Control and the future of brands
Controlling the ways a potential customer experiences and identifies your products has always been the heart of branding. But what happens when brands have to give up some of that control?
On Saturday, I proposed something to ponder over the weekend. Namely, I suggested that we all think, over the weekend about the possibilities of a brand and design strategy that takes into account multiple degrees of control, in the various registers of user experience.
This is a deep and complicated question, and whatever strategies will be used to resolve it will likely involve brand strategies that are downright alien to the ones we know today. Why this might necessarily be the case, I thought, may give us some deeper insight into moving forward on this difficult problem. After all, diagnosis is one thing, treatment is another.
In that short post, I hinted that the key to understanding the problem posed by Jon Baskin is to the idea of control. Baskin obliquely indicates this as well.
In traditional contexts, companies had the upper hand in most exchanges: Television and radio advertisements, billboards, and to an only-slightly-lesser extent websites are all media in which a company can tightly control the visual or aural experience of a potential buyer. As Baskin rightly points out, this is not the case with internet search results.
Which means that brands are going to require strategies that go beyond the totality of all the "traditional" requirements of a brand: colors, logos, taglines, website design, etc. while at the same time, either continuing to employ them contextually or else finding some other type of strategy that does the same kind of work.
Regardless of the role played in the future by traditional brand materials, we are certain that in a growing number of situations, potential users will be deciding for or against products based on something else entirely. Something that can’t be controlled for using these traditional branding strategies. The net effect of this emergent reality is that we are being forced to relax the control requirements that our traditional brands have required. But, since very nearly everything about old brands required the ability to control a user-context, we need an entirely new type of branding.
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Relaxing the control requirements entails a new kind of ethical thinking about the relationship of our products to our customers, a relationship for which the "brand" terminology seems crass and malapropos. No longer are we going to be able to brand our user’s experiences in every context, which means that our special stamp (color palate, logo, etc.) is no longer singly reliable as an indicator of quality. Thus, the de facto post-branding wisdom seems to lean toward product quality as a kind of branding. In other words, your corporate stamp might be the particularly delicious taste of your Cheez-Flavored Crackers.
Of course, while product quality should certainly become a more and more aggressively pursued brand strategy, there is still the problem of selling those crackers without a commercial, or even a box.
What this amounts to, or so it seems to me, is not simply a requirement for pictureless-advertising, but a requirement to totally recast the purpose of corporate branding from a declarative, drawing and writing type enterprise, to one in whose entire focus is to develop an outspoken community to talk up your product (Seth calls this managing a tribe).
Why does this work? Because people don’t trust your brand anyway (just look at Lehman Brothers). The simple fact is that they trust total strangers’ ranting opinions a thousand times more. No amount of clever copy or advertising is going to sell your crackers nearly as much as a trusted individual recommending them on cooks.com, or five thumbs-up votes on Yahoo Answers.
(Incidentally, this is why Microsoft just looks silly trying to advertise their way into the kind of brand loyalty that Apple knows you have to build by word of mouth.)
So, we know that product quality and tribe management could play key roles in the next five years of brand design. What else could? What could in ten years? Are there unthought design (as opposed to strictly “design thinking“) solutions?
Comments on this post
1.
You make a good point about great products being at the heart of a great brand. However, even though businesses are rethinking the kind of control they have over a brand, certain elements and characteristics of a brand must remain consistent wherever and whenever consumers have an experience with it. It is true that people are interacting with brands very differently with the advent of the Internet and social media. This interactivity is forcing businesses to change how and what channels they use to communicate with consumers. However, branding is about identity, and therefore it becomes important that brands strengthen their core identity as communication channels become more fragmented.
At Schawk, we have found that packaging is an increasingly critical factor in managing a successful brand — with more than 70% of purchase decisions occurring while shopping. The enhanced visual experience allows a brand to resonate with a consumer thereby strengthening brand affinity and increasing loyalty. Part of building brand affinity is in fact maintaining and strengthening the visual elements such as colors and logo.
Schawk looked to streamline processes and turned to brand point management, which integrates strategic, creative and operational excellence, to help businesses deliver consistent and compelling brand experiences across all mediums and geographic locations. Our work with Coke, which was recently ranked as the number one brand according to Interbrand, reinforces the necessity to strengthen core design characteristics thereby improving brand value.
Brand point management helps companies deliver brands that are compelling enough to turn shoppers into buyers. The category of brand point management touches all phases of a product’s life – from ideation to design to market implementation – ensuring that whenever a consumer interacts with a brand, the experience remains consistent throughout. To learn more, here is some information about brand point management: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/854644/Brand-Point-Management .
Schawk has created a new online community to facilitate discussion around the issues and ideas that lead to having quality brands that resonate with consumers. The community is free for anyone to join, but registration is required. To check it out, please visit www.brandsquare.com.