Unzip Your Brand

Episode I: A Creative Engagement

San Francisco. New friends Mark and Sandra gather over a pristine duet of Grey Goose Martinis in a busy Marina District bar. Through the long bank of windows a piercingly clear day has morphed into a blustery, fog sheathed sunset, swatches of gold and gray and blue coursing above the rooftops.

Sandra: Naomi said you work in product development ….

Mark: I'm on the brand side. We extend the product by extending the customer. It's fun.

Sandra: Is that brands the new way—or the old way?

Mark: The new way, please! It's a new brand approach, from the customer up. There's a new brand logic, innovation platforms, and a big focus on value. The old "build it, brand it, sell it" model is kaput.

Sandra: The new way is supposed to be … more creative …?

Mark: Well, you can put more into it. Instead of just packaging the product we're packaging the customer. You can take it in a dozen directions. There's a lot more upside—for everybody.

Sandra: How does it work … in terms a deskbound, overworked lawyer can understand?

Mark: It helps in three ways. First, it moves brands off the box and into customers, with whole new sets of connections. Second, if you're battling for market share it enables you to innovate on brand in addition to innovating on products. Brand innovation may the most potent form of innovation available to you. Third, it makes it possible to undermine a top-tier product by innovating on brand with a lower-tier product. Basically, you can run off with their customers.

Sandra: That's not nice.

Mark: No, but it's business.

Sandra: It's still brands, right? Big time logos, fancy designs … .

Mark: That's not so important anymore. What counts these days is what a brand does, not how it looks. Brands are customer applications—like software. You can think of us as brand programmers. Context coders. Just like busy bee's … .

Sandra: I thought brands were supposed to be above the crowd … icons to be revered.

Mark: Well they were, and that's why they never did anything. Totem brands tanked. They were long on looks, short on leverage. Brands are now on the street, in your pocket, in your ear. They're tools for you. The corollary is that brands don't need high priests or witch doctors. They sprout evangelists. And I'm sorry if I rant about this, but it's a big deal to me.

Sandra: I knew a designer who ran in circles for weeks developing a brand mascot for a new disposable diaper. They could never decide on a mascot color, even though they kept doing tests. First it was aqua, then marine, then sea green, then teal … then there were questions about the size of the eyes, and the shapes. He was totally wagged by numbers. And they would never add up.

Mark: That was part of the old way. He was trapped in a false logic where brands are reduced to stylized sales stimulants. If you don't know how to cook, you're stuck with slice and dice.

Sandra: It was mascot by numbers.

Mark: Companies thought their business mission was to subdivide a population until all that's left is lemmings. Then they'd send in the precision-guided mascots.

Sandra: If brands aren't sales stimulants, how do they make sales? I thought that was their goal. To grab you when you're watching TV, or reading, or shopping ….

Mark: More of the old way. You don't sell brands. Brands sell you. In fact, brands aren't made to be sold. Brands lead. They're a style of meaning that makes a market. If you lead, customers follow.

—The waiter arrived with the first two plates of tapas Mark and Sandra had ordered: glistening sauteed shrimp, and small Spanish sandwiches.

Sandra: Naomi said you were really into your work. I think the operative word was "consumed."

Mark: It's just energy overflow from being limn-enabled.

Sandra: Whatever that means ….

Mark: There's so much brand value … so little time.

Sandra: A steady job! Let's drink to that! Cheers!

—Mark let his eyes trace the rim of his glass. It was thinner than the usual barware, with a dense, liquid clarity, cut like crystal. The rim woke your tongue a nanosecond before the cold stab of vodka—just as the spirit gods intended. He brought his eyes back to Sandra—

Mark: To complexity! Salud!

Sandra: To complexity? That's a first!

Mark: Didn't Naomi tell you? I have a new sub-task in life: I'm going to redeem complexity.

Sandra: As opposed to simplifying life … like we're all trying to do … and pretty much failing ….

Mark: Complexity is richness without context. It has to be mediated—by someone who transforms that richness into human terms. Then people can thrive on complexity in a context they can handle. My iPod is amazingly complex, and so is the music in it, and the iTunes that keeps it there, but it's all designed in the context of me—so it's easy. That's brand virtue. Brands redeem complexity. They engineer the customer in.

Sandra: I don't know …. It sounds awfully abstract.

Mark: It's simple in practice. Only brands can save products from themselves. Products run amok with features when they're deficient in brand. Happens all the time.

—The small plates beckoned. Mark speared a plump shrimp sautéed with garlic and pimento. Sandra chose a smoked salmon and queso fresco bocadillo—

Sandra: Someone once told me the main purpose of a brand was to make a statement.

Mark: Weak brands make a statement; strong brands make a difference. Check out any market category, and the brands that make a statement are on the outside looking in. What's new about new brands is that they've moved beyond dressing up the product and making statements. They're programs to make a difference. They're based on a new brand model, and they focus on what the product does for the customer.

Sandra: As in features and benefits?

Mark: As a platform for customer growth. The old concept of features and benefits is too product-centric. It follows a product logic rather than a customer logic. The results are look-alike products with multitudes of marginal features—as far as the customer is concerned.

Sandra: Been there, done that ….

Mark: Those products don't make a difference. They're focused on themselves, not the customer. To operate in customer context you have to focus on who your customer is, where he or she is headed, and what you can do to get them there. You package the customer and the product at a higher level of value, and build your brand around that. Ergo, brands are about performance.

Sandra: That strategy could go anywhere ….

Mark: That's the opportunity. Brands are avenues of value innovation that can be directed to any market space. The value they deliver depends on a company's imagination, and on the depth and density of meaning that the brand provides. The initiative comes from the company, but the exciting part comes from customers, who can run with the brand and extend it in their own context. Customers are co-creators in the brand process. Brands help customers succeed in ways the company could never imagine.

Sandra: That doesn't sound like a normal brand to me ….

Mark: It isn't, and that's where the nature of brands has changed. Brands used to dictate terms to the customer. They were top-down, monolithic, unilateral and regimented. They were classic missionary position, but that's over. Now brands are bottom-up, the province of innovators and derring-doers. They create value where customers need it. The old way was to imprint the herd. The new way is to blow up fences.

And by the way, we're hiring … big picture/high res ….

Sandra: MBA's, designers … ?

Mark: Strong liberal arts. Extreme generalists, or if they're over 25, general extremists. Content rich and context savvy. People who can tell you why Capulet, Capuchin and cappuccino are heaven on the lips.

—Three more plates of tapas arrived. Mark ordered a glass of 2001 Brewer-Clifton, Rozak Ranch, Santa Rita Hills for Sandra and a glass of 2000 Rincon Vineyard Talley Arroyo Grande for himself—

—Sandra rested her head on her fingertips and gently began to laugh—

Mark: Is my wig crooked? I told them no starch.

Sandra: No—as she laughed at the joke —it's just that Naomi predicted our conversation. She said you were consumed with work, and then she said sometimes he goes on and on, and then on and on some more, and then watch out for side trips, mostly overboard.

Mark: I'm like Columbus begging for his boats, jumping up and down in front of K-Ferd and Queenie the I. There's a New World of brands out there—waiting to be explored.

Sandra: It sounds like it might be a long trip and a hard sell. You're asking companies to change the way they think about brands. Those are habits set in stone. I'm a lawyer. Business wants everything set in stone. They live in stone.

Mark: We have a secret weapon.

Sandra: Sarbanes-Oxley?

Mark: Dionysus—god of fertility, transcendence and art.

Sandra: Dionysus … in the boardroom?

Mark: Dionysus is the patron saint of brands. In ancient Greece he mediated between man and the wilds of nature, incarnating the edge experience, and granting mankind the fundamentals of civilization, which are boundless passion, creativity and Pinot Noir. Brands feed on the frontier, mediating between companies, customers and the wilds of the market. They're a company's leading edge, whether the company knows it or not.

Sandra: OK, Dionysus … as metaphor ….

Mark: As model. Dionysus as the god of pushing the envelope. Dionysian brands are a ferment of mind and matter. Instead being some concocted add-on, or a cheap-rent façade, they're primordial and potent, delivering visceral value, procreating customers, infusing every synapse of company being. They're passion from the core. At their most extreme they're total transport, walking the thin line between ecstasy and innovation.

Sandra: A lot of CEO's I know may not want to walk that line—or even let it in the door ….

Mark: Point taken, but those companies are condemned to incremental oblivion. The only future they have is more meetings with fewer people. Brands raise the bar. The goal is to raise it fast enough and far enough so your competitors can't catch up. You don't raise the bar by copying the next guy, playing it safe, or faking it with illusions. It isn't always apparent, but a company's greatest competitive weapon is its customers. When you raise the bar you raise your customers, who gladly shut your competitors out.

Sandra: It's just that traditional brands are such a fundamental part of life. They define who we are and what we think.

—Sandra took a bite of the salt cod cazuela, followed by long, lingering sip of her wine—

This wine is really good! It plays harmonies on your tongue, even after you swallow. Makes the food taste better, too.

Mark: Wine is to food what brands are to customers. They both sharpen the senses—or at least they should. What we need now is a better language of brands, with more forms of meaning, to scale brands up and out for heavy customer lifting.

Sandra: Well, you have a friendly audience in me, but it's bottom-liners who make corporate decisions. They have sharp pencils and dull senses. And they're paid to be skeptical ….

Mark: If we can wedge open their legacy mindsets we can convince them that the bottom line that counts is the brand foundation. That's the platform for customer growth. The genius of brands is that they can act as a customer operating system, extending the customer to new value domains that a company can effectively own.

Sandra: Tell me again what your pal Dionysus is doing up there in the executive suite ….

Mark: He's making sure that brands spring from company passion, not make-believe. Brands are company truth. Dionysus is a perfect patron saint because he frees brands from convention and cliché. He's freedom, passion and procreation rolled into one, with the bad-boy verve to rewrite the rules. That's where companies have to start, on the Dionysian edge, true to themselves, face against the frontier.

If I had my projector I'd show you how we start our kickoff meetings: three Dionysian PowerPoint's that liberate brands from the cute, the cuddly and the cosmetic.

--Mark turned in his chair and framed a projector screen with his hands--

OK, here we go. The first slide says, in giant type, Unzip Your Brand. Now everyone is wide awake. Multiple meanings, all relevant. On to the next slide. It says: Brands are the generative organs of business. No-nonsense fact. Multiple meanings, all exciting. If we get past the fainting spells, we show the third slide, which states, boldly and clearly: Be fruitful and multiply—which is what brands do.

Sandra: "Unzip" might be a bit strong for the meek ….

Mark: A fainting spell from us beats a wake-up call from the market. We use "Unzip" because 90% of a company's potential brand value is locked inside the company itself. And let's face it, brands are a company's vital force. They're unleashed or they're wasted. They're not creating customers if they're boxed on a shelf.

Sandra: OK, once the brands are all … unzipped … what happens next?

Mark: We fine tune the opportunities, which are usually all over the place. Then we work on the product models, brand models, platforms, innovation strategies and deliverables to make them happen. But the key is to involve the customer—as an active partner in creating the brand.

Sandra: That means giving up control!

Mark: Brands are not about control. Brands are business seed and customer crop. Companies are beginning to realize that to grow their business they have to grow their customers. That means migrating brands from shelf space to customer space, as active artifacts of meaning, engaging customers to create new markets. Great brands help customers grow themselves.

Sandra: That seems like a pretty high standard ….

Mark: Why encourage a low standard? Who wants a future with that?

Sandra: Most companies are married to the status quo. They're vested in their inertia. Some won't want to change—ever.

Mark: A lot of companies are dinosaurs, and if they want to bee-line their bones to bedrock, that's their option. Right now the mammals are munching. It's a long haul, but Darwin's on our side.

—The waiter appeared with dessert: bread pudding drizzled with orange-caramel sauce. The Moro blood oranges and Caribbean cane sugar made the bright ribbons of sauce a tangy counterpoint to the dense pudding base—

—Mark let a savory spoonful melt on his tongue.—

I've been babbling way too much about me. Naomi said you do most of your work with corporate contracts ….

Sandra: Work sucks. I want to talk about quilts.

Mark: Quilts?

Sandra: I'm into quilts.

Mark: Quilts.

Sandra: Into quilts—big time.

Mark: Brands can learn from quilts.

Sandra: Everyone can learn from quilts.

To be continued . . .