If your city identity resembles a stew—made up of a little bit of everything—you’re in hot water, identity-wise. An identity is ONE THING that reigns supreme. Too many ingredients will smother the extraordinary “you” that’s trying to stand out. When you’re a stew, all you can do is blend in. As a city, that’s not what you want.

How city identities can become stew-like concoctions

City identities, often against their best intentions, can easily fall into stew-like concoctions. In an attempt to please everyone locally, they often try to accommodate every local constituency and interest, as equal ingredients. To insure that no one is “left out” they add everyone in, pretty much at face value. The result is a compromise identity, usually stirred with a time-worn slogan that means next to nothing. A slogan like “Someplace Special.”

A compromise identity full of contradictions

A compromise identity can’t differentiate a city. The city will appear like every other city singing the same tune of “everything for everybody.” An additional peril is that compromise identities often teem with contradictions in their attempt to please all local interests and all potential outside interests. A city with such an identity will often be portrayed as a peaceful, walkable  hamlet—with the nighttime pulse of New York. It will be a city that’s both great for shopping—and wilderness hiking. It’s a city that’s dreamily romantic—and a kid’s paradise. It’s a city renown for its luxury boutiques—and bargains galore. Eventually the city’s identity boils down to a classic hodgepodge, i.e., a stew. It’s a mishmash, with nothing really memorable.

The city identity is not a directory

You can usually detect a city’s compromise identity because the identity itself reads like a directory. Everything—and the kitchen sink—is tossed into the mix. The city itself never transcends this directory. In effect, the city has positioned itself as a mall—which makes it harder for the city to stand on its own.

The solution: a higher context of identity

The solution to this common problem is to find a new context for the city that rises above the classic identity stew. This requires some careful, critical and creative thinking, because we want the identity to differentiate the city in a manner that’s most productive for its residents and businesses. We aim for a strategic identity that will serve the city now and into the future. As a first step we re-imagine the city as a platform for more meaningful values, and behaviors. These are often already there inside the city, in latent form, waiting to be developed.

Photo credit: wallyg — Flickr

I played around with one of these when I was in Hong Kong recently, no doubt terrifying the petite clerk kind enough to show it to me. It is serious business.

Rescue to the rescue

The bright lime yellow certainly fits the emergency mission, but I’m puzzled why Victorinox calls this a “Rescue Tool” on the device, squeezing the name to fit. It is a rescue tool, but why not just a big and bold RESCUE on the handle? It’s RESCUE that they’re selling, more than a “tool.” And I’d bet they’d sell a lot more that way, too.

Every city or town yearns to be “someplace special,” a unique and delightful community that attracts good residents and plenty of visitors for local business and events. Sometimes, nature lends a hand. Usually, though, crafting a standout civic identity entails a careful plan, time and resources. A city tagline or motto can help in this regard, framing the city in a differentiating and productive context consistent with city goals.

Mount Dora is “Someplace Special”

It’s a bit rare, though, for a city to simply call itself “Someplace Special” as its tagline or motto. But that’s what the city of Mount Dora (in central Florida) has done. (See above.)

Here is how the city describes its “Someplace Special” tagline:

Formally adopted by City Council in June, 2007, “Someplace Special” is a short, alliterative, descriptive phrase that quickly and simply reflects the City’s unique culture and relaxed atmosphere which attracts visitors, residents and businesses. It remains catchy for easy memory recall in a simple phrase that can be easily utilized in a variety of marketing campaigns.

A tagline that’s vague on purpose

“Wait a second,” you might say. “Someplace Special” really doesn’t indicate how or why Mount Dora is special. In itself, the tagline is meaningless (and more than a bit time-worn). Shouldn’t the tagline distill the unique essence that is Mount Dora, that special quality that clearly sets Mount Dora apart from all other places on earth?

Well, the Mount Dora tagline is nonspecific on purpose. Back to the city’s description:

The City’s tagline is intentionally nonspecific so it may be used to communicate with every constituent of the City: residents, potential residents, visitors, business owners, potential business owners and City employees. Additionally, “Someplace Special” works well with the many diverse events the City hosts. “Someplace Special” can speak of any event, to any constituent of any age, race or gender, at any time of the year, and it may be tied in with a variety of marketing themes that arise: romantic, historical, quaintness, charm, festivals, luxury, budget and more.

An “artful, strategic and persuasive message”

The city’s identity guidelines go on to say that the “Someplace Special” tagline “enhances the value and relevance of the City’s brand and extends its reach; it compresses the overall experience of living, visiting and doing business in Mount Dora into an artful, persuasive and strategic message.”

A tagline that says little and fits every purpose

And there you have it: a tagline that says little and fits every purpose, from luxury to budget. It must confer some practical value because “Someplace Special” has been used by the city of Mount Dora for three years. I wonder, though, whether “Someplace Special” really does justice to the many qualities that do seem to make Mount Dora special. Does it point toward a unique civic character found nowhere else? Does it grab hold of potential visitors with the promise of an exclusive destination experience? Does it spark their imaginations, resonate with their deepest values and elevate Mount Dora to the top of their must-see places? And for those who do visit the city, does the tagline help focus the Mount Dora experience, intensify it into something remarkable, and extend it beyond Mount Dora so visitors carry it far and wide?

One visitor to the city said: “Mount Dora was pleasant and worth seeing once.” Perhaps he would have longed to return had his experience had more focus, more intensity, and fully engaged the values that made him tick.

Mount Dora does have special qualities

I’ve never been to Mount Dora, but from what I see on the Web Mount Dora may be far more special than its current tagline. The city (pop. 11,600) has wonderful architectural heritage with carefully preserved buildings, is rich in American values and tradition,  has nice shops (especially antiques), a beautiful lake, a picturesque lighthouse, popular events (here and here) and whimsically offers a Florida’s best “mountain-top experience” (at 189 ft. asl). It certainly has aspects of a walkable and charming historic village.

A tagline of convenience

Mount Dora’s “Someplace Special” tagline is what I would call a “tagline of convenience.” It demands so little that it’s easy to agree on, and to implement. That gives it a certain pragmatic value, which can count for a lot in a small city. Of course, using that criteria a city could just as easily call itself  “The Cat’s Meow” or “The Bee’s Knees.”

Someplace special—somehow

While Mount Dora has an abundance of special qualities, the tagline of “Someplace Special” doesn’t really obligate the city to do or be anything special. It makes no promise, commitment or pledge toward any particular kind of civic or visitor experience. It doesn’t hold the city to any special standard, vision or quality of life, nor does it project any. As it is, the city doesn’t have to do anything special to make this “special” tagline “work.”

A context for Mount Dora

A signal weakness of taglines like “Someplace Special” is that they don’t provide a differentiating and productive context for cities and towns. Mount Dora, however, seems tailor-made for such a context based on the experiences that it does provide. To name just a few:

1. Local heritage (100 years) and story
2. Retail that connects present and past
3. Preservation
4. Outstanding architecture
5. Village charm
6. Respect for traditional American values
7. Community values that only a small town culture can provide
8. Respect for art, craft and craftsmanship

Many of these elements are in short or shrinking supply in today’s America. In Mount Dora they’re plentiful and real, and they constitute real (and rare) value. They work together, too. A tagline challenge would be to crystallize these elements in a short and remarkable metaphor or phrase that clearly specifies and evokes the uniqueness that Mount Dora represents.

Social media lends a hand

Social media may help point a way forward for Mount Dora. Mount Dora’s Twitter page already seems to be extending the context of Mount Dora beyond the non-specific “Someplace Special” formalized by the city. The Twitter page describes the city as “A super quaint, 100 year old, lakeside, hilltop, New England town in Central Florida.” There’s energy in that description and a sense of what the city might offer, albeit very loosely focused.

Local business lends a hand

The Mount Dora Village Merchants and Business Association is on to something (in my view) when they frame Mount Dora as a “village.” Villages are rare. A village experience is very rare. The Association extends “Someplace Special” too, by adding that Mount Dora is “Someplace Special to play, shop, dine, stay ….” Unfortunately, this extension, while fine for business, doesn’t really specify the singular experience that Mount Dora as a village represents. The extension could refer to any city, including nearby Orlando.

(The Merchants site does refer to Mount Dora’s “Southern charm,” which is surely true, but that’s somewhat at odds with the Twitter page description of Mount Dora as a “New England town.” Which is it?)

Identity is exclusivity, not one size fits all

Mount Dora’s Twitter page includes a nonstop stream of local events, deals and promotions. That’s commendable, but my question would be this: how can the city identity rise above the various promotions and events that flood the local calendar. It’s as if the Mount Dora  identity is being reduced to a directory, a calendar, and a list of features. Moreover, a city that tries to be “everything for everybody” is never someplace special. It’s a strip mall. Identity is exclusivity, not one size fits all.

A context, not a “theme”

Should Mount Dora (and cities like it) ever consider a more differentiating and productive tagline they would want to focus on their real context, and not on a pre-packaged or concocted “theme.” Themes are a dime a dozen. And they’re facades. The context of a city is real, and irreplaceable. Its roots are in the city’s character, and in its residents, in their past and present, and in their aspirations. Such a context can  be leveraged, too, and that can mean development opportunities downstream.

A context city: Carmel-by-the Sea

A famous context city is California’s Carmel-by-the-Sea. It manages to be a world renown tourist destination while remaining true to its roots, genuine through and through. And being “genuine through and through” is a major reason why it’s a tourist destination.

Image: City of Mount Dora

A strong, well-managed brand will let all of its stakeholders sleep well at night: customers, employees, shareholders, partners, the public, and Mother Nature. They can all sleep soundly when the brand does its job.

Strong brands have a unique and wondrous power to deliver value—and to mitigate risk—throughout their entire ecosystem. Let’s see how each brand stakeholder in the ecosystem benefits from the brand:

Customers

Strong brands offer superior quality, comprehensive warranties and responsive customer service. They are accountable to their customers for their products and services, and this translates into market offerings that customers can trust. Customers know that the brand has their back. And knowing this, they can drift into pleasant dreams.

Employees

Companies with strong brands are the best places to work. The brand sets clear standards, and brand principles infuse operations at every level. Everyone is accountable up and down the line. A unified vision and mission focuses the work, making everyone more productive. Fulfilling work leads to fulfilling sleep.

Shareholders

Strong brands take care of business (and shareholders) in ways that optimize operations and mitigate risk. They build equity above and beyond product offerings. The operating brand principle: “The closer you look, the better we look,” is something shareholders can take to the bank. And sleep on.

Partners

Strong brands make the partnership stronger. They can be trusted to do the right thing. It’s weak brands that cause the 3 a.m. wake-up calls.

The Public

Brands are a public trust. Strong brands earn that trust by being accountable to the public for their products, services and corporate actions. The public sleeps well knowing that the brand will stand up for what’s right as much as it stands out on its own behalf.

Mother Nature

Strong brands take care of Mother Nature. She has no money, no purchase intent, and no brand loyalty whatsoever, but her strength is brand strength. Mother Nature sleeps soundly because strong brands know that any wasteland is a dead zone for brands, too.

Photo credit:  Spring | Sweden — Flickr

A brand, when properly constructed, helps its customers interoperate with the universe. Yes, it works at that level, and on those many, many levels in between. Let’s not forget that the genius of brands is that they have no limits. The value of brands is that through them, customers have no limits.

So yes, brands are big picture tools, for very big spaces. They help customers get from A to B, and to worlds beyond.

Wayfinding should be baked into brands

Brands negate the void, and the abyss. The best brands are a form of cultural orientation, and leadership. They certainly lead us on a directed brand journey of their own invention. Thus, some element of wayfinding should be baked into brands.

Brands might embrace new forms of signs and signage, directional cues as cultural cues, at all sorts of scale and resolution, the more personal the better.

Personal brand applications will have a key role to play in these developments. They can transform brands into a mobile sense, leading customers into (and through) new terrains. (A brand has no future if all it can do is lead customers in circles.)

A Slate series on signage

Slate has a nice series on signage and wayfinding beginning with The secret language of signs. It’s rudimentary signage, and for starters, not a bad place to begin.

Map the world and your customers will follow

In its series Slate has interesting examples of hand drawn maps, and how they can provide more meaningful/useful/human information than conventional maps. Yep, in brands we’re also in the mapping business.

How does your brand map the world? The universe? Customer want to know.

“You want the cooler, the six-pack and Wi-Fi for your iPhone?”

Why create a new brand glossary?

Brands are long overdue for a glossary of new concepts, terms and definitions tuned to an age of collaborative, bottom-up brands, where companies use brands to team with customers to innovate and create new forms of customer value.

This brand glossary is different

You’ll note little similarity between the terms and definitions here and those of conventional brand practice. That’s because most conventional brand approaches are campaigns to contain and control customers, rather than create them. In so doing they condemn themselves to run in circles, unable to innovate themselves (and their customers) out of a self-imposed corral.

Specific problems with traditional brand glossaries

Traditional brand glossaries often seem archaic and shallow today because they’re predicated on a narrow vision of brands as top-down, stylized sales stimulants. Traditional brand glossaries are typically written from an ad agency perspective, where “brand” is an emotional tool for persuading customers. Traditional glossaries usually assume a passive customer “audience” for brand messaging campaigns, where the brand aspires to be a “belief system” that serves the company’s interests. In this view, brands aim to be timeless (static) “icons” worshiped by “consumers,” who are positioned as little more than sheep with credit.

Traditional brand glossaries are therefore largely glossaries of control. The brands they describe really don’t do much for customers—except to keep them in place.

A glossary of brand innovation

In contrast to the traditional brand glossary, this is a glossary of value-based brands and of brand innovation. It contains concepts, terms and definitions for a new era of brands designed to foment new business by creating new customer opportunities. The essence of these brands is collaboration, not control. These brands create proactive new customers who leave old brands—and old companies—far behind.

Where I can’t stretch old brand concepts to fit new realities, I invent new concepts and new terms. Many of these concepts and terms are the subjects of full web posts in the Brands Create Customers weblog. (Check out the Key Posts section for examples).

This glossary is very much a work in progress. Your insights and comments are welcome, as is the dialog we can create.

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Architecture of Participation

A brand model that favors customer interaction and initiative through the brand, leading to bottom-up innovation and new market growth. It stands in sharp contrast to the top-down, command-and-control architectures of legacy brands. Companies choose an architecture of participation when they desire to team with customers to build new markets.

Brand

Brands are tools that enable customers to interoperate with the universe. The genius of brands is that they have no limits. The value of brands is that through them, customers have no limits.

Brands encompass many dimensions. The following definitions touch upon key parameters:

Brand (Core Definition)
Brands are avenues of value innovation in a creative engagement between companies and their customers.

Brand (1)
A brand is vertically integrated value.

Brand (2)
Your brand is one of your capabilities. It extends your ability to deliver open-ended value to customers. When properly executed, it accelerates customers to a new realm of fulfillment which you create, and which only you can sustain.

Brand (3)
Brand is a non-commodity experience. It can grow from a product or service, a company’s character, or from artful wrappers that sharpen customer perceptions. The essence of non-commodity experience is passion. Your brand has to have it.

Brand (4)
Strategically, the way you value your customer defines your brand. A brand that treats its customers as commodities (purely to be sold to) wastes much of its potential.

Brand (5)
Brands are programs to achieve company growth through customer growth. As programs they invoke two critical perspectives: 1) “the customer inside the product,” and 2) “the customer inside the company.” Weak brands distance the customer. Strong brands open their arms.

Brand API’s

Brand API’s are application program interfaces. They provide convenient latch points for customers to grab onto brands and advance themselves through the brand. The best API’s help convert customer initiative into better brand content, context and value.

To see a brand API in action, visit Apple’s App Store.

Brand Character

Functionally, brand character is the spine of a company. It’s evident when a company is accountable to the values that make it stand tall. This means accountability in action, not on paper. Brand character draws a line that moral weakness cannot cross.

Companies with character create brands with character. Brands with character lead.

Brand Chain

The brand chain begins where the classic supply chain ends. While the supply chain is made up of value-adding inputs leading to the product, the brand chain begins with product development and heads toward the customer. Through brand platforms and programs it delivers multiple forms of downstream value. The brand chain consists of creative brand interactions between customer and company, customer and product, and between customers themselves.

Brand Context

Brand context is the unique world of opportunity that a brand presents to customers. It’s the real deal of possibilities that the brand incarnates, and enables, across all human dimensions: creative, social, personal, emotional, spiritual and moral.

Brand context is human texture. It’s the opposite of artificial worlds fabricated by hype, spin, and distortion. (These are aspects of propaganda, not brands.)

A brand’s context is only as “relevant” as the customer opportunities it creates.

Brand Decay

Brands decay when they stop leading and start pushing. One of the first signs of brand decay is when brands begin extending themselves instead of their customers.

Brand Depth

The measure of customer presence inside the brand. Brand depth is a key indicator of a company’s ability to innovate on brand, and to create new streams of customer value.

Brand Design

The process by which the brand team designs a customer. (A brand is a customer template.)

Brand Engagement

“Engagement” means to set things in motion, as when we engage the gears of a machine. “Brand engagement” is the process by which the brand moves the customer forward, to a stronger sense of self, and to a higher plane of being and doing. As such, “brand engagement” is more than a mere brand/customer interaction stemming from symbols, messages and campaigns, where the customer is positioned as a passive audience. A brand engagement advances both the customer and the brand toward shared objectives. (The goal is to advance the customer into new market spaces where competitors can’t follow.)

Brand engagements are collaborations in context between a company and its customers. They invite customer initiative and participation as value co-creators. A brand engagement makes a customer better-off than a dis-engaged customer subjected to “branding” messages and communications.

Brand Essence

The essence of brand is collaboration. Brands are collaborations in context between a company, its customers and the product. The company may initiate this endeavor, but the nature and success of the brand will be determined by the most passionate player(s). And typically, people are passionate when the brand creates opportunities for personal growth.

Brand Experience (1)

The process by which the customer realizes new dimensions of himself or herself through the brand, via sensory, emotional or cognitive interactions. Typically, a brand experience becomes meaningful only when it exceeds expectations, i.e., makes a difference.

Brand Experience (2)

Brand experience is also what the customer passes on to others, or returns to the company, once engaged by the brand. Customers write the brand story based on their brand experience.

Brand experience is proactive, not passive. You do not create a sustaining brand experience by reducing customers to an audience.

Brand Hacks

Customers hack brands. It’s their way of pumping meaning into a brand that doesn’t measure up. In this process, customers add content and context that the brand originator overlooked. They effectively redirect a brand in this manner, migrating it into new value domains, sometimes far beyond the original brand vision. New brand strategies encourage (and thrive upon) brand hacks.

For these reasons, a primary mission of the brand is to cultivate brand hacks.

Notable brand hacks: Harley Davidson, Arm & Hammer.

Brand Icons

The false gods of conventional brand approaches. Icons don’t innovate. They usually mark a strategic dead end for a brand, when the brand loses its creative power and aims to harvest customers by 1) resolving itself to a symbol or slogan, or 2) trading on its past.

Conventional brand icons are their own worst enemies, trapped in their own rigid molds. They’re sitting ducks for brand iconoclasts, the new non-linear brands that spin up to create customers out of nowhere. Brand iconoclasts foment new streams of value, socialized (e.g., the mobile app.)

Brand Imagination

The quantum leap in thinking that separates value-rich brands from value-corrosive concepts. It’s the difference between iPod and “internet appliance.” The former plugs into the customer; the latter plugs into a wall.

Brand Innovation

A brand innovates when it makes the world more relevant for its customers. They gladly leave old brand worlds behind. Brand innovation often occurs as company potential X customer potential, and as product potential X customer potential. It is the brand exponential.

Brand innovation can take many forms. It can be material, creative, metaphoric, moral, spiritual, economic, or another form entirely.

Brand Journey

The shared experience of a brand and its customers as they pursue common goals. Through the brand journey, customers can discover new aspects of themselves: new strengths, new abilities, new ways of being and doing. Companies use the brand journey to discover new ways of creating value, and creating customers.

The quality of the brand journey—how enlightening, how enriching, how transforming—is a function of the brand vision, and the brand imagination behind it.

Brand Layering

The process of nesting sequenced brand benefits within the brand whole, leading the customer through phased discovery to fulfillment. Brand layering is typically integrated within the brand journey.

Brand Leadership

The ability of the brand to create opportunities for customers, and to lead them to a qualitatively better life. Brands lead by example.

Brand Loyalty (1)

The loyalty of the brand to what it stands for. In practice, brand loyalty is a mutual loyalty of company and customer to a common cause. The customer is loyal through the brand, not to the brand.

Brand Loyalty (2)

The transcendent condition that occurs when customers believe in you because you obviously believe in them.

Brand Mission

The brand mission can be refined to a simple, three-part directive: Grow the customer, grow the brand, grow the business. That’s what brand builders do. Their job is to grow their customers beyond the reach of competitors.

A brand without a mission is a brand without a prayer. The brand mission is a customer mission to escape commodity culture.

Brand Mode

Brand mode is the drive gear of brand builders. It is a radical way of thinking that innovates on value to jump customers forward. Brand mode generates new styles of freedom as context breaker and context maker, extending customers, products and platforms. You are in brand mode when your brain burns with the question, “What is holding our customers back?”

Brand Model

As critical as the business model. While the business model defines a company’s profit logic, the brand model defines a firm’s customer logic: the structure and meaning of the brand program, its internal and external engines, and how, when, where and why it creates and sustains customer value.

Brand Objective

Brands have one objective: to create the customers that sustain the business. This is a dialectic of mutual growth, where brand and customer advance one another. The brand leads by illuminating a customer destination and a path to get there. It frames a compelling story, plots a course, meets adversity with superior values, and sustains the customer going forward, to be sustained by the customer in return. Brands that fail to create the journey and the reward are little more than cover art.

Brand Operating System

The Brand Operating System (Brand OS) is a set of steps, leaps and revelations that enables customers to do more, and be more, through the brand. It includes integrated context, content and tools that customers can adopt to pursue richer realms of living. The Brand OS provides traction for customers in the direction they wish to go. In practice, it functions as a customer operating system championed by the brand, and fully interactive with it.

See also: The operating brand principle

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.

Brand Program

The set of applications through which the brand delivers value to the customer. Brand programs should be designed to grow customers, in accordance with the principle: “Grow the customer, grow the brand, grow the business.”

Brand Roadmap

The brand roadmap is a visual document that depicts the development stages of a brand and its customer relationships along an explicit timeline. The roadmap shows the phases, timing, and outcomes of planned brand innovations. Its primary focus is to illustrate how the brand (and the brand platform) will advance customers in concert with new product development. The brand roadmap lays out the sequence of planned brand interactions, relationships and experiences that will advance customers beyond the reach of competitors.

The roadmap is, first and foremost, a customer roadmap. It shows how the brand will grow customers in a manner that benefits them, and is also strategically beneficial to the business. The best brand roadmaps are a march to a new market space.

Brand Scalability

The ability of a brand to extend its customer logic to higher market levels, growing outward and upward from the product to a market-defining platform.

Brand Story

The narrative force that drives your brand. It’s the drama of past, present and future value that flows through you, and your products, to the customer. Brand stories are written by customers, in customer terms. A company’s identity and positioning will appear artificial and contrived if they are not supported by the (real) brand story.

Brand Strategy

A company’s brand strategy describes how the brand intends to create customers. Specifically, it sets forth the creative, social and moral steps that the brand will take to create the customers that will drive the business forward.

For more on brand strategy, see here.

Brand Toolkits

Brands compete for customer attention. One way to focus and sustain that attention is to provide customers with convenient brand toolkits to enhance their lives through the brand. Brand toolkits are compact “always on” brand applications, devices or widgets that can be readily personalized to deliver new streams of customer value. Their function can be parallel to, or convergent with, core brand benefits. Because brand toolkits can encapsulate the brand in dynamic customer context, they are well-suited to explore new brand spaces.

Brand Touchpoints

Brand touchpoints put customers in touch with vital parts of their lives. They move customers forward. If they don’t, they’re mostly brand gestures. At their best they’re strategic handholds that enable customers to move past the dorky touchpoints offered by competitors.

Brand Trust

Brands work for the customer and are paid in trust. Brand trust is earned;  there’s no free lunch. Brands that slack get sacked.

Brand rule: Brand trust suffers when marketing writes checks that the brand can’t cash.

Brand Vision

The ability to see your company’s future through your customer’s eyes.

Chronic Brand Deficiency

The condition suffered by customers whose growth has been stunted by years of subsistence brands. Those who suffer from CBD are ripe for brand innovation. Brands that follow a customer containment agenda often induce chronic brand deficiency—and are then stunned when customers flock to a brand that delivers more value.

Commodity

Lack of imagination by the producer.

Customer Creation

Brands create customers. In fact, brands are the engine of customer creation. They create customers by connecting the customer with his or her potential, using brand programs that leverage both the product and the company. The newly created customer reaps new freedoms in being and doing, sloughing off the constraints of incumbent brands. Creating a customer begins with a holistic view of your customers, where they’re going, and how you can take them there.

Customer Platform

The customer platform is the structure of resources, tools and capabilities that the customer relies on to succeed. A properly constructed brand platform can step in and support critical aspects of the customer platform, often in a 1:1 fit, freeing the customer to pursue additional objectives. In this process, the customer “adopts” the brand platform and can add value to it through customer initiative and innovation, ultimately feeding this value back to the brand.

Destination Brands

Structured experience platforms for tourist destinations (cities, regions, museums and other unique locations). Active destination brands are necessary because the physical destination itself is no longer enough, nor is scenic inventory, nor mere promotion. Every destination brand must be a creative act that enriches the visitor (in time and space) beyond the venue itself.

Destination Pump

In a branded destination, an experiential node that introduces a forward-focused element of brand experience to the visitor. It is the strategic and structural fanfare for what follows, given the programmatic concept for the venue.

Discovery-Driven Brands

Brands that follow a discovery process to lead customers to new forms of meaning in their lives. Discovery-driven brands employ a method of prototype, pilot, test and iterate to tune and re-tune brands along new context streams. This incremental approach enables brands to validate their assumptions in context, and to learn from customers going forward.

Great Brands

What makes a brand great is not that it does more for its customers. A great brand frees customers to do more for themselves.

High Performance Brands

Brands that accelerate customer growth into new market spaces, beyond the reach of conventional offerings. High performance brands are programs for action predicated on high levels of customer participation.

Iconoclastic Brands

Brands that route around entrenched brand icons and deliver value directly to customers. Example: Wikipedia. For every brand icon there is an equal and opposite brand iconoclast.

Innovation (1)

Products with more customer; process with less company.

Innovation (2)

Innovation is what you do for the customer, not what you do to your product.

Internal Brand Building

Successful brands are built from the inside out, as organic expressions of company leadership, culture and capabilities. Employees are conditioned to “live the brand” when company leaders exemplify brand values through their actions. Internally and externally, brands are built by example.

Brands are culture first, then commerce.

Legacy Brands

Backward-facing brands that can suck the future from a company. Legacy brands are predicated on top-down, command and control models which position the customer as a passive commodity, purely to be sold to. Legacy brands are vulnerable to competitors who create active partnerships with customers to innovate on brand, elevating customers from “commodities” to value co-creators.

Typically, legacy brands create diminishing value for customers. They are often predicated on obsolete value architectures from the past (and hence, backward-facing).

Lock-In Brands

Brands that rely on artificial, non-value measures to keep customers. Lock-in strategies are often self-defeating for two reasons: 1) the perception of lock-in undermines customer loyalty, and 2) perpetuating a customer base via lock-in removes incentives to develop better solutions. Lock-in brands lock out innovation.

Packaging (1)

The package is not the box. The real package is the customer, the company, and the product—going forward. A package is a structure (and style) of collaboration. Brands create the package that counts.

Packaging (2)

One of the greatest packages ever is the Polo Ralph Lauren signature stitched logo: brand, product and customer packaged as one.

Patron saint of brands

Dionysus, of course. He’s the edge-God, Mr. Wild Side, ecstasy in excelsis. Dionysian brands are a ferment of mind and matter. They’re primordial and potent, delivering visceral value, procreating customers, infusing every synapse of company being.

Peer-to-Peer Brands

Brands powered by users that arise, grow and mutate within a shared product or brand context. Peer-to-peer brands generate layers of meaning through common focus and/or passion. They serve customer agendas, but may open doors for new product and brand platforms. Market spaces of P2P brands include open source software, product customizations, automobile aftermarkets, modding, and software extensions. Peer-to-peer brands are brand additive.Brands designed to be extensible via peer-to-peer architectures can gain market advantage over traditional top-down, close-end brands.

Personal brand applications

Personal brand applications are software applications that deliver unique brand value to customers in ways that are personal, portable and persistent. Their intent is to form a brand partnership with the customer, with a depth of interaction far beyond conventional channels of brand communication. They become the customer’s virtual sidekick, mentor, confidant and guide. They watch the customer’s back, they go where the customer goes, and they are “always on.”

Personal brand applications are the future of brands, to be played out on personal digital devices.

Pseudo Brands

Pseudo brands are brands that aren’t. They go through the usual motions of brands—an eye-grabbing logo, pumped up personality, lofty vows, zippy tagline and media splash—but do nothing to advance customers, or a company’s ties to them.

Repetitive Brand Syndrome

The affliction suffered by companies that implement conventional brand formulas and wind up (again and again) looking, acting and struggling just like everyone else.

Starbucks

In many respects, Starbucks is still the future of retail. Starbucks has cleverly packaged an invaluable and inexhaustible resource (culture) with an everyday commodity (coffee). You provide the former, and pay a premium for the latter.

Tear-off Brands

Brand swatches clipped from established brand fabric to impart new brand freedoms to fast-moving customers, potentially extending the brand (and customers) into new market spaces. Tear-off brands accelerate brand imagination. Case in point: concept cars.

Value Net (Value Creation Network)

A system to co-create value established by a company and its customers, and driven largely by brand programs. Brands play a primary role in 1) opening avenues of collaborative value innovation to all parties; 2) organizing, documenting and managing value creation efforts; 3) articulating new modes of being and doing for customers; and 4) transforming new forms of value into customer growth, and market growth.

Value Innovation

The creation of new categories of customer value that can radically reshape markets. In markets where established competitors fight head-to-head on price and features, the value innovator defines a new form of customer value that transcends the status quo, potentially creating a new market space with high barriers to entry.

Value Proposition/Brand Proposition

There is a world between these two. A value proposition is part of the sale. The brand proposition is not for sale. Brand is not a transaction. It is a joining. A handshake. A kiss.

Working Brands

Brands that team with customers to create new value. Instead of projecting a corporate identity through symbols, slogans and high-level campaigns, working brands roll up their sleeves and make markets happen by directly extending products and customers. They are brands of collaboration rather than brands of persuasion.

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In a previous post, Brand lessons from the BP oil disaster, I framed my discussion by asking: Did BP fail its brand; or did the brand fail BP? In this post I’ll explore these two failure modes in greater depth. A brand failure like BP’s might arise from using the wrong brand model, which no amount of execution can save, or by employing a correct brand model but failing to implement it properly, especially at the management level.

What caused the BP brand to go off track?

I’m looking for causal factors that might explain why the BP brand went off track, resulting in the blowout disaster and massive pollution. Future hearings, investigations and court cases should provide us with much more data than available now. This is a preliminary snapshot, nothing more. My goal is to posit some basic brand rules applicable to all brands, in whatever business or organization. I’m using BP as a provisional case study.

(And to those who might argue, “You know, you really can’t separate brand strategy, brand model and brand execution” I’d say I agree philosophically, but I’m forcing such a separation here for analysis purposes.)

How can a brand “fail the company?”

The brand itself can fail the company when it’s the wrong brand approach for the business. This is a brand model/brand strategy issue, as I see it, in which a brand can fail the company in two ways. The first is when the brand model can’t advance the company and its customers beyond the reach of competitors. The brand doesn’t create competitive advantage, and the business suffers as a result. In the second (and far more serious) case, the brand fails to optimize internal operations, and in so doing actually increases business risk. The result may be a quality breakdown, or even a business breakdown. In both the first and second cases, a company has the wrong brand model for the job.

The perils of an “image campaign”

My “sense” is that brands most often fail the company when the brand is positioned as a stylized sales stimulant, in an “image campaign” of advertising and promotion. The resulting brand isn’t part of the meat and bones of the business. When stressed the core business can founder, with notable weak points being innovation and quality.

Signs that a brand might fail the company

Here are some specific signs (as I see them) where a brand might be in danger of failing the company:

1. The “brand” is defined as a media campaign that promotes the brand identity. It exists as part of the company’s persuasion and promotion package. (E.g., “Beyond Petroleum.”)
2. The brand doesn’t state what it values, and why. (And the brand is no guide to what’s right and what’s wrong inside the company.)
3. The brand makes no commitments.
4. The brand doesn’t define a clear chain of accountability.
5. The brand is largely decoupled from day-to-day operations. As a brand, it’s mostly symbols and slogans. It is not a working brand.
6. The brand relies heavily on myths and make believe, further divorcing it from day-to-day realities. (The brand also plays little role in innovation, quality and value creation.)
7. There’s nothing visceral in the brand for employees (and customers). It has a “Wizard of Oz” feel to it. Lots of smoke and mirrors, and a very big curtain.

How can a company “fail the brand?”

Let’s now look at the other side of the question: How can a company “fail the brand?” Here we assume a brand that’s properly structured within an effective brand strategy. The brand is OK, but the company prevents it from achieving its objectives.

Signs where a company is in danger of failing its brand

Here are some specific signs (as I see them) where a company might be in danger of failing its brand:

1. Management believes that the brand’s sole purpose is to make the company look good. The brand has no internal value beyond the “image appeal” it can generate externally.
2. Management positions itself above the brand. It doesn’t exemplify brand values in its actions, nor does it lead the brand by example.
3. No one in management is accountable to the brand. (Or accountable to brand values.)
4. The brand does not fuel the corporate culture. It’s decoupled from business decisions.
5. The brand is treated as a form of communication, rather than a method of optimizing operations. It’s kept as a messaging layer.
6. The brand team (if there is one) has no authority. It’s marginalized into a feel-good adjunct of marketing and corporate PR.
7. Management treats the brand as a financial “asset.” In this accounting mode the brand loses its position as a core value-set and tool for best practices.

And in BP’s case, perhaps “both”

In my previous post on BP (link above) I suggested that, based on preliminary indications, BP’s brand failure in the Deepwater Horizon blowout was probably a combination of both failure modes: a brand that failed the company, and BP management that failed the brand. Maybe more of the first than the second,. In time more facts will help clarify what actually transpired prior to the blowout, and may reveal other brand issues as well.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue — Flickr

At this point the App Inventor is fairly rudimentary, and the demo apps appear somewhat simple. Wait a few months, however, and we all might be surprised with the apps that  result. One observer calls App Inventor “a game changer.”

An excellent example of brand innovation

I see App Inventor as an excellent example of brand innovation. With App Inventor Google is putting more power in the hands of Android users. It’s enabling them to do more of what they want with Android, shaping apps to their personal or particular needs. These will be apps in the pure context of the customer, and as such they can build significant brand depth. They’re also at the edge of the brand ecosystem, and that gives the brand new territory to enter and explore. That’s what personal brand applications are all about.

Personal Apps or Corporate Apps?

Google provides an example of a personal Android app in the video below, but there’s nothing stopping businesses from developing their own Android apps for sales, marketing or operations. A delivery business might find use for such an app, because one of the functions is geo-location. And if the Android OS powers the (rumored) Google tablet, these apps may work on the Google tablet, too. That could open up more possibilities.

Types of applications possible

Quoting from Google Labs:

	Because App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are. You can build an app to help you remember where you parked your car, an app that shows the location of your friends or colleagues at a concert or conference, or your own custom tour app of your school, workplace, or a museum.
	You can write apps that use the phone features of an Android phone. You can write an app that periodically texts “missing you” to your loved ones, or an app “No Text While Driving” that responds to all texts automatically with “sorry, I’m driving and will contact you later”. You can even have the app read the incoming texts aloud to you (though this might lure you into responding).

App Inventor in education

App Inventor may have important educational uses. See the video here from the University of San Francisco.

Google video and demo app

Here is an introductory video from Google showing the app development process and a completed app: