What’s your Brand?
February 3rd, 2008
Ruminating over what to post let me with a few unfinished thoughts running through my mind, and reading portions of the OPEN brand and the Long Tail have given me a few more marbles to roll around this cranium of mine. The initial thoughts I’m having are… well, the OPEN brand makes the case that there is a family of brands out there whose image is defined more by their customers rather than by their marketers or product specialists. It’s an intriguing point of view the validity of which can be seen by looking at brands like REI, Google News and NikeID: Personalization and community contribution is king.
This should come as no surprise- ever since The Long Tail was published we know that business models can be quite successful on catering to the fringe elements, by virtue of the fact that today’s technology allows for customization to the n-th degree. Not only that, but as we see with the example of iTunes such customization will inevitably reveal the nascent individuality in customers formerly used to mainstream offerings.
This then has empowered the consumer to the degree where they now demand that companies cater to them, rather than blithely be affected by advertising, and that is the foundation upon which the OPEN brand is built.
Even so, defining exactly which brands are open can be tricky. Some are simple: Microsoft, for instance, isn’t open. Neither are most financial and educational institutions, nor any online service where the focus in on the service provided than the needs of the individual.
Others… well, take Apple for instance- OSX is easily customizable as long as you stay within certain rules, yet breaking past them is practically impossible. It took consumer demand for them to open up the iPhone SDK, and god forbid you want something other than the offered colors of iPod. They are legendary for the control they demand over the design, effectively taking that choice away from the consumer. Are they open? I don’t think so. There’s plenty of community support, however it’s all mono-directional. Community contribution rarely, if ever, will change what Apple is doing without being vetted by their own internal team. They give an image to the world, and consumers make a choice of association so they can be perceived in the same light: Sophisticated. Intelligent. Well Designed. And just a little bit Arrogant.
And then at the far side of the spectrum you have places like istockphoto, wikipedia, and typepad, environments where the parent brand is subsumed to such a degree that the individual takes over entirely. Can these brands be truly called open? Technically yes, because they allow ultimate community participation, however in many cases they do so at the expense of their own identity.
Quick recap: Consumers have become more interested in expressing their individual tastes, and in so doing now demand the ability to customize their online and offline service providers to cater to their own personal needs.
This is why I think the book may not take the train of thought far enough: There already exist brands that have given up their entire identity to the consumer, providing him or her with the tools to build their own. Unbranded self-expression can be easily had at cafepress, wordpress, converse and to a lesser extent at Nike, BMW Mini and MySpace. All you need is a little bit of time and a sense of self-identity strong enough to overcome the desire to be a part of someone else’s idea of you.
This new consumer will refuse existing brand identities- instead they will demand that a service/brand conform to their own self image, and if it isn’t close or flexible enough it will be discarded in favor of one that is. In extreme cases even the brands’ own identity artifacts won’t be tolerated. To some extent this will take us full circle; this consumer will once again identify themselves with a particular consumer segment. But now the consumer will expect the ability to customize to their own particular nuances, making customization the killer app.
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