Brands Create Customers

Well, to answer this question right at the start, the answer is “yes.” In fact, a lot of mainstream brands have already gone over the falls, but their demise has been shrouded in mists of mismanagement, buyouts and bankruptcy. But make no mistake about it: they were brand failures first. The other things happened when they had already let themselves drop over the edge.

The mainstream brands that are still afloat are somewhere upstream, in the middle of the flow, enjoying the serene drift. Perhaps they can’t hear the deafening thunder of their fate, but they’re surely coursing toward it.

What makes a mainstream brand?

Mainstream brands are defined by their assumptions:

1. They assume brands are all about shaping perceptions, rather than delivering value.
2. They assume the sole mission of brands is to push the product. In their view, brands are “the salesman on the package.”
3. They assume customers are only valuable as one-dimensional “consumers,” and that customers can add no value back to the brand, or to the business.
4. They assume that the only way to build their brands is through top-down media campaigns.
5. They assume that brand success means corralling and containing the customer—under lock and key if at all possible.
6. They assume that brands are a substitute for innovation. Get people to believe in “the brand” and you can stop innovating and preserve the status quo, forever.
7. They assume that brands “never rock the boat.”

And then they feel the waters quicken, and hear a distant rumble.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but a primary purpose of your brand is not to be seen.

It is to be seen through.

Your brand is a lens that enables customers to experience their world, and their role in it, in a richer and more complete context. You show the way.

A brand activates beyond the brand. It does not hook.

It frees.

And great brands do not sit dumbly on a shelf.

They fly.

The highly publicized Yahoo peanut butter memo has identified some key problems in Yahoo’s structure and strategy, mostly related to “spreading the company too thin.” Many companies can relate to these issues. The memo makes some good points. Here’s a small taste:

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

Sounds like a brand vision problem to me

In reading the memo, my first reaction was: These issues all point to a problem with brand vision. There’s lots of Yahoo pieces in play, but no clear picture of where they’re taking Yahoo—and Yahoo customers.

“Brand” is mentioned one time in the memo, and the way it’s mentioned is somewhat revealing:

We have awesome assets. Nearly every media and communications company is painfully jealous of our position. We have the largest audience, they are highly engaged and our brand is synonymous with the Internet.

I would argue that if Yahoo’s brand is “synonymous with the Internet,” Yahoo has a brand problem. Yahoo really needs its brand to be synonymous with customer dreams and aspirations, and for that it needs a clear (and coherent) brand vision.

Brand vision defined

Let’s start by defining “brand vision.” Brand vision is the ability to see your company’s future through your customers’ eyes. (No customers, no future.) It’s a shared vision that comes from being customer-connected at a level that’s at once visceral, and spiritual. (These guys get it, as do many others.) When you’re in this zone as a company, your brand pumps customer blood, and you think, feel and act like a super customer. It’s a creative high, 24/7. And it’s the brand’s job to help articulate this vision, across all relevant customer dimensions.

Rarely, if ever, is a successful brand vision a private dream hatched in a vacuum, and unilaterally projected from the top. Those approaches tend to stay in a vacuum. And they can drop you into an undifferentiated brand tableau that might look something like this.)

Brand vision takes leadership

Brand vision takes leadership, because customers are usually wrapped (and bound) in the present. They can have a hard time discerning their future until you map it for them, with pathways, platforms and value they can use. That’s why I call brand vision a “capability.” It shows in what you do, not in what you put in a PowerPoint, or in a media campaign.

A brand vision is simple and direct

Keep in mind that the best brand visions are simple and direct. They’re pathways, platforms and value. There’s no room for corporate ego, and no need for gaudy spectacle or Utopian fantasies. The brand vision of the United States was a Bill of Rights, democracy and a promise of 160 acres to pioneer homesteaders. The pomp and circumstance of regal brand trappings were stuffed in a bag and shipped back to England.

Brand vision is a mutual vision

That said, the goal of your brand vision is not to steer customers toward the future you want. It’s a mutual vision. You are helping customers articulate a future that will advance the both of you. Think of it as binocular vision, with the attendant deep perspective. Your brand vision engages customers in ways that help you gain new market insights and directions.

Customers become co-creators of your brand

Given a vision that adds richness to their lives, customers will amplify, elaborate and extend your brand in ways you can’t imagine. They become co-creators of your brand because they can expand your field of vision and your depth of field. That can give you significant market advantage. But if you treat customer “eyeballs” only as a window on their wallets, the results are far more problematic.

Brand properties are not automatically a “place”

One reason why Yahoo might find itself “spread too thin” is that it’s been less concerned with brand performance and more concerned with staking out large swaths of turf, as large portals do. In this approach, you buy a lot of properties to become a large landlord, exerting some control over those who reside in your (expanding) domain. But these properties do not automatically make a “place.” Only customers can make it a place—when they share a brand vision.

Acquisitions and brand vision

This week Amit Chowdhry gives us a detailed rundown of the 44 acquisitions Yahoo has made since 1997. It’s an interesting list. Each acquisition was a logical move to gain a strategic property. What’s not clear (as evidenced by the peanut butter memo) is the over-arching brand vision that integrates them to carry Yahoo and its customers forward.

Bottom line, the Yahoo brand vision is still a work in progress. Lucky for Yahoo that Microsoft and Google are very much in the same boat.

Image: Lego blocks

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

Brands and the cinematic experience

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

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

Brands and “persistence of context”

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

The brand narrative is all about the customer

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

“Cinematic” or “landscape”

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

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

Breaking through the prescribed heavens

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

Brands as metaphor

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

Brands: portrait view, or landscape view?

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

The landscape view of value-based brands

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

Semi-bottom line

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

Photo: mikefats — Flickr

Note: updated August 11, 2007

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

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

After a robust run of 100 years, traditional top-down brand models have passed the point of maturity. They’ve peaked, and now they’re on the down slope. Across all markets, they’re being challenged by upstart brands that march to a different drummer: the customer.

Yes, new brand models are on the rise. They work from the bottom up.

This chart highlights the differences between old brand models and the new brand models taking their place:

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