Brands Create Customers

What should companies do with brands that still retain valuable equity, but no longer generate expected sales? A growing market for brand builders is to develop strategic revival programs for such brands. A case in point is Booz & Company, which has announced a new service to help companies regain “new life for tired brands.” It’s “a rigorous, data-driven approach to brands” that helps companies decide whether to retire a dormant brand, or try to revive it.

(I have to admit that I did a double-take at the phrase, “tired brands.” It echoes the famous “tired blood” campaigns for Geritol®, the iconic tonic of old folks. Geritol® is now kind of a dormant brand itself, but it did have its frisky moments 50 years ago.)

It’s not the brands that are tired

Of course, it’s not the brands that are tired. It’s customers who are tired. They are tired of mediocre, do-nothing brands. That’s why they ignore them. The real brand challenge is to provide new life for tired customers.

A balance of analytics and emotion

In reviving a “dormant brand” one must balance analytics (on the marketing side) with the emotional and qualitative elements on the brand/customer side—as the Booz approach recognizes. To revive a brand means to revive a customer, and that calls for a fresh look at where customers want to go, and how the company can take them there. A piecemeal “brand refresh” does little. The goal is a strategic revival with new pathways where the brand can create and grow customers. Or better yet, change the brand game.

Choosing the right brand model

In any brand renewal effort, it’s also important to select the right brand model. An inappropriate model may fail to recognize (or capture) potential brand opportunities. For example, a traditionalist (i.e., old-fashioned) approach might position the brand as a stylized sales stimulant. That’s a messaging model typically geared to produce conventional media campaigns for a passive “audience” of customers—who may soon tire of it. A more productive model would be to make the brand a customer enabler, powered by interactive and collaborative brand programs that engage customers in new dimensions.

The brand as a tool to revive customers

If you think of the brand as a tool to revive customers, and to help them get where they’re headed, you may find that customers themselves become proactive players in the revival effort—a very good sign indeed.

Photo: wallyg — Flickr

An article that every brand builder should read is Branding Youth in the Totalitarian State in Design Observer. The article is based on Steven Heller’s new book: Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State.

The article raises all sorts of interesting questions about the relationships between propaganda and brands, and on the “totalitarian” nature of brands themselves.

1. Are brands a form of propaganda?
2. How are brands different from propaganda?
3. Are the best brands “totalitarian” in concept and in execution?
4. Is every brand builder a closet fascist, inventing a new world order for customers?
5. What are the strategy downsides of brands conceived and executed as propaganda? What other brand models could disrupt them?

I’ll tackle these questions bit by bit in coming posts.

Two brand models: containment vs liberation

As part of this discussion maybe we can assess different models of brands, among them a persuasion or propaganda model, and a contrasting liberation model. A persuasion or propaganda model would try to shape customer thoughts and feelings so as to contain customers, to keep them in place so they continue to be “loyal” to the brand and purchase the product.

In contrast, a liberation model of brands might aim to free customers to be more proactive for themselves, on the premise that greater sales will flow from a more proactive culture, where customers are active players in product development rather than a passive audience. (This model assumes a company can lead by innovation into a proactive culture, and that can be a very risky assumption.)

Two previous posts along these lines:

• Managing the brand agenda for customer growth
• Some brands go medieval on their customers

Totalitarian brands—and brand builders

To a certain extent, every brand builder has a totalitarian mindset. (Yes, admit it.) We conceive of a “total” unified and integrated brand experience where the brand identity is carefully composed and actively expressed. We make sure that every symbol, slogan, color, theme, touchpoint, etc. is set forth to maximize the brand effect. Behind every logo is a torchlight parade.

Personally, I tend to be a super-totalitarian in this regard, but I always have to ask myself: does this approach leave sufficient room for the customer? Since we’re trying to build the brand through the customer, shouldn’t we also focus on building customers themselves so their freedoms can create new markets for us?

Limits of a totalitarian brand strategy

Some questions: Can a brand be too totalitarian? Does a totalitarian approach create passive customers who are a dead end strategically? Can we build a totalitarian brand from the bottom up? Does a totalitarian brand just hold customers back? Or can it set them free?

More to come.

NOTE: See also the Youth under fascism site, which is the source of the poster above.

Martijn van Welie has written useful guidelines to help interaction designers deal with brands in “Brand behavior in interaction.” This is part of a longer series he’s doing called “Thoughts on interaction design.”

I’ve addressed the same subject from a slightly different perspective in Interaction design: the new key to brands.

Brands as interactions

If brands are interactions, then interaction designers will play an increasingly important role in brands themselves, especially as brands migrate to digital platforms like the iPhone. Their talents will be needed to make brand interactions amazingly productive for companies and customers, with solutions that address:

1. How to maximize customer autonomy and freedom, through the brand
2. How to make the brand a “second skin” to customers, one that is also personal, portable and persistent.
3. How to foster customer participation and collaboration in building the brand, on an equal level with the company
4. How to create strategic brand communities, value nets and “creation nets.”
5. How to source brand innovation at the edge
6. How to ensure that the brand delivers value the customer can use
7. How to intensify and enrich the brand engagement

Interaction designers as the rock stars of brands

I’ll still keep my original prediction that interaction designers stand a great chance of being the new rock stars of brands. Their skills can unleash myriad new ways for brands to create customers, widening the gap between brand winners and losers.

NOTE: I originally dashed off this post while getting ready for a flight, and have now had the time to add to it since it first appeared.

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

A Google brand play

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

A brand of deliverables, not promises

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

In education, integrity and trust are fundamental.

Google in the classroom

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

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

Building the integrated brand

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

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

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

A Google brand platform for education

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

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

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

Photo: jisc_infonet — Flickr

The AP reports that General Motors is now mulling the sale of struggling car brands Saturn, Saab and Buick in addition to its plans to unload the Hummer brand. A while back I noted the Hummer’s brand strategy problems. The other three brands are in a similar predicament: too much company, too little customer.

A Saturn brand that went nowhere

Of all these brands, Saturn is the most painful failure. It was launched with great fanfare in the early ’90’s as a Japanese import killer, a high-quality, high-value brand aimed directly at Toyota and Honda. The Hal Riney ad campaign that got it off the ground was a classic. Yet, after a few years GM neutered the brand. It’s been an afterthought ever since—while Toyota and Honda are stronger than ever.

A hefty dose of kaizen in the Saturn brand might have made a difference.

We don’t often think of brands as “incubators,” but incubating customers turns out to be a critical part of the brand mission. As a matter of fact, it’s strategically vital.

The logic of incubating customers

Let’s begin by observing, first and foremost, that brands are creative partnerships between companies and their customers. They’re a team effort, bottom-up as much as top-down. As such, brands have a vested interest in incubating as many energetic, diverse and free-thinking customers as possible. These are customers who can push the product envelope and the brand envelope into new forms, formats and markets. In so doing, they add value back to the brand from a dozen different directions, and help drive the business forward.

Strategic incubation

As warm and fuzzy as “incubation” might sound, brands incubate customers for reasons that are strictly strategic. The payback from incubating customers is competitive advantage. Your goal in incubating customers is twofold. You want customers who can:

1. Augment your R&D
2. Carry your business into new markets where competitors can’t follow.

The customers that your brand incubates today may drive your strategic platforms of tomorrow. By incubating customers your brand becomes a means of innovation, organically developing new contexts of product and service value.

The incubator model: an innovation platform

There’s a very specific brand vision behind the incubation process. That vision understands that customers are much more than mere “buyers” of products. They’re potential innovation partners who can pay bottom-line dividends far into the future. Thus, we employ an incubator model that’s much more than heat lamps and a comfy nest. In brands we incubate innovation, and we design the brand as an innovation platform for customers. (Brands belong in the innovation department far more than they belong in the marketing department.)

Brands as innovation tools

Brands are, of course, the premier tools to create (and incubate) customers. Brands enjoy this special status because they encompass creative, social, personal, emotional and moral dimensions. These are all potential innovation levers. This special scope grants brands a transcendent power to transform customer lives—in the right directions if the brand is morally and socially grounded.

A reference model: Y Combinator

One reference model for brand builders is that of startup incubators, the boutique companies who help fledgling entrepreneurs turn raw ideas into business. Treat your customers as brand entrepreneurs, because that’s what they want to be, and that’s you need them to be. A useful model to examine in this regard is the successful business incubator Y Combinator. Brands would do well to learn from their vision and focus.

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Back in 2003 a prominent Windows user tried to download a new Windows application to his machine. The download did not go well.

Bill Gates fired off a blistering email to top Windows honchos detailing his experience, and his frustration. You can read that email here.

“No one wants a relationship with their mustard.”

Kara Swisher uses this quote (from an ad agency exec) to begin her post, Social ads not cutting the mustard? She examines why widgets and other forms of “social advertising” haven’t (yet) lived up to their billing.

She continues:

This odd but spot-on observation was about why big packaged-goods advertisers–who are the really big spenders of the ad business–might be less than interested in leveraging social-media advertising and its promise of deep engagement with consumers.

No one wants to interact over mustard or mayo or ketchup or most products that pay the rent up and down Madison Avenue.

Brands and the big picture

In a narrow sense Kara is quite correct: we don’t need to chat with our jar of Grey Poupon, or have it update our Google calendar, or follow us around on Twitter. But no one really expects that, either. Such a focus on the jar or the tin is myopic. In the big picture of things—where brands play—relationships with products like mustard are very important indeed. They’re the essence of brands. What counts is the context of the relationship, and the ability of the brand itself to make that context sustainably engaging.

In brands, context is king

From a brand perspective, the blanket statement that, “No one wants a relationship with their mustard” is self-limiting. It precludes brand opportunities. Consumers can be open to such relationships—if they’re meaningful. Using mustard as an example, mustard brands have been designed to be very rich in relationships for decades. They certainly want relationships with their customers, beginning with brand trust and brand loyalty. And they certainly want their customers to have relationships with them—beginning with the brand experience of a consistently tasty product. These relationships are money in the bank.

Building the brand enthusiast

Customers who use a particular mustard will often swear by it, testifying to their relationship. If they also use it for marinades, sauces and dressings, the mustard will play a significant role in their recipe repertoire and cooking lifestyle. This places the mustard in the brand Nirvana of the enthusiast, and believe me, in that space will be a relationship. Weber understands this quite well, for example. And would Weber ever think, even for a second, that people don’t want a relationship with their grill?

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The US Army seems to think so. It is establishing its own air arm, to be more responsive to tactical needs on the ground, where today’s battles are increasingly won or lost. The Army’s focus is on unmanned surveillance aircraft under control of local (Army) officers:

. . . [I]n Iraq, the Army has quietly decided to try going it alone for the important surveillance mission, organizing an all-Army surveillance unit that represents a new move by the service toward self-sufficiency, and away from joint operations.

. . .

The work of the new aviation battalion was initially kept secret, but Army officials involved in its planning say it has been exceptionally active, using remotely piloted surveillance aircraft to call in Apache helicopter strikes with missiles and heavy machine gun fire that have killed more than 3,000 adversaries in the last year and led to the capture of almost 150 insurgent leaders

Brands are about performance, not “essence”

The Army’s air power initiative illustrates the rule that to sustain a brand, you have to deliver the goods. Your iconic “essence” is immaterial. You perform, or a better brand takes your place. Sometimes, customers take matters into their own hands—as in the case of the US Army.

The task force of about 300 people and 25 aircraft is a Rube Goldberg collection of surveillance and communications and attack systems, a mash-up of manned and remotely piloted vehicles, commercial aircraft with high-tech infrared sensors strapped to the fuselage, along with attack helicopters and infantry.

Bottom line: Brands of “essence” never have a chance against brands of innovation.

Photo: Wikipedia

From today’s WSJ:

In retrospect, Microsoft’s unsolicited approach appears to have badly backfired. Instead of winning Yahoo’s huge audience and online search capabilities, Microsoft has driven its quarry into the arms of its arch enemy — Google.

Like brands merge because they can see themselves on a common platform with uncommon opportunities. But when one brand is ill-suited, stunted or malformed, the platform will be full of holes, and pitfalls. Players inside both companies can see this coming. They avoid it like the plague.

For a bit of perspective, see here and here.

Photo: zoer — Flickr

Often, a major hurdle to brand success is the actual brand model that a company employs. For example, a brand model that reduces a brand to part of the sales pitch, and sales package, can actually handcuff the brand’s ability to create customers. That’s because brands tied to the “influence model” become elements of a persuasion package, and little more. Their value to customers is limited, and their platform potential is nil.

The confluence model

A more strategic approach is that of brand confluence, where your brand enables you to join with customers in a stronger forward flow. In the photo above, imagine that the river on the right represents the customer. Your brand becomes the river on the left. You join the customer in a major confluence of forces, mixing and becoming one, stronger together than when apart. (And indivisible, too.)

In this approach the brand model is that of “value creator,” not “persuader.”

Join the customer flow

The confluence model is one of joining and teaming, rather than one of influencing.

Once your brand is “in the customer flow” many previous barriers to acceptance and adoption suddenly disappear. Instead of squaring off as “seller” and “buyer” you emerge as teammates and partners. Your brand now works from within, instead of banging on the door from without. You now have the opportunity to merge your value stream and your strategic direction with that of your customer, enabling the two of you to go where competitors can’t follow.

Confluence creates customers

How can brand confluence create customers? You’ll find a starting point here.

Image: Google Earth