Brands Create Customers

Every craft and every profession needs a patron saint. Your patron saint is the spiritual power and muse to tune your senses, watch your six, and ease the path ahead. It’s someone you can commune with on the Ducati, in the midst of a do-or-die decision, or while laying out the bills for a case of 2004 Antinori Tignanello.

People graced by a patron saint have that special glow. Their inner dashboard radiates a confidence of connection.

So, who’s the patron saint of brands?

Dionysus: patron saint of brands

That’s easy. It’s Dionysus, the edge-god of art, passion, creation and wine, Mr. Wild Side himself, ecstasy in excelsis, musician, dancer, fount of thoughts unbridled, lust undying. Like great brands, Dionysus unfolds the untamed. He pushes limits. In a world of tepid convention, he’s the sensual feast of free.

Not for the meek

Dionysus is not for the meek—but neither are brands. He’s a non-stop force of creative destruction, blasting the current context for something bigger and better, shredding, melding, re-shaping, re-birthing. He may be momentarily satiated, but satisfied—never. He doesn’t let brands coast, or calcify.

Brand-builders can’t have limits

Dionysus is the perfect patron saint for brands because brand builders can’t have limits. Their mission is to bring products to life, pushing, pulling and transporting customers beyond the grind, into new contexts of living. Brand builders don’t just strut upon a stage; they cook up new stages. Dionysus fuels their brew. (Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne above captures some of the Dionysian fire.)

The Dionysian license to create

Vital question: If you’re a brand builder, does having Dionysus as your patron saint grant you the license to let your senses soar and your creative juices run wild?

Vital answer: Only if the essence of your creation is a higher form of customer. (Brands aim high. Don’t waste your powers on trivia.)

Dionysian brands

There are brands, and then there are Dionysian brands. Dionysian brands are a ferment of mind and matter. Instead of being some concocted add-on, or a cheap-rent façade, they’re primordial and potent, delivering visceral value, procreating customers, infusing every synapse of company being. They’re passion from the core. You, the brand builder, are the music, the grapes and the dance. Step one is to Unzip Your Brand.

I’ll be discussing brands as interfaces at Dcamp in Palo Alto on Saturday, May 13. Hope to see you there.

As it happens, our core definition of “brand” is interface rich: “Brands are avenues of value innovation in a creative engagement between companies and their customers.”

That’s no accident. We see brands as guiding all sorts of vital interfaces in the ways that customers are created. We’ve written about that here, here, and here.

I’m looking forward to feedback and ideas from the BayChi people who will attend, and from interaction designers ready to liberate brands from the tyranny of the box.

I’m always on the lookout for any kind of “brand quick take” that can help a company gain insight into its brand. There are many to chose from. This is one I currently use:

How you challenge yourself defines your brand.

What it means
Every company is originally organized around a challenge it sets for itself. In startups, the founders set the challenge, and the challenge becomes the pulse of the business. The challenge runs deep. It is values, process and deliverables rolled into one. Employees “get it,” share it, and feel it. That’s why startups are such an emotional high, in spite of the ridiculous hours.

The nature of the challenge
The challenge is always to advance customers to a higher level, to a new plane of being and doing. This means the company will deliver new tools, new economies, new possibilities, and/or new customer freedoms.

Mature companies
The original challenge can become lost in mature companies. The founders are gone. The original fires are gone. Sometimes the original challenge is still reflected in the company’s mission statement, or the company culture. Often, though, the mission statement is cobbled together to be all things to all people. It doesn’t do much. And the company culture can sink into bureaucracy. The electric challenge that started it all has vanished. At that point, the brand is adrift.

The nadir occurs when a company defines its challenge as, “Just make it through the quarter.” That results in paper brands only used as window dressing.

Your challenge defines your brand
Whether a company is a startup or a mature enterprise, how it defines its challenge will define its brand. Great companies set great challenges for themselves. The challenge unites company and customer, values and vision. The greater the challenge, the more you demand from yourself, and the farther you can advance your customers.

Your brand translates your challenge into customer context, and leads customers with it. The greater the challenge, the greater the brand.

A great individual in so many ways, Jane Jacobs understood that cities are civic brands that grow their residents (and visitors) with an energy, imagination and richness found nowhere else.

She may not have invented the term, “architecture of participation,” but she taught the world that a city is indeed an architecture of participation, writ large.

Paul Thurrott, a leader in the Microsoft brand ecosystem, laments the broken promises, delays and performance shortfalls of Microsoft’s upcoming Vista operating system.

His concerns raise questions about the viability of the Vista brand itself:

1. After so many missteps, does it have the integrity of vision to lead Microsoft customers?
2. Is it “different enough” from Windows XP to warrant an upgrade?
3. Can Vista generate a brand platform that raises computing to the next level in productivity and user experience, and thereby raise the Microsoft brand ecosystem with it?
4. Can the Vista brand create and grow new customers, given that Apple OS X ships now with a competitive feature set, and Vista isn’t due until 2007?

Why the brand ecosystem matters
A company’s brand ecosystem consists of those parties outside the company who nurture and grow the brand. They are the positive (charged) layer of the brand’s public sphere. They include customers, potential customers, lead users, partners, complementors, fans, and media influencers (print and online).

Often, the brand ecosystem has a better perspective on the brand than the company itself. The ecosystem depends on the value that the brand delivers. It sees the brand in the hard light of reality.

When the brand ecosystem speaks, companies that value their brands listen.

The New Scientist reports that Philips has applied for a patent to force viewers to watch TV ads. The technology would disable TV controls while the ads played in live or recorded programming.

Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over. The flags could also be recognised by digital video recorders, which would then disable the fast forward control while the ads are playing.

Philips’ patent acknowledges that this may be “greatly resented by viewers” who could initially think their equipment has gone wrong. So it suggests the new system could throw up a warning on screen when it is enforcing advert viewing. The patent also suggests that the system could offer viewers the chance to pay a fee interactively to go back to skipping adverts.

If your brand intent is to make customers less free, insult them in the process, and take their money, your brand is officially DOA.

If Philips were smart they would assign this patent to EFF or Creative Commons on the condition that it only be acted upon to prevent similar idiocies from being pursued. That might snatch a win-win from the mouth of unmitigated disaster.

Markets and customers are constantly changing, but if you look at traditional brand methods, they really seem frozen in time. Some of their assumptions, concepts and practices date back a hundred years or more, when societies were far less diverse and dynamic than they are today.

Brands are not forever, and brand inertia is no virtue. Brands that cling to the past soon lag behind customers–who are a brand’s real bridge to the future.

Common Weaknesses of Traditional Brand Methods
Traditional brand practices can be handcuffs from the past. There are many ways they can limit a company’s ability to innovate on brand.

This chart identifies some of these weaknesses:

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You can learn a lot about brand building by watching the first 20 minutes of this Masterclass by Broadway legend Barbara Cook.

In this segment, Ms. Cook helps a talented opera singer free herself from operatic conventions and connect with listeners on a more intimate, emotional level.

Barbara Cook knows what she is doing. Her analysis, process and final results are eye-opening.

Too many brands aim to be high-flung arias and solos, full of formula effects and staged theatrics. They’d be much more effective as a personal, heartfelt chanson.

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(thanks to Metafilter)