The Productization of Brand

How low barriers to customer relationship development are making brands easy to make — and easy to discard.

I often think about our society’s transition from a factory-based, Industrial paradigm to a network-based, Internet one. As a brand guy, I look at this shift through the lens of relationships — how did Industrialism change the way people related to businesses? How does the Internet change that relationship even further?

Creating a business is infinitely easier than it used to be. Many of my clients who’ve been around for over ten years are experiencing a similar phenomenon: a flood of young startups coming for their customers. These companies have nothing to lose and need very little investment to enter the market and begin learning from potential customers. Smaller in size, they focus more intensely on a specific need and exploit it to the fullest, all the while developing a separate value proposition in parallel so that when the first expires (due to shifts in technology or market landscape) they have a new, proven relationship ready to scale, and so on.

What does this mean for brand? Isn’t trust derived from long-term relationships, stability, and permanence? That’s what I was taught in school, and in various professional circles thereafter. But in the age of information, customers — empowered by unlimited access — view their own brand as the most important. Thus, brands have become less like eternal monoliths of trust and more like products and services that users (otherwise known as people) use to build out their own personal brands. Imagine Yo expanding into an adjacent market — it would cease to be Yo because that brand was synonymous with a hyper-focused service. It’s not built to last, it’s built to serve. No doubt its founders realize that what they must replicate is not the brand, but the success of the brand. If they can create a new brand with the clarity and responsiveness of Yo, they’ll have something.

So what will happen to Yo’s brand? The same thing that happens to all obsolete products. It becomes history. That’s why I started #brandhack three years ago — to build and deploy brands in the same way lean startup adherents are building and deploying products and services. It’s not about the eternal sunshine of our spotless idea anymore, it’s about how efficiently we can abandon our expired notions of what people used to want.