“Dear Adobe” — a pipeline to the Adobe brand.
NOTE: This post replaces a post of 8/25/08 in which I did a bang-up job of getting some key facts wrong. Many thanks to Richard Dudley for the correction. I have deleted that 8/25/08 post.
————-
Dear Adobe is a new site established by Adobe users to tell Adobe what its customers need. In effect, it’s a pipeline to the Adobe brand. The site is an example of how customers can proactively collaborate to add value back to a business.
A brand’s customers are its greatest competitive weapon
A brand’s customers are often its greatest competitive weapon. Having sharp customers who care about Adobe products is extremely valuable to Adobe. Such customers can help Adobe maintain a competitive edge, especially as it now confronts Microsoft in major markets.
It’s always better to get wake up calls from customers rather than competitors.
Currently more heat than light
In its newly-born state, Dear Adobe is mostly a torrent of pent-up vents and rants. It’s more heat than light, as might be expected. Its founders say that changes are underway to add more structure. For starters, there’s a Top 50 List. (A few days ago I think this was a Top 25 list.)
Structure is vital, because you cannot build a brand out of pet peeves. Pet peeves are local and personal; brands are strategic and global. The task within Adobe is to sift and winnow these customer voices to glean strategic truths. (Ideally, there would be more brand, fewer features.)
The brand question: what is holding our customers back?
Where might Adobe start in making brand sense out of the Dear Adobe comments? The first question every brand should ask is, “What is holding our customers back?” It’s the brand’s job to advance customers to where they’re going. This is often beyond what products alone can provide. When customers feel unduly burdened by certain products, it’s usually a sign that the brand (a collaboration of company and customers) is not keeping pace with product development.
A brand never wants to be caught between a user and his/her productivity. That can be a sign that disruption is near.
A positive response from Adobe
The founders of Dear Adobe received feedback from Adobe within 48 hours and consider Adobe’s response “very positive.” I would guess that most of the comments on Dear Adobe are not new to Adobe. The company has a long history of extensive usability and user workflow studies, and deep user groups. What may be new is the dynamic range of the comments and their raw intensity, in an aggregated format.
Some additional thoughts on the content and context of Dear Adobe can be found on John Nack’s Photoshop-related blog here. (John is a Photoshop product manager but his blog posts are his own—not official Adobe viewpoints.) Don’t miss the 100+ comments to his Dear Adobe post. Clearly, Dear Adobe has struck a chord.
Dear Adobe is not a suggestion box
It’s in Adobe’s interest not to treat Dear Adobe as a âsuggestion box.â That would diminish its potential value. From a brand perspective, Dear Adobe is a collaborative innovation platform. It should be treated as such. Customers contribute more value when they’re treated as proactive brand partners instead of being treated as “purchasers” who may come up with “suggestions.”
The brand imperative
Dell has initiated a customer pipeline site of its own, which it structures and manages to optimize information flow: http://www.dellideastorm.com/. Eventually, Adobe may decide to opt for something similar if its current efforts (plus what it gains from Dear Adobe) don’t yield the results it needs. For Adobe, Dell and others, the brand imperative is to team with customers in new product and process innovations. They’ll be on the same page with customers because they’ll be writing it together.
Photo: midiman â Flickr
Hat Tip: Daring Fireball
What can I learn from this brand?.
When a brand introduces itself, every customer should rightfully ask: “What can I learn from this brand?”
The answer should be, “A lot.”
Strong brands are leveraged sources of learning
Strong brands are leveraged sources of learning. They’re not pedants, of course. They’re bottled fire, beams of light and life that spark awakenings and foment revelations. They have something to say, and they aren’t shy about saying it. That’s why they’re brands, and not labels.
Brands have the wisdom to bring products to life
Brands have the wisdom to bring products to life. A brand in this mode is more than a stylized sales stimulant, or a pre-packaged “experience.” For starters, it’s interesting. (That alone sets it apart.) It has a history of deeds (exploits, scars, triumphs) instead of a puffed-out bogus “narrative.” It asks the questions that other brands can’t.
Imparting brandly wisdom
As the brand engages and interacts with customers it imparts its brandly wisdom. This is the combined insight and intelligence of its makers, every iota of value they fused to the product and the brand to move customers forward.
Brandly wisdom is the sensuous set of smarts that creates customers—and helps customers re-create themselves. You see it in the details—and in the vision.
Expect tectonic truths that blink
Brands don’t “teach” as much as they lead by example, forging new dialectics with you and me. As a customer, expect tectonic truths that blink. Spiritual leavenings. Flashes of far horizons. Worlds de-packaged, unwrapped, laid bare for you to clothe.
Brand experience is shared wisdom
Brand experience is shared wisdom. It leaves the customer—and the brand—wiser.
Photo: amarola — Flickr
What follows are some of my notes on “university brands.” These are preliminary thoughts as I’m working through various ideas and concepts on the subject.
I’ll be adding to this post, or changing it, as time goes on. Comments and suggestions are welcome, as always.
Should we use the phrase “university brand?”
I go back and forth on this question. I’m not totally sold on the phrase “university brand”—even though I use it. Part of me says that universities really don’t need “brands”—certainly not in the commercial sense. Universities just need clear and coherent expressions of themselves. As it is, universities are largely “self-branding.” They’re co-creations of faculty, students, alumni, community and their own histories.
The last thing universities need is “branding” advice that’s more appropriate to a strip mall. Universities are a special form of culture. They’re brands of culture rather than brands of commerce.
Maybe we should just say “university” instead of “university brand.” The concept of “university” is pretty universal to begin with.
That said, there’s a lot universities can learn from the concept of “brand,” mainly because much of what we call “brands” today was invented by universities hundreds of years ago. A university that understands brands has a better understanding of its potential value streams, and its future.
A recap: what is a brand?
Brands are methods of creating personal, social, intellectual and moral value. Think of them as company potential X customer potential. They’re collaborative efforts, proactive co-creations that result in more freedoms for participants.
The above definition sounds pretty much like a university, does it not? In many respects, universities are brand models for others to imitate. Why do so many businesses call their facilities “campuses?”
What can a “university brand” do that a “university” can’t?
Well, nothing, really—if the university totally has its act together. (Not all universities do.) A “university brand” is a method that enables a university to create new forms of value. It opens a university to more of the world; it enables the university to initiate and to innovate in ways that the “old” university probably would have ignored.
Great brand ideas can come from faculty, students, administrators, alumni and the community.
What about strategy?
A university brand will have a strong strategic component. This will be aimed at adding new value to enable the university to be more, and to do more, in years ahead. Brand strategy = value strategy.
Universities as brands of collegial learning
One way to view “university brands” is to say that universities are brands of collegial learning. Thus, the difference between two universities lies in their approaches to learning. But there’s obviously more to it than this. A class at Cal or UCLA may be essentially the same, but the “brands” of these two schools are different. Superficially different? Essentially different?
The strategy of place
A university is also a brand of place. Campus = four years of “brand experience.” What is the brand strategy during these four most formative years?
What’s the appropriate brand model for a university?
The conventional brand model—where a brand is fashioned as a stylized sales stimulant—is rarely the right model for universities. It’s unilateral, superficial and too dependent on advertising.
A standard marketing approach to building a university brand, in which the “brand” is defined as a package of symbols, slogans, values and images to be communicated to students, alumni and others is not enough. The “brand” is not an idea or an “image” to be sold.
Brands are programs to get things done. They lead by example.
The problem with many university brands is lack of intensity, not lack of “essence”.
A university brand model would include: a collaborative culture that’s collegial, exploratory, innovative, questioning and proactive, with a focus on shared freedoms rather than top-down doctrine. It would be a joint venture of discovery. A “way” rather than a “thing.” The commencement exponential.
What makes university brands uniquely powerful?
What makes university brands uniquely powerful is that they’re structures of culture rather than structures of commerce. They’ve existed as “brands” in this context since the first universities were founded in Europe in the middle ages. Those institutions had unique identities, traditions, communities, customs, rituals, a special context of place and mission, a social life and an intellectual life, and they imparted all of these elements into their students, who went forth into the world so “branded”—and proud of it.
Universities are brand platforms
Certainly true. University strategies are platform strategies.
Universities and personal brand applications
Big potential here. Cf:Â personal brand applications. Esp. Google, and Chrome.
Universities are context machines
Certainly true. Universities can generate multiple layers of meaning, for multiple publics. These can support multiple value streams, even sub-brands, some quite potent. Can be life-defining. The end of the “4-year college.”
The difference between university brands and commercial brands:
- You can be a “Harvard Man” for about $200,000
- You can be an “Aqua Velva Man” for $3.25
Which is the better deal?
Photo:Â Richard Peat — Wikimedia Commons
A university makes a money-back guarantee.
Guarantees play important roles in commercial brands, but do they have any role to play in university brands? A new guarantee at Stanford University raises some important issues.
Enjoy the game—or your money back
Stanford is making brand history of a somewhat controversial kind. In order to fill seats at home football games, the University’s athletic department is offering fans a “Gridiron Guarantee.” If fans don’t enjoy the games at Stanford Stadium, they can get their money back.
That’s right: it’s a money-back guarantee from one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Giving football fans “their money’s worth”
Let’s review some background on the Stanford guarantee. Several years ago Stanford replaced its ancient 85,000-seat stadium with a modern 55,000 seat facility, thanks to $100 million from donors. While the new stadium is more compact and comfortable, it has yet to have a sell out. In this same time frame, prior to the 2008 season, the Stanford football team had a losing record of 10-25, with many defeats at home.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:Â
When you’ve won two home games in the last two years, a money-back-guarantee might seem a little risky.
The Stanford athletics marketing department has little choice but to take a big chance and hope that the payoff finally comes - first on the football field and then, maybe, in the stands of its sparkling but half-empty stadium.
The deal works like this: New season-ticket and new “Family Plan” buyers can ask for the “Gridiron Guarantee,” and if unsatisfied with the “entertainment value” at season’s end, the cost of the season tickets will be refunded.
“It’s good motivation for us, but that motivation is already there,” Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh said. “We definitely want to give fans their money’s worth.”
A guarantee can change a university’s core identity
University brands typically operate in a realm above commercial guarantees. The concern with any sub-tier “guarantee” is that it can change the core identity of a university brand, tipping it from a traditional brand of collegial culture and learning—where commercial guarantees are irrelevant—toward a “buyer-seller” brand of commercial transactions, where hot deals and promotional promises are the name of the game.
A guarantee can alter a university’s brand context
At first glance, Stanford’s Gridiron Guarantee seems innocent enough, and it has some carefully-crafted limitations. Nonetheless, it points toward some new contexts for the Stanford brand. As it’s currently framed, the Guarantee implies that Stanford is now a brand of “entertainment value.” This puts the University in the same brand boat as ESPN, or even Vegas. Is that where it wants to be?
Moreover, at least one Stanford team is now obligated to give fans “their money’s worth.” That seems an odd mission for unpaid athletes ostensibly imbued with Stanford’s traditional identity and values. (The football coach doesn’t need the Guarantee to motivate the team; it’s an external obligation. As his quote in the Chronicle indicates, the team’s motivation to win “is already there.”)
A slippery slope toward more “guarantees”
The first “guarantee” made by a university, however innocent, may set a precedent. It may set the university on a slippery slope toward more guarantees—with no end in sight.
Where might Stanford’s Gridiron Guarantee take the core Stanford brand? If a Gridiron Guarantee is on the table, perhaps other performance guarantees are in order. Might parents ask for a “Commencement Guarantee:” a money-back guarantee if their sons or daughters didn’t “enjoy” their Stanford experience, or somehow didn’t “receive their money’s worth?” Similarly, would there be a “Donor’s Guarantee” to insure that funded developments perform as expected?
Why position Stanford athletes as “entertainers?”
The Gridiron Guarantee states: “If at the end of the season you do not feel that you received your entertainment value for the ticket, Stanford Athletics will refund the price paid for the season ticket.”
From a brand perspective, one might ask why the Gridiron Guarantee positions Stanford football players as “entertainers”—as if they’re the Rockettes with cleats. Does the football team exist to put on a show? Is that why the players risk serious injury during months of practice and in league games? Is “entertainment” their charter? Isn’t there a higher purpose behind the concept of athletics at Stanford? Are the players given athletic scholarships or entertainment scholarships?
A healthy university brand shouldn’t need guarantees
If a university brand is healthy, “guarantees” shouldn’t be necessary. The brand itself should have the wherewithal to sustain the campus and its relationship with the community. This includes everything the campus and the community create together, such as a fan base.
It’s worth noting, however, that a brand that lacks confidence can project its insecurities outward. As one sports columnist noted, with reference to what he called the “daffy” Stanford guarantee:
If you buy a ticket knowing you could get your money back if and/or when you are disappointed, you are being rewarded for either your lack of faith, or the team’s.
An attendance problem—or a brand problem?
Ideally, the Stanford football team would win most of its games and Stanford Stadium would be deliriously packed. There’d be no “guarantees” needed.
Until the new football coach can make that happen (not impossible: the man has energy and imagination) Stanford has a need to fill seats at home games. A sports marketing approach would typically view this as an “attendance problem,” to be solved with promotions, and maybe something inspired like a “Gridiron Guarantee.”
As noted above, that approach, however well-intentioned, may actually work against the University’s brand.
A brand approach
A brand approach would aim to solve the problem at the strategy level instead of at the promotion level. It would ask if the lack of attendance might be a sign of a deeper brand problem, where the full value of Stanford is not being developed and articulated. The goal would be to create a higher platform of attendance to sustain the team through thick and thin.
A brand approach would ask questions like these:
- Is the brand identity where it should be?
- Is the correct brand model being employed?
- Does the brand leverage its platform strengths?
- Is the brand culture sufficiently inclusive and expansive?
- Does the brand create the kind of student/alumni that the University needs?
Photo: maveric2003 — Flickr
A stress crack in the iPhone brand platform.
As a brand platform expands, stress cracks can appear between the brand core (perhaps over-controlled by the company) and the active brand edge (a more freewheeling terrain energized by partners and customers). The brand and its innovation ecosystem may be moving in the same general direction, but they don’t always move as one. And they can move at different rates.
Brand stress cracks have to be fixed
Brand stress cracks have to be fixed. If allowed to propagate, they can seriously weaken the platform, and the brand. The issue is rarely one of “brand essence.” It’s typically an issue of process, or of brand value delivered.
A stress crack in the iPhone brand platform
Apple is currently dealing with a stress crack in its emerging iPhone platform. The issue is how Apple approves third-party applications for the iPhone, and then makes them available for sale in its online App Store. Apple hasn’t published guidance on the approval criteria it uses in the App Store, leaving developers in the difficult position of writing software that meets iPhone technical specs but may be rejected for other reasons. The fear of arbitrary rejection has dampened developer enthusiasm for the platform.
A recently rejected iPhone application has become a cause celebre.
The importance of the App Store
Apple’s App Store is the location of this particular stress crack. The App Store is as important to Apple developers as it is to Apple and the iPhone brand. It’s the sanctioned gateway to selling third-party iPhone apps, and it’s crucial to the commercial success of an independent iPhone app developer. Selling iPhone apps outside the App Store conduit is very difficult.
In many respects, the App Store is the engine of the iPhone platform. It may represent a billion dollar market. It’s so vital that Kleiner Perkins has created a $100 million fund to help startups develop apps for the iPhone platform.
Third-party iPhone developers are a part of the brand
Apple needs motivated (and successful) third-party developers if the iPhone is to reach its potential as a broad-based mobile platform. Apple’s third-party developers form a critical part of the brand. Their initiative, imagination and innovation equal that of Apple’s in-house engineers, and they can spot iPhone apps in nooks, crannies and niches that Apple itself could never address. These niches can become selling points and growth avenues as the platform evolves.
The app approval process is a brand process
What’s at issue isn’t Apple’s right to exercise control over new iPhone apps. That’s a given. The issue is the transparency of Apple’s review and approval process. The App Store’s approval process is a brand process, a subset of Apple’s approach to its brand ecosystem and how it works with and nurtures its third-party developers. It’s a bit ironic that Apple should have this problem, because Apple knows this process. It was Apple who first sent out “software evangelists” to bring developers into the Apple brand 30 years ago.
The brand cannot be a bottleneck
One of the first rules of brand innovation is that the brand cannot be a bottleneck. Too much control at the top chokes off initiative and innovation, and eventually chokes the brand itself. Brand value is really a confluence of many streams, from the company, its partners and customers.
Brands that are “curated” as precious objets d’art in a temple tended by brand priests always run the risk of being bottlenecks. They’re too far from rough and tumble markets where active brands discover new forms of value.
Structuring the brand as a shared brand journey
Structuring the brand as a shared brand journey is often a step in the right direction.
A brand solution
The extent of developer angst over the iPhone app approval process indicates that a brand solution is needed. For sure, the iPhone app approval task inside Apple is challenging. There are thousands of iPhone apps that need to be vetted and tested, with a host of legal, technical, strategic and brand reasons why they must be carefully scrutinized. That said, there is a (brand) logical solution out there. Apple didn’t get this far without successfully resolving similar problems in the past.
One developer has proposed a six part solution, which begins:
Publish clear and unambiguous rules for what will be accepted and what will not. I donât even care if this is a long and detailed document, but it needs to be The Rulebook from which both sides play.
Sometimes the brand ecosystem can lead in bringing problems to a close.
I’ve written about the iPhone brand platform challenge previously.
UPDATE: Here is one third-party developer’s step-by-step experience in getting an iPhone application approved by the App Store. A total of 22 steps. Not a quick process, but not unreasonable given that Apple found at least one bug in the software. (Hat Tip: Daring Fireball).
Merlin Mann reinvents the 43 Folders brand.
Merlin Mann has announced that he’s “shifting gears” at his famed 43 Folders personal productivity site. In effect, he’s reinventing the 43 Folders brand. The site is changing from a brand of personal productivity to a brand of personal creativity. It’s brand deliverable is changing from improving one’s core efficiency to improving one’s creative output—and one’s personal relevance in the world.
The shape of a new brand
The new 43 Folders brand approach is evolving as we speak, but we can glimpse its general shape and direction. It’s RIP for “productivity pr0n.” The new focus of the site, in its own words:
43Folders.com is Merlin Mannâs website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work. Â . . .
This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about â but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.
Right now, 43 Folders is focused on an arc about how to improve the quality of your career and life by managing your attention in a way that allows you to work your ass off on the creative projects that matter most to you. . . . .
I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want to help you figure out how to make those things even better. Thatâs pretty much it.
The person the new brand will create
It appears that the new person that the 43 Folders brand intends to create will be one who can enjoy a creatively-focused life in the context of a workaday world. This is a trans-cubicle, integrated approach that opens up a lot of possibilities. Defining oneself as a creative individual who articulates a passion can dramatically refocus one’s life; it can actually make certain mainstream “productivity” issues irrelevant. One’s life jumps to a whole new level.
Some questions
- It’s not clear yet if the new approach will concentrate on workaday people with passionate hobbies, or also lean toward serving artists and creatives. Will this be a new 43 Folders for the “creative class?”
- The original 43 Folders approach helped spawn a “productivity process” movement where process took center stage. People flocked to GTD and joined the Moleskine militia. However, a strict focus on productivity process can be limiting to an individual’s growth. Will the new approach be more “philosophical,” with less emphasis on process? In other words, will the journey take precedence over the journal?
- Who might serve as a model practitioner of this new approach? Every new brand should bring to life a new model of customer, someone who incarnates the brand and serves as a reference.
- A brand “arc” or a brand journey?
- What are the brand possibilities inherent in a DIY approach? How might these trump factory brands? This might be the basis for a multithreaded brand from the bottom up.
The incumbent challenge
Of course, there’s one dark shadow hanging over this new 43 Folders initiative. The last word on creative productivity has already been uttered, and immortalized, by Father Guido Sarducci, two decades ago. It’s hard to top that.
Illustration: Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook entry for a flying machine. (Leonardo could have used 43 Folders. He was notorious for starting many projects and finishing very few.)
How to define “brand strategy”.
We encounter the term “brand strategy” in just about every brand discussion these days, but what does “brand strategy” actually mean? How does it fit into that dynamic matrix that includes a company, its products, its brands and its customers? And what makes it “strategic”?
Brand strategy defined
As I see it, 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.
“Creating customers” is a strategic act
“Creating customers” is a strategic act in itself. It is one reason why the “creating customers” approach to brands is so powerful. It is inherently strategic. It aligns company and customers in a shared context from the get-go.
The process by which a brand creates customers is outlined here and here.
What a brand strategy must include
To be effective, a brand strategy must include these qualities:
- It is value-based. It aims to deliver new forms of value that advance customers beyond the status quo, and beyond the reach of competitors.
- It innovates. It aims to deliver a new customer context, a new vision of what customers can be, and do—exclusively through the brand.
- It is structured as a platform. It’s goal is to make the brand a platform of new customer opportunities, a springboard for personal customer growth.
- It collaborates with customers. Brand strategy is a joint effort to free customers from current markets, illusions or fears that hold customers back. Customer energy magnifies brand energy.
- It’s an overt act of culture creation. A brand strategy aims to create a new culture of growth, initiative and discovery that raises customers to a new level. This is a new level that leads to profitable new markets for the company.
A brand strategy takes its direction from the brand mission. It includes the capability of brand vision, which is the ability to see your future through your customers’ eyes.
Many brands don’t have strategies
While there are a great many brands in the world, not all brands have brand strategies. Many brands are constructed as intense identities to be flogged by advertising campaigns, in which the “brand” operates as a stylized sales stimulant. Such brands are synthetic creatures of marketing and sales. They’re part of a persuasion package, and persuasion is not a strategy.
Companies can employ negative brand strategies
Certain companies may employ negative brand strategies that aim to limit and contain customers. Their goal is to use customers, rather than to create them as proactive brand partners. Often, these strategies result in brands of illusion that go medieval on their customers. They follow a brand agenda to keep customers weak, because they lack a strategy for dealing with proactive cultures—including those of their own employees.
Photo: Inky Bob — Flickr
Links for creative brand builders: 12/19/08.
These are links for brand builders pursuing creative contexts for brands, as well as radical new (root) connections with customers. I’ll try to post such links a couple of times a month.
Brand identity: go cosmic, or go home
For a nice identity fix, check out these spiffy tattoos from young scientists. They may not win any design awards, but that’s not the point. They’re emergent identities—symbols of fundamental truths, processes, or discoveries that shape the universe, and humankind. They’re identities that transcend market offerings and shopping carts.
In comparison, many conventional brand identities seem small-minded and transitory. That’s because they aim too low. They’re commerce, not cosmos.
Some corollaries: In brands, the biggest universe wins. Go cosmic, or go home. Identities chained to products risk becoming dead-end DNA. They can’t evolve, and they’re doomed to perish.
Benjamin Zander elucidates the principle. Does your brand enable major breakthroughs in the lives of customers? Does it take customers to places they couldn’t reach without you? Is your brand a new world of possibilities?
Google Maps now makes it possible. The creative context is up to you.
In brands, the back is the new front
Touchscreens are an emergent interface for a whole host of new digital devices such as the iPhone. However, designing small touchscreens is tricky because one’s fingers can easily block the interface elements on the screen itself. Solution: use the back of the device for touch inputs, rather than the front. You make things happen from the “working” side.
There’s a metaphoric analog here for brands: While every brand likes to strut its display side, it’s often inputs through the back end of the brand—the customer side—that move the brand forward. Every customer is a “capacitive interface,” with back-end customer inputs more valuable in the long run than the dazzle of up-front campaigns.
Store brands lift grocers in troubled times
Conventional packaged brands from “name brand” manufacturers were once the measure of what brands were supposed to be. Now they’re in danger of becoming obsolescent, if not obsolete.
Conventional packaged brands tend to fall short on two accounts. First, they can’t match the experience level of retail brands, who are far closer to the customer. Second, retailers can shape their brands to the context of their total offering, and to the whole customer. To see what this means, traipse on down to Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, two stores that act like communities. When your brand is confined to a package, it stands alone.
Moreover, a store experience can differentiate the customer. That’s a far more valuable experience than package brand dress that merely differentiates a product from its neighbors on the shelf.
How a Steve Jobs approach might transform Detroit auto makers
Small chance of this ever happening, but Robert Cringely scores some good points on the strategic importance of brand focus and customer experience.
I especially like this line: “Apple is worth more than any of the car companies and for good reason: Apple has a future.”
Yes, indeed. Your brand holds the keys to your future. For decades, Detroit brands have been pseudo brands, little more than stylized sales stimulants. Lately they’re being reduced to progressively puerile ad campaigns. Customers are taking their futures elsewhere.
In brands, culture trumps commerce
The gist of a brand is its contribution to culture. Thus, brand builders pay attention to thinkers like Michael Shanks, a leader in reappraising past cultures and their living heritage, especially in terms of processes of adaptation and innovation. He’s helping transform archeology into a discipline of foresight, rather than hindsight.
Brand builders are culture creators. The more your brand adds to the culture, the better its chances to self-seed and take root. A brand that isn’t a new context of culture is effectively DOA.
Also: the Stanford Humanities Lab, a brand builder’s sandbox.
The new book is called The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett. It explores “deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values,” which just happens to be the very stuff of brands. Well, real brands, not pseudo brands. Brands predicated on craft have a material and spiritual advantage over synthetic brands (fictions) predicated on selling. When companies lose their craft, they wind up in dire straits, like those brand-deficient Detroit automakers.
NPR creates a personal brand application.
There’s some strategic brand thinking going on over at National Public Radio (NPR). They’re developing new ways to make the NPR brand a personal brand application. Specifically, they’re enabling the NPR brand to become more personal, portable and persistent–essential qualities of brands to come.
Saul Hansell in the New York Times describes it:
National Public Radio has introduced a nifty little feature that lets you create your own custom podcast of NPR content on topics that interest you. Type in Obama or Madonna or whatever, and you can sign up for a stream of NPR clips that match your keywords that can be downloaded to your computer, smartphone, iPod or Zune.
The future of brands lies in digital devices
As I’ve noted previously, the future of brands lies in digital devices. Brands will be universal enablers, as close as a second skin. It’s nice to see NPR taking a step in that direction. Of course, people don’t want mere “clips” from the information stream on those digital devices. They want a new context of insight into the world around them. That’s a large part of NPR’s brand challenge.
Refresh.