Brands Create Customers

In my view the best way to develop a brand is to create it as a joint venture between the company and its customers. In this strategy we shape the brand as a working relationship of equals in a shared context rather than a marketing relationship between separate “buyer” and “seller.” The result is a dramatic change in brand context, and greater opportunities for brands and customers alike.

Brand and customer on the same page, writing it together

In a joint venture the brand and the customer are on the same page, writing it together. Customers are not a passive “audience” for brand theater. The two are allies. They’re co-explorers. Sidekicks. They’re a team, solving mutual problems in a context of collaboration. The joint venture enables trust, feedback, idea flow, cooperation and co-creation. This stands to be a far more productive approach than the brand modeled as a “communication” between separate parties. In the latter case, brands are often reduced to a persuasion tool, a product wrapper, a pie-in-the-sky promise or campaigns to manipulate emotions.

The brand as a joint venture to create value

“OK,” you might say, “I can see where the brand might be structured as a joint venture, but what is it a joint venture of?  What’s the purpose?”

Good question. Simply stated, it’s a joint venture to create value, for both the customer and the company. As I’ve written previously, brands are a method to create value above and beyond the product proper, with the entire brand working as a customer-facing application, with all the focus, power and outcomes that applications can deliver. We shape the joint venture so that customers can add value back to the brand as they themselves advance to richer realms of living, and to new ways of being and doing. The customer is an active part of the application, too. The joint venture structure fits hand-in-glove with the brand-as-application strategy.

A context of getting things done

As a joint venture we place the brand in a context of getting things done. The brand is action-oriented, not persuasion-oriented. It’s not about “aligning” customers to the brand as if they were medieval serfs to be pumped with doctrine and kept in a static universe of perpetual dependence. (That’s what your competitors try to do, and that’s what makes their brands vulnerable.) As a joint venture, the brand can envision and create new market spaces where company and customer are both significantly better off. In a joint venture the brand agenda is one of creating new customer freedoms, not imposing another set of customer controls. The brand steps up with the vision, the path and the tools to get there, as set forth in the brand journey.

Strategic objectives of the brand as joint venture

What’s the strategic objective of this joint venture?  It is to use customer insight, initiative and innovation to advance customers beyond the reach of competitors. In essence, the brand and its customers get together to gang up on competitors, especially those who aim to capture, corral and control customers using the brand as a mental and emotional silo. There’s no future for customers in that kind of brand desert. As a joint venture the brand enables customers to transcend the limitations imposed by competitors, reshaping the market, or creating entirely new market spaces where customers are better off. A classic example is how the iPod teamed with music lovers to route around the expense and restrictions of the CD format, reinventing the music industry in the process.

The joint venture and brand experience

Customers today value brands by the totality of experience they provide: before, during and after the sale, and including the behavior of the brand itself as a responsible world citizen. When we construct the brand as a joint venture we “socialize” the nature of brand experience itself, making it participative and interactive. Brand experience becomes not what the brand “does” for customers, but what customers and the brand create jointly in pursuit of common goals. In short, we co-create brand experience, giving it two potent drivers instead of one.

Strategic advantages from the brand as a joint venture

As a joint venture the brand delivers the following strategic advantages to company and customers alike:

1. It unites them—creatively and pragmatically—in a common context, with a common goal. Each gains a market ally.
2. It replaces “buyer-seller” (and brand as persuasion) with team effort—and brand as mutual enabler.
3. It creates new avenues and opportunities to circumvent (or disrupt) incumbent brands.
4. It’s a team of equals where the end product (a customer who’s strategically better off) helps advance the brand to market spaces where competitors can’t follow.
5. It’s a full-blooded, and full-bodied, collaboration in context, content and in value. It facilitates brand innovation, especially non-linear brand breakthroughs.
6. The joint venture is not confined to today’s products. It’s geared to an arc (or narrative) of customer development. The brand isn’t selling a product. It’s developing a customer. (Personally I’d say it’s “creating a customer,” but let’s give Steve Blank proper credit.)
7. The joint venture not fence customers in. It’s a platform (or innovation engine) to develop new brand frontiers.

Further reading

As further reading on developing the brand as a joint venture with customers:

• Position the customer, not the brand
• A brand is not a lure (and customers aren’t fish)
• FAQ: Creating your brand as a customer-focused application
• Brands as collaborative strategies
• How great brands change the game

If there’s one general rule for brands it would seem to be this: Your brand is what you put into your product, not something you add on to your product when it’s ready to ship. If you create a product and then try to dial up some “branding” to make it appear special and unique, and “emotional,” you’ve already lost the brand strategy war. You’ve reduced your brand to a media exercise. Instead of being a direct drive to create value and create customers, your brand as “branding” is busy creating “impressions,” “likes” and other media metrics. While that may be good business for publishers and ad agencies, you and your customers deserve more.

The brand as a method to create value

Strategically, we want our brands to advance our customers beyond the reach of competitors. Being strategic, we design this process so our customers will also be able to add value back to the brand, through their initiative, insight and innovation. Our goal is to partner with customers to make competitors irrelevant in the new context we’re jointly creating. (Two against one being strategically superior to one on one.)

This means that your brand is much more than a communication tacked on to the product with bells and whistles. It’s a method to create value, a creative discipline far closer to innovation than to the fluff stuff of advertising or PR. Specifically, it’s a method of engagement that advances customers where competitors can’t follow. For example, Apple makes some wonderful products in the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad, but Apple’s real brand power lies in the systematic and seamless experience that it delivers to customers: an integrated operating system, iTunes, apps, App Store, Apple Store and perhaps soon the iCloud, all of which combine to take Apple customers to a new level of being and doing. Once Apple has advanced customers to this level, why would they settle for anything less?

Reference posts

Here are a few reference posts that expand on the ideas above:

• How brands create customers
• Value-based brands: brand innovation
• Adios branding, your day is done
• The brand goes in before the brand goes on
• Brand strategy: create your entire brand as a customer-focused application

Companies often dream of producing a game-changing “killer app” that can wow customers, create new markets and vanquish competitors. What most companies don’t realize is that they already have a potential killer app in house, under their control, ready to be launched. Their potential killer app is their brand—if they choose to use its formidable powers as an application to create customers and open new markets.

Brands as applications

Yes, brands are applications. As applications they can apply the full context of a company’s products and services—practical, creative, emotional, moral and spiritual— to lead customers to richer realms of living. Brands developed as applications (in the real world) are far more productive than brands developed as communications in the make-believe worlds of media campaigns. Instead of relying on symbols, slogans, gestures and promises, brand applications roll up their sleeves and help customers get to where they’re going. Applications get things done. They’re methods of creating customer value, direct and focused, fully integrated to produce strategic customer outcomes. Current sales is one of those outcomes, but platform hegemony with an exclusive new class of customers is the goal.

Creating the brand as killer app

To create your brand as a killer app I suggest you start with two previous posts in this blog:

1. Brand strategy: Create your entire brand as a customer-focused application
2. FAQ: Creating your brand as a customer-focused application

They will get you started with the right framework and strategic view.

Developing the full context of your brand

Developing the full context of your brands means that you have to envision how your brand can create (and co-create) value in multiple dimensions: practical, creative, emotional, moral and spiritual. Chances are, you already have some ideas about what these dimensions are. Of course, it pays to think big. (Brands never think small.) With your brand as a killer app you will seriously re-position the customer to win. You will also change the game by changing the customer. Yes, the full context of your brand means a newer and fuller context for the customer.

Practical steps

As practical steps, you might begin by asking yourself these questions:

1. What is holding our customers back?
2. Where do they want to go—and how can we help them get there?
3. How can our brand advance customers beyond the reach of competitors?
4. How can we create customers that add value back to the brand?
5. How can our customers become our strongest competitive weapon?

The above questions are from my post called Strategy for an “immersive” brand. Killer apps are immersive.

Name brands can get a bad name when they treat their customers as targets for ads rather than partners in a brand relationship. A relentless, overpowering sales pitch can drive out brand qualities and just might drive away customers.

Here’s how that might happen:

TV ads that hound you in the aisles

These days many people resolutely skip ads on TV using the remote or the DVR, or simply find their content on the Web or via social media, where ads are less intrusive. Imagine how these people might feel when they zip off to the supermarket and find nonstop ads beamed at them from little TV screens up and down the aisles, everywhere they turn. What they so thoroughly avoided at home now has them trapped in the store. It’s like a scene from The Twilight Zone.

Perhaps this is a preview:

What kind of brand experience is this?

If I’m at a grocery store being assaulted by sales pitches from rows of tiny TV screens, some at shelf edge, I have to ask myself, “What kind of brand experience is this? Why are these products doing this to me? Why is the store doing this to me? These are name brands, and this is a name brand store. Why is it now a creep show pumping ads? Don’t these brands know any better? Where’s their respect for me?”

The alternative is easy

Maybe this is why a lot of people head on over to Trader Joe’s. At Trader Joe’s there’s basically one brand for the whole store and its products. That brand conveys respect, and in so doing earns respect. It’s a much smaller store than a supermarket, but one’s personal space is honored as infinite.

For brands, that idea is obvious.

The best way to create an identity is to change the game, and to make your identity synonymous with the wonders of the new game at hand. Apple’s iPhone and iPad prove the wisdom of this approach.

Copycat brands don’t change the game. They cling to the current game like sucker fish, hoping for a free ride. Nothing they do takes the customer to the next level. Their identity devolves to features, which offer no identity traction at all.

David Pogue gives us a pretty funny glimpse of how this plays out in the current tablet market.

To change the game you have to change the customer. HP still has a way to go.

[This is an updated version of a July 11, 2008 post called Totalitarian Brands.]

An article that every brand builder should read is Steven Heller’s  Branding Youth in the Totalitarian State in Design Observer. The article is based on Heller’s 2008 book: Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State. (The book is now in paperback.)

The article raises all sorts of interesting questions about the relationships between propaganda and brands, and on the sometimes “totalitarian” nature of brands themselves. As I see it, the key questions are as follows:

1. What is the “totalitarian” brand model?
2. Are brands a form of propaganda? Do they follow its rules’?
3. Do brands need “true believers?” How do true believers add value to the brand?
4. What are the strategy downsides of brands conceived and executed as propaganda, or as “totalitarian?” What other brand models could disrupt them?

I’ve also discussed some of these elements in the various posts referenced  below.

Definition of “totalitarian” brand

For this discussion I define a “totalitarian” brand as follows: “A totalitarian brand is a brand that totally subsumes the customer into the brand, erasing the individual and the individual’s capacity for proactive, independent action.” In other words, in a totalitarian brand approach the brand wants to impose its will upon the customer. The customer becomes a tool, and a creature of the brand. The brand intends to “own” the customer—body, mind and soul. ((And wallet.) This is a model of domination instead of (for example) partnership.

The customer as “true believer”

I would also suggest that a totalitarian brand approach is one that wants customers to be “true believers.” The brand seeks mindless followers—perhaps because mindful followers might see through it. I would define “true believer” as a one-dimensional person fanatically devoted to a cause, an organization or to another person. A true believer is a follower with a capital “F.” In the eyes of the true believer, the leader can do no wrong. And thus, true believers add no value to the brand. They don’t interact with it to make it better. They don’t help it to adapt. In fact, they typically magnify its shortcomings. A brand with true believers typically doesn’t innovate, or innovates narrowly, and may be its own worst enemy. True believers are not strategic.

True believers and “yes” men

It seems to me that a brand of true believers may be just as ineffective as a company of “yes” men. By saying “Yeah!” (or “Yes!) to everything it won’t be productive strategically. There’s no creative interaction. No questions. No feedback. No alternate views. It may be that true believers are in fact the products of yes men, who are simply cloning themselves at a lower level. In contrast, a strong brand is strong because it’s in constant creative ferment, continuously questioning and testing itself to remain a step ahead of the world. Yes men and true believers only slow it down.

Two brand models: containment vs. liberation

As part of this discussion we can assess two different models of brands:  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 capture, contain and control customers, to keep them in place so they continue to be “loyal” to the brand and purchase the product at desired price points.

In contrast, a liberation model of brands aims to free customers to be more proactive for themselves, on the premise that greater sales will flow from a more proactive and productive customer culture, where customers are active players in product development rather than a passive audience. This model assumes that a company can gain market advantage via product and service innovations that create a more proactive culture, where customers leave behind old paradigms. It’s a method that uses customer initiative to disrupt competitors. Apple shows that it can be done, and quite profitably, too.

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Before a brand can create any kind of “immersive” experience, it must first immerse itself in its customers. The truly immersive brand will leave its shoes on the beach and dive in. It will swim with customers, feeling their pleasure and pain, hopes and fears. Thus immersed, it can venture forth in the very context of customers themselves.

Begin by answering five brand strategy questions

A brand can begin its customer immersion by answering five basic brand strategy questions:

1. What is holding our customers back?
2. Where do they want to go—and how can we help them get there?
3. How can our brand advance customers beyond the reach of competitors?
4. How can we create customers that add value back to the brand?
5. How can our customers become our strongest competitive weapon?

Brands immerse customers in exclusive opportunities

The brand goal, of course, is to immerse customers in exclusive opportunities of self-creation that no other brand can match. We’re not trying to drown them. We’re trying to save them—strategically—as only our brand can. That’s one reason why we develop brands as customer-focused applications.

Photo credit: Owl Cottage – Flickr

While waiting to enter La Musée d’Orsay in Paris I noticed some interesting shoes on a young woman in the next line over. The shoes were shaped like . . .  piano keys! But wait! Those were socks, not shoes. The shoes were cut so low that they served as platforms for socks, giving the wearer great latitude in style combinations. In a role reversal, the shoe was an accessory to the sock. With one pair of low-cut shoes like these you could style-out with 10 pairs of eye-popping socks, giving the effect of 10 pairs of shoes. Plus socks offer so many more design possibilities. And they’re cheaper. And with statement socks like these you could do a nifty counter-point with a scarf: theme, color, etc.

“Footwear” redefined

In a nutshell, making the shoe an accessory to the sock redefines “footwear.” The “foot” now includes the whole foot. By providing less shoe, you create a larger product canvas, and a bigger market.

Brand lesson: create opportunities for customers

If I can derive a brand lesson from this shoe-as-accessory-to-the-sock example it would be this: develop your brand to create opportunities for your customers. Instead of offering a range of static choices, give them dynamic platforms so they can create and re-create themselves anew. By opening new dimensions for them, you can open new markets for yourself.