I found a really interesting post on Communites Dominate Brands about the experience economy. Overall it gives some perspectives on "expanding the experience" for the customers in order to survive in the market place. Even though its a good post I disagree with the brand angle:
Context is something that already exists in peoples lives. Combining the brand to the context gives the experience new, deeper meaning.
I dont think its branding that makes a difference…in worst case, branding can be counter-productive. As mentioned in previous posts I believe that branding - at its best - is a "fog of war", propaganda and something meant to cover up that no real development and improvement in a company or its products has occured.
Instead (of the above) I believe that combinding new and real value to a given person’s context gives the experience new, deeper meaning. Something design ("new design" if you like) can do.
Nevertheless, its an interesting post and I agree with its suggestion that business need to focus on the total experience for their customers if they want to be a player in the future.
How you create this experience is a different matter, I guess…do you have any thoughts on this?
(Thanks to Morten Grønborg for some interesting discussions about branding in relation to this).
2 comments so far
Service is not just the “transaction” as the linked article suggests, but the “total experience” as you point out. Branding should be seen as a component of service. Specifically, service is about the moment of service creation (the transaction, if you will), but it is also about the way a person enters into the transaction. How a person approaches a service (frame of mind, expectations, mood) should be seen as equally important as their experience within the service. Brands have a powerful value in setting up customer expectations — brands are rather Pavlovian, really.
2 years ago, I discussed with the sociologist Michel Maffesoli, author of, the “Time of the Tribes” among others.Taking a broader perspective than the mutation of capitalism, he said that as people seek “connection to each other” in new loose patterns, they threaten the very basis of modern utopia (belief in progress-rational thinking-the free and independent individual) and the institutions it erected such as the Nation-state and consumer society.
To replace them, new beahaviors are experimented where social interaction take similar forms as traditional societies’ tribes.
Robert Cova, a marketing professor, has been inspired by his ideas and suggested that people now look for the “link value” of a product or service beyond any other attributes. This is one of the forces behind the development of “brand communities” whether virtual or physical.
I think that using the term “branding” may be to limitating and doing branding as me usually understand it may even prove counter-productive as you suggested Magnus.
However if we define the brand as semiotic entity, as an articulation of a signifier and a signified, it brings more relevance and accuracy. The brand can trigger and help developing a plyphonic conversation and therefore design, “events marketing” (from Olympic Games to Christmas beer in Denmark), location based marketing, viral marketing and so on are part of the process.
I am not sure that the context is necessarily pre-existent to the association with brands though: often brands develop the context, nurture it and design it in appropriate forms to serve their goals: Beaujolais Nouveau as nothing to do with traditional French culture but is a long term -brilliant- strategy imagined by -bad- wine producers to attach value to their prodcut. More and more the brands mediate our relationship with others through their participation in our environment.
It is paradoxically the most powerful brands name that can afford to remain hidden behind a tiny logo (Nike) or even the simple distinctive and differentiating character of their design.
But maybe it should not be called “branding”… any suggestion for a name ?