Brands: a big, bold and exciting perspective.

So, I've been one of the lucky guests of Wolff Olins last night, for their Brand Next event. It has been an incredibly inspiring and intellectually stimulating evening, like it hadn't happened to me for a long time.























They have come up with a whole new way to see brands, which I find fascinating. I suspect I am only beginning to elaborate it in my head, and it will probably take a little while before I can really understand it in all its depth and complexity. Anyways, here is my attempt to explain it(*):

The fundamental premise is the following:





So far it may sound a bit naive, but then they expand upon it, in three points ... and the whole thing becomes very relevant:

1. brand = platform
This is for me by far the most interesting point:

"Brands started as a stamp on a product, and became a gadget designed to get people to buy, an emotional lever. Now they’re becoming something bigger and different. Brands are becoming platforms. More and more, customers are invited not just to buy things but to do things. On the platforms of eBay, Wikipedia, flickr and YouTube, people sell things, share knowledge, broadcast visual ideas. Through Zopa, people lend to and borrow from each other. On Sellaband, you can launch your favourite unknown band, and then share in the profits. [...] Across the developed world, consumers are becoming active, even activists, and brands their platform. [...] As consumers are invited not to buy but to work".

In my brand management class at LBS I learned that brands deliver value to the consumer in four ways: (1) they create familiarity, (2) they reduce search costs, (3) they provide a guarantee of performance and (4) they provide meaning. I guess that what the folks at Wolff Olins are saying here is that there is a fifth way: brands provide a platform for consumers to act and express themselves. That way they create value for the consumer, and in return they receive value.

For example, last night I pledged to visit two locations in London and write an opinionated review for World66. By doing so, I will contribute to making the brand more interesting and relevant, and in return the brand will give me an opportunity to perform an action, express myself. No payment involved, a lot of value created.

The 'free beer' they were serving last night really took the concept to it's extreme consequences. It's an open source beer licensed under a Creative Commons license. Basically anyone is free to chance the receipe and the branding elements, and to make money from it:



2. brand = link
Yet, there is another way in which brands create value:

"It’s not just individual customers who use these platforms. Other organisations do too, and brands increasingly link organisations together. [...] Amazon may seem like a bookselling corporation, but actually it’s a constellation of retailers of electronics, homewares, toys and more – plus the wider constellation of people who review and recommend. Creative people increasingly work in consortia, forming communities through conferences like TED or websites like worldchanging.com. Cities like New York are creating a city brand to connect and multiply the impact of the myriad of agencies who promote the city. [...] As brands become less the property of an organisation and more the banner of a movement, ownership will become even looser. Logos will be things other organisations, and individuals, can borrow and adapt".

I love it.

3. brand = theme
Finally:

"As brands become platforms and links, they get used and abused. People want to make them their own – which means they may no longer be the same everywhere. Brand becomes not one tune, but a theme with variations. As ideologies compete, as cultures become more multi, organisations are getting much more sensitive to context, to localness. Even Starbucks – the great exponent of a repeated formula – now believes in ‘identity, not identical’. The BBC has moved from uniformity to create distinctive channel brands. Mandarin Oriental thinks of its hotels as a family, not a chain, so that San Francisco looks and feels different from London and Hong Kong, though there’s a unifying oriental sensibility. [...] The new brands have many ways of doing things, many ways of speaking. They experiment and change over time. The brand is not a perfect blueprint, and brand creators are less architects and more inventors, learning by adapting. What unites the organisation (or constellation) isn’t the surface logo but the underlying idea".

I am wondering whether they had a bit of this in mind when they created the London 2012 logo.

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(*) and here is how they explain it ... perhaps a bit better.