Does the brand define the customer experience, or is the customer experience the brand? Your work may involve both, but you probably attack problems with a bias for one or the other.
Earlier this year I asked Josh Levine of Great Monday to simply describe the relationship between brand and experience, and I like what he said.
I went back and dug deeper with Josh to clear up the differences between how he described it and and the way I often see the relationships between brand and experience being practiced. What emerged was this illustrated question and answer, attempting to untangle brand and customer experience in just 9 minutes:
As humans, the drive to connect with others who share common values is an inevitable force. This behavior is so fundamental, so critical to functioning societies, academics have dedicated their careers to understanding the complex dynamic and ritual of tribal cultures.
Of all the years of academic research spent understanding tribal affiliation, inclusion, identity and shared cohesion, it’s only recently that business has taken notice. That’s not to say commerce based tribes haven’t been around forever—they have—but until now they’ve formed organically, without the considered attempts of brand managers to leverage this platform. Read the rest of this entry »
In April’s Harvard Business Review this article caught my attention: How to Market in a Downturn. The basic premise is resegmenting your customers according to their emotional response to the recession. It’s basically encouraging businesses to deeply reconsider their demographics.
I’d go further and say it’s a critical moment and that business must reconsider everyone in their brand ecosystem—employees included. The downturn has touched everyone, and no one will be left unchanged when we come out on the other end (whenever that may be). To create a sustainable business, isn’t it time we take into account our entire community, not just the people buying the products?
This past Saturday, the New York times published a front page article about the “Vast Remaking” of the economy. Vast is not overstating it, and perhaps underplaying the severity of what we’ll see in the next few years. Watching the dollar tide go out reveals weak business models and long-forgotten market needs. Yet while many are calling it a collapse, what we need to understand is that it’s really re-framing. Today’s job-losses are an indicator that old needs are finally going away, and that new needs will fill the vacuum.
I think a lot about how I’ll see these new needs as they arise, and you should too. Now is when the next great success stories begin, not when the next boom finally arrives.
For creatives, it’s about finding the opportunity in tough times.
A couple months into an already beat up 2009, and things are looking grim. What’s a creative entrepreneur to do? Earlier this year I chaired a panel for the AIGA called Design Through the Downturn, and the discussion surfaced some big ideas about the challenges—and opportunities—this new economy brings.
Opportunities? Yup, a number of people at the event observed that demand for creative services like design isn’t down, its just different.
There’s many ways demand will be different in the next few years, but here’s the one that might affect the creative businesses more than any other: a shift from artifacts to solutions. Read the rest of this entry »
Any idea is a good idea, no matter how crazy.
Nothing can kill the spirit of a brainstorm quicker than judging ideas before they have a chance to gain legs.
