Brands Create Customers

Behind every logo is a brand trying to reach out to customers. Since a designer’s job is to help a company unfold its potential, one hires the best designer one can afford when developing the identity and logo. A good designer can raise a logo from “packaging” to long-term brand performance.

Wired’s How Google got its colorful logo describes the iterative steps taken by Google’s founders and their designer to work out the current Google logotype. The step-by-step details are fascinating. Through design, the brand behind the logo emerges front and center.

A brand identity with a customer context

Sergey Brin and Larry Page knew what they wanted in the Google identity, but weren’t sure how to express it. The different design iterations helped birth a Google brand identity with a strong customer context. For starters, the logo/brand respects customers, by not getting in the way of doing a search. Second, the generous white space on the search page sets off the logo, and invites customers in. That big white space is customer space. Third, the vivid colors announce that this is a space for human expression—where Google and searchers team up.

Room to grow the brand

Of course, the Google logo itself doesn’t make Google search any better. You need sharp engineers for that. What it does do, however, is provide room to grow the brand. The design helps make the Google brand friendly, relaxing, inviting, unpretentious, fun and productive, so that Google connotes discovery and opportunity, never “work.” Long-term, this can set an engaging tone that makes adding more Google apps and services to one’s life easy, or maybe even automatic.

And then there are Google Doodles.

Logo: Google

While corporate brand strategists are busy re-thinking brands at the top, the most powerful brand innovations may be taking shape at the bottom. In the digital age, brand leaders are born at the customer level, far from boardrooms and PowerPoints.

Brand innovation at social network sites

Prime examples are social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook. These sites, and others like them, are quietly redefining the brand identity mission. In traditional brand practice, the identity mission was to craft a company brand identity that was coherent, consistent and compelling, and then use brand programs and practices to drop it like a silo over customers. In contrast, the social network sites are turning down the volume of their own identity messaging so they can amp up their capabilities to become identity creation platforms for their customers.

This is a development all brands will eventually adopt, to some degree, consistent with their objectives and market situation.

Customer identity platforms

In effect, this new dynamic turns the traditional brand identity mission on its head. The new brand identity is less about promoting a company identity and more about using the brand to help customers build their own identities through the brand, as an integral part of the customer creation process. It creates customers as brand partners rather than brand subjects.

In other words, instead of being an identity silo, the brand becomes an identity platform for customers. As the brand extends the customer, the customer extends the brand, and the company. The silos (and silo thinking) are left behind.

And thus, brand identity is no longer a front-loaded belief system that must be imposed on customers. It becomes a shared workflow, collaborative and multi-faceted, gaining strength because its social rather than private.

Customer identity drives social network sites

Social network sites are becoming the new medium for helping customers forge their own selves. For people in their teens and twenties, identity is a very big deal. You have to roll your own, gloriously, and painfully. The sites understand this, and instead of dictating a preordained site brand identity to the customer, the social network brand frees customers to discover the interactions and identity contexts right for them. Instead of being a static symbol of the company, the brand becomes a customer process, flowing customers into new contexts of meaning and relevance.

The brand as customer platform

In effect, the MySpaces and Facebooks of the world are becoming customer platforms. That’s the ultimate sweet spot for any brand. As a customer platform, the brand becomes a customer partner in exploring and delivering relevance. Rather than dictate monolithic “branding” messages to them, it becomes their infrastructure for personal growth. It’s the brand as a social place, a value network, a home away from home.

Fred Stutzman is doing some pioneer work in this area, and has pointed out that social network sites are popular in large part because they help young adults negotiate the primary contexts where they can articulate their emerging identities. See Fred’s “Situational Relevance in Social Networking Sites” for an overview. (And see also my earlier post which is based on Danah Boyd’s seminal work.)

The brand as identity enabler

I really like the phrase, “to articulate one’s identity.” That’s something a brand can help customers do. The brand becomes a preferred vehicle for customers to discover and articulate their own identities. It does so by providing them with contexts relevant to their lives. This is the brand as an enabler: active, open, potent and personal.

Brands designed to create customers will have an easy transition to being enablers of new customer identities. Strategically, they’ll be creating customers around new freedoms, where customers will find new avenues to grow themselves. The business goal, of course, is to grow the customers that will drive the business forward.

Learning from social network sites

For brand builders, social network sites like MySpace and Facebook are a “proof of concept.” The task now is to see which enabling elements of these sites can help other brands do a better job of creating customers. Since brands are always in “learning mode,” this process should not be difficult.

What’s clear to me is that to survive, a business must actively create customers. As part of creating customers, it must offer new identity platforms as springboards for customer development, no matter what it produces. The faster it grows its customers, the faster it grows itself.

Don’t forget what makes a brand great

An apposite entry from our New Brand Glossary: “What makes a brand great is not that it does more for its customers. A great brand frees customers to do more for themselves.”

At long last, there’s hope for the Dell brand. Dell’s new partnership with AMD signals a potential turnabout in Dell’s recent fortunes. After two decades of being the street seller for the Microsoft/Intel consortium, Dell had hit a brand ceiling. Brand-wise, there was no way for Dell to go. Certainly no way up. Microsoft and Intel made history, and Dell sold the souvenirs. Because the other two companies picked the game and held the cards, it was hard for Dell to create a strong brand identity with a strong customer connection.

A global faceless follower

Dell, based in a state of rugged individualism, had become a global faceless follower. And it’s no accident that everything that Dell isn’t, Apple is.

For a while, Dell’s claim to fame was its service. But that suffered when Dell decided to monetize service via outsourcing and cost cutting. Service quality crumbled, and Dell’s “service” cachet dropped off the cliff.

Recreating the Dell identity

The Dell brand can use the AMD deal to help recreate its identity. There’s energy in fresh starts. While the Dell/AMD relationship is limited, and currently focused on server technologies, there’s no reason it can’t expand to laptop and desktop markets, and carry a new Dell with it.

Let’s see: plucky AMD is the perennial chip outsider, now with a lead in chip performance. Dell is a proud Texan tired of being a hollow front. Down-to-earth Dell competes with the polished Apple. There’s the rough cut of a gritty brand story here, ready-made for this guy.

It’s way too early to predict whose products will define the emerging “home media center,” but at its big “Showtime” extravaganza this week Apple ran across the room and boldly jumped on the sofa. It can’t claim to own the sofa—far from it—but it certainly acts like it belongs there, with its Front Row remote in hand, new full-length movie downloads from iTunes and its sleek “iTV” device streaming Pirates of the Caribbean to our widescreen TV’s in early 2007. “I think it completes the story, and shows you where we’re going,” said Steve Jobs.

Microsoft, which has powerful technology of its own in this market, doesn’t seem to be inhabiting the same room as Apple. It’s standing uncomfortably back by the door, as if still wondering how to fit its classic market control strategies into this new high-touch, high-design world of mom, dad and the kids.

Apple’s brand advantage

What we’re seeing in Apple’s initiative is how a customer-centric brand strategy can undermine the market dominance of a far stronger player. Microsoft owns most of the cards, but it’s Apple who’s picking the game, and it’s Apple who’s dealing. It can do so because:

1. It leads with its brand
2. It has structured its brand as a holistic expression of the customer
3. Apple has integrated innovation into its brand, creating clear customer pathways to higher levels of value.

These three elements contrast with Microsoft’s historic strategy to control customer choice, a strategy that puts internal limits on Microsoft innovation. While Apple is just as hard-nosed as Microsoft in its business dealings, it understands that by making Apple a brand of innovation it can create market opportunities in areas Microsoft can’t easily reach. Case in point: Apple’s five-year head start between the first iPod in 2001 and Microsoft’s Zune in 2006.

Some observations:

The power of customer-centric brands

Brands can be “about the company” or “about the customer.” Apple’s brand is the latter. Its brand has a supple, sensory texture that helps customers feel more alive. Through its customer-centric brand strategy Apple appears to be your personal agent in bringing about everything you’d want in the promised land of digital innovation and digital media: convenience, performance and completeness. Apple exudes a focus on “you” with such easy, holistic confidence that you want to jump on the sofa beside them. (That, of course, is the plan.)

Brands as “the customer inside the product”

One way to think about brands is to consider brand to be “the customer inside the product.” A brand built this way will radiate a strong customer presence. It does so because your brand strategy has integrated the customer’s forward path into the product. When the customer is “inside the product” you complete the customer as you complete the product, creating a powerful brand advantage. (A contrast to note: Apple works on completing its customers; Microsoft works on completing its controls.)

Apple’s “brand path” effect

I’ve previously described the concept of “brand space” and how a company can use a brand space strategy to gather strength in new markets before its products are ready for launch. There’s a corollary to this concept that we might call the “brand path” effect. Think of the brand path as a vectored brand space infused with your brand vision and brand qualities. It’s a customer pathway paved by the brand, in the direction you are taking your customers, even though your full suite of products hasn’t been delivered. They can see it, and feel it. Apple may well have the reigning brand path in the home media center space.

Brand path is somewhat related to the “halo effect.” For the last five years marketers have debated whether an iPod halo effect would boost sales of the Apple Mac line. Well, it turns out that was the wrong place to look. The real halo effect of the iPod will be in the home media center, thanks to the brand path Apple is constructing. Apple’s brand path is the iPod scaled up to the entire house.

The real “video iPod”

In other words, in the brand scheme of things the home media center will not be a “computer.” It will have nothing to do with computers. It will be an extension of people, as laid back and as comfy as the sofa. It will be a holistic, brand-enabled media experience, the purest experience possible. It will have the simplicity and ease of use of the best consumer devices, as typified by the iPod. In more ways than one, the home media center will be the real “video iPod.”

Photo: re-ality, Flickr

The dramatic success of the Apple iPod is a major business story, but the iPod’s innovations in brand identity are a major brand story as well. The iPod represents a game-changing shift in how brand identity is developed and managed. It shows how brand identity can become more effective when it’s less about the company and more about the customer. For brand builders this may seem counter-intuitive, but the iPod demonstrates it can work with great effect.

The iPod’s brand identity innovation

The iPod has moved beyond traditional brand identity approaches in two critical areas. First, it shifts brand identity from a company context to the context of the customer. This is a big change that greatly expands the scope of “brand identity” itself. It allows for many new layers of brand innovation. Second, placing brand identity in a customer context opens many new avenues for creating customers, and for advancing customers beyond the reach of competitors. The iPod itself is testament to how this can be done.

I’ll discuss the iPod’s brand identity innovation below, but first I’ll review some of the problems with traditional approaches to brand identity.

Problems with the traditional brand identity approach

In a traditional brand identity approach, the brand team develops a brand identity that’s company-centric. The identity stems from a unique company “essence” that differentiates the brand from competitors and supports marketing goals. Unfortunately, this approach comes with a major problem out of the box: it treats brand identity as a proprietary “package” that’s separate from the customer. Because it’s company property, it’s not meant to be shared. The customer is simply invited (or persuaded) to embrace it, and to become, in effect, a (passive) brand follower.

The traditional approach makes no attempt to add value to the customer’s own identity through the brand. By its nature, it tends to reduce brand identity to a perception play. Because companies desperately want customers to embrace their brands, the marketplace becomes flooded with competing brand campaigns broadcasting “me, me, me” brand identity calls, much like preening birds in the jungle, vying for mates. For customers, this typically results in too little signal, too much noise.

The generic weakness of the conventional approach is that it produces a brand identity in the context of the company, whereas the market exists in the context of the customer. That’s a disconnect. Brands use advertising to bridge this gap, but advertising is imperfect and expensive, and increasingly locks the brand into a perception-play spend.

An alternative to the standard approach

There is a brand identity alternative. Why not: 1) add value with your brand identity; 2) share it with the customer; and 3) frame it in the context of the customer, rather than the company? This can provide you with a more direct path to creating customers in the first place, and then keeping them for the long haul.

And that’s where the iPod points a new way.

Identity is all about the customer—not the company

Customers care about brand identity when it helps them grow their own identity. In truth, they want their identity, not yours. In other words, effective brand identity is about them, and not exclusively about you. The genius of the iPod brand is that it elevates customers to a new identity, without trying to impose its own. This is an act of liberation, not an act of conversion. It changes the game of brand identity from being company-centric, where dozens of brands compete head-to-head, to being customer-centric, where a brand teams with the customer to create a shared identity platform.

Buy an iPod, be a DJ

The iPod nurtures a customer identity from below, rather than projecting a brand identity from above. Through this organic process, the iPod becomes a customer identity enabler. It raises the customer from being a lowly “buyer of music” and a lowly “buyer of an mp3 player” to a superior identity: that of being a DJ — with the creative power of 10,000 songs.

Why buy an mp3 player from Creative or Dell when one can be a DJ via Apple? Being is superior to buying.

As an identity enabler, the iPod delivers demonstrable coolness. The iPod includes iTunes, and with iTunes every iPod customer can create customized playlists for every mood and occasion. Yes, playlists are a creative act. The iPod elevates the customer from a passive listener in his/her room to a mobile music creator and performer (the DJ), ready to share one’s taste, sets, mix and rhythms.

Brand identity is customer identity

The iPod does more than give customers power over their music. The iPod offers them their own musical identity. And thus, buying an iPod is an investment in one’s own identity. This is real, not symbolic. iPod customers are unlocking a part of themselves that’s been repressed and constrained. Apple understands this, which is why the integration between the iPod, iTunes and the iTunes Music Store is so strong. It is “seamless,” as is the identity it enables.

In fact, the iPod presages a coming convergence of brand identity and brand experience, where identity is forged as part of the brand experience process. This also means that brand identity/customer identity becomes deeply interactive.

Identity that makes a market

The goal of any brand identity effort is to create an identity that makes a market. For this to happen, that identity must be a customer identity. Instead of trying to “sell” a brand identity to the customer, or hook the customer on an illusion, the iPod simply frees a powerful identity driver within the customer. Note how Apple highlights the customer in iPod campaigns. The Apple logo and the iPod don’t dominate the stage. We see persons totally at one with their music. And they’re not mere “listeners.” They’re manifestations of a new brand identity that exists as a customer identity: dancers, DJ’s, performers, creators.

Hosting the new brand/customer identity

Creative and Dell used traditional, company-context identity strategies against the iPod and failed to gain market traction. In effect, their “company first” brand identities had to compete against customer identities fueled by the iPod. It was “no contest” because the iPod had already changed the game. The iPod strategically repositioned digital music identity from the product to the customer. Using its “umbilical cord” of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, Apple now hosts this new identity—a very enviable position, indeed.

Photo: iLounge, Flickr

On Friday, May 19th, Apple opened its stunning Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. The large underground store is entered through a striking glass “cube” aboveground in a spacious urban plaza, making the entrance itself an iconic beacon. It’s an immediate landmark.

The Fifth Avenue store is a showcase of the Apple brand. It has lessons for all brand builders.

Framing the customer
To aspire to greatness a brand must frame its customers on a plane of greatness. Apple knows how to do this. Through its innovative architecture, Apple makes a trip to this store the virtual equivalent of visiting the Louvre in Paris, where visitors enter through an equally striking glass pyramid. Apple thus frames its customers in the context of Europe’s greatest art. The “cube,” though, does not mimic the Louvre’s pyramid. It honors it symbolically while making its own distinct statement. It invites customers to become active creators of art using Apple technology, not just spectators of past creations. Customers who enter the glass cube experience both the homage and the daring break.

The event
A cardinal rule of retail is to make your retail space an ongoing event that awakens your customers to new experiences. Your store is a realm of customer connections, not just a door and four walls. And “event” means drama—lots of it. Thus, opening a store becomes an exponentially dramatic event, flush with new connections. Apple is a master of such occasions. The indefatigable ifoApple has some Fifth Avenue event details. Here is a snippet:

The short early line and thunderstorms translated into a huge line just before and after the opening. At 4:10 p.m. New York Times tech writer David Pogue showed up with a new black MacBook, with the iMovie recording feature running, and was interviewing people. At the same time, we could hear the store employees yelling and hooting inside the store. At 4:30 p.m. there were 915 people in line, stretching around the block. Security guards split the line at business entrances to keep them from being blocked.

At about 5:30 p.m. dozens of store employees came up the stairs and started working the waiting line, standing on the plaza and making like cheerleaders–the crowd yelled back. At the same moment, Steve Jobs appeared at the entrance, generating more yells, including from some young woman who told Jobs, “You hot!” Apple’s architects and retail execs also joined the group, standing to the right of the cube entrance. Johnson and Blankenship hugged again. The press had arrived and were positioned to the right of the entrance.

With just 15 minutes left before opening, the young man who was #8 in line turned to his female companion and proposed to her. She accepted, and that set off a ripple of “Awwww” back through the crowd, and up to the Apple staffers. Some came over to offer their congratulations.

The waiting line was in a perfect configuration to watch the show and create sidewalk buzz. The closest people were both those at the front of the line, and those at the end. Both groups were looking straight at the cube, which is raised up several steps, creating a stage. The pedestrian area was jammed, and there was a huge crowd of people across Fifth Avenue trying to catch a glimpse of what was occurring.

Retail as an expression of brand
Apple rightly considers retail to be an expression of the Apple brand, on par with other brand expressions such as “design” and “user interface.” In other words, “retail” channels the brand. It is not allowed to impose constraints that bend the brand.

Apple demonstrates that retail space is also a spatial extension of brand, a multi-dimensional platform for customer experience and growth. Retail is thus a workspace for brand. You build out from the brand. It’s what your brand does with—and within—that space that defines who you are, and where you lead.

More on the Fifth Avenue Store from Apple.

Photo source: openeye, flickr

UPDATE: ifoApple looks into estimated construction and maintenance costs of the Fifth Avenue Store.

When you walk into an Apple store you feel your spirits lift, your senses sharpen. That’s a function of a retail space shaped by the Apple brand. And it’s no accident.

If you’ve ever wanted a detailed account of how Apple manages its brand in its retail stores, the ifoAppleStore blog is the place to go.

It’s all here: store basics, design, layout, brand identity, customer experience, architectures of participation and architectures of purchase, and the constant tweaks and adjustments to make it all work.

You can even learn all about those fabulous glass stairs.

MySpace is not a “container.” It is the uncontained.

Lesson A: Rupert Murdoch

Lesson B: Tila

This has been a tough week for Microsoft, and for the Microsoft brand. The scheduled release of Vista has been moved back from 2006 to early 2007, missing the big Christmas season. Release of Office 2007 will also be delayed until the new year. As if this wasn’t enough, the company also announced a massive re-org intended to re-align desktop and online strategies. And, at the end the week, both Dare Obasanjo and Robert Scoble cite weaknesses in emerging Microsoft brands. Dare compares new MS online brand efforts to competing Google and Yahoo brands, and finds the Microsoft brands confusing. The Scobelizer agrees.

Dare and Scoble make some good points. I’ve touched on Microsoft’s brand quandaries here, here, and here, and obliquely in my post Brands are code.

(more…)

Here’s what Walt Mossberg has to say about Microsoft’s Office Live offering in his column of February 23:

Confusingly, Office Live has nothing to do with Microsoft Office, the company’s productivity software suite. It doesn’t include Web-based versions of Office programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

If the way you name your products leaves customers confused, don’t expect them to line up at the sales counter any time soon. (It’s never a good sign when your own employees have reservations about a naming scheme.)

As we’ve said before, and will no doubt say again: in brands there is no beta.

And just for fun, don’t miss the web site that Walt created using Office Live tools.