loyalists, Apple will need to articulate how the iPhone will make a profound difference in customers’ lives. In other words, Apple must illustrate how the iPhone is more than just a handset (e.g., deliver on the iPhone slogan: “your life in your pocket.”)

This can’t be a vision solely dictated by Apple. As a brand vision, it has to be seen through customer eyes. While it was easy for customers to “get” the iPod, the iPhone represents a larger context, and will be a different, multi-layered story. Potential iPhone customers will “get it” when the iPhone becomes their story, too.

Develop an effective brand roadmap

By design, the iPhone is an innovation platform. (It certainly acts like one, able to gain new features and functions with each new iteration of chips and software.) The iPhone of 2008 will probably do much more than the iPhone of 2007. Apple needs an effective brand roadmap to synchronize product innovations with depth of brand experience, to ensure there is no brand overshoot or undershoot. The roadmap keeps customer advances on track, and also helps manage customer expectations. It also insures that innovations deliver the desired brand experience payoff.

A potential issue: The Apple product release cycle is shorter than a two-year Cingular contract. The brand roadmap should address how Apple will make it easy to upgrade to new iPhone releases without incurring Cingular contract difficulties.

Create reference customer “archetypes”

A phone that’s been radically “reinvented” requires a reinvented customer to make optimal use of it. Apple will need to select or create reference customer “archetypes” who will represent iconic iPhone users. These are individuals who will raise the bar and push the envelope with the iPhone, so that potential iPhone customers will have model iPhone users to emulate. These reference customers will show the world how the iPhone frees and empowers them in ways that conventional mobile phones cannot.

The brand platform should define reference customers for each application set that’s deemed critical to iPhone success—currently and into the future.

Extend the iPhone brand experience

How will Apple insure that its iPhone does all those dozens of things that customers want, while still providing a unified, “100% Apple” brand experience?

This will be a major challenge for the iPhone brand platform.

In order to control the iPhone brand experience, Apple has indicated that it will be the gatekeeper of all iPhone software applications. There are sound reasons for this iPhone “closed system” approach, mostly dealing with maintaining system integrity, UI consistency and quality. For a “revolutionary” new product that’s trying to change the game in a mature market, this approach is understandable.

A downside

But there’s a significant downside. By routing all software applications (i.e., iPhone functionality) through Apple, the iPhone’s approved application suite may lag behind those of its smart phone competitors, such as Nokia and Palm, who embrace more open development platforms and feature hundreds of applications. (These are often life-critical apps on a human scale, such as subway schedules, currency converters, crossword puzzles, flight trackers, shopping lists, etc.) The first people to notice iPhone application shortfalls will be new iPhone customers who find that their iPhone can’t do what their “old fashioned” smart phones easily could. At that point, the touch screen will get old in a hurry.

Apple’s third-party developers feel more than a bit miffed that they (currently) cannot write apps for the iPhone platform. They believe they could enrich the platform, in short order.

From a brand platform perspective, Apple’s task is to deliver a suite of iPhone applications that advances customers farther than Palm, Nokia, et al. How Apple will build a pipeline to deliver these apps remains to be seen. Some applications may be made available as web-based apps or widgets, via Wi-Fi, but these are limited. To be competitive, the iPhone will need a larger pipeline of apps than these.

Maintain the Apple brand in a Cingular world

Apple needs Cingular to help make the iPhone a reality, but to many Apple customers, Apple and Cingular represent opposing brand models: one company (mostly) on the side of liberating the customer through innovation, while the other (mostly) limiting the customer with onerous contracts and restrictions. No one would confuse the Apple brand experience with the Cingular brand experience, or an Apple Store with a Cingular Store.

Apple’s iPhone brand platform must include measures to maintain the Apple brand context, the Apple iPhone brand identity and the Apple brand experience front and center, with Cingular positioned as the deep background “carrier,” a recessive, dial-tone brand of switches and towers (and that—ahem—monthly bill.) Apple has managed similar brand acrobatics before, with the music industry and with these guys, but this will be extreme brand management in virgin territory, with high stakes.

Many potential customers may prefer to buy the iPhone and sign up for Cingular service in an Apple Store, and never have to venture over to the “Cingular side.” Apple has clearly thought about this, because Apple store staff will also be trained to troubleshoot iPhone problems, including Cingular network issues.

Long-term, the prospects for the iPhone brand look best if Apple can wean itself from exclusive dependence on a single carrier, and possibly leverage the iPhone’s Wi-Fi capabilities to enable low cost VoIP. (With what they save on calls, customers can buy more iPhones.) This assumes that Apple intends the iPhone to be more than a “handset brand,” and more than a flanking move to protect its iPod franchise.

Photo: iJavier — Flickr