Your brand is a network. You have no brand when this network isn’t working. More importantly, when this network doesn’t like what you do or doesn’t like to participate in it, you have a crappy brand. Jonathan Salem Baskin
Veteran author, blogger and design consultant Jonathan Salem Baskin shares his personal vision of how customer relationships will come to shape brands and businesses in the future.
Read the transcript below.
Jonathan Salem Baskin, Author, Columnist and Chief Heretic, Baskinbrand
Thank you, Vijay. Thank you, everybody. When I was growing up my two heroes were David Ogilvy and Buckminster Fuller, so I’ve spent a career talking to brand folks about design and talking to designers about brand. And as a quick little anecdote of where I think brand and design come together, I was running experience design for a systems integrator around the turn of the century, and we had a financial services client in New York that wanted us to build an intranet for their employees.
So we went to this beautiful, sleek office building, glass, you know, modern everything and, you know, austere, nothing on the walls, very high, high end, and we’re walking into our first meeting and as I’m walking out of the elevator well I see this piece of Xerox orange paper, taped to the wall between the elevators and I walk by and it stands out, and I ignore it. We go into a meeting and a bunch of meetings to do all the analysis you’re supposed to do. We want to understand the employees, their behaviours, what they want to use, what information they need, and we do all these studies and back and in out of the office, and as we’re walking in and out the office every day I notice there’s another piece of paper taped up to the elevator, sometimes a different colour and, again, being an idiot I ignore it.
We do this study on the brand and decide what does this financial services brand mean? What should it mean? What should it look like? What should it feel like? And we build this intranet and we test it and it sucks. Nobody wants to use it. It’s like a chore. The employees check it because they have to. And we don’t know what to do because it’s on brand and we designed it with all the information they themselves said they wanted in an intranet, it’s all there. You can imagine just the cacophony on this design for this sort of portal, if you will.
And, low and behold, one day I actually have the gumption to put my glasses on when I’m walking out of the elevator and I look at this piece of paper, and it’s the lunch menu. It’s the lunch menu for this company and I realise that the big 'ah-ha' for designing this intranet is put the lunch menu on the front of the screen. Now, this didn’t emerge from any of the analysis of the user. It didn’t emerge from any analysis of the brand. But, low and behold, we put today’s menu item on the front of this intranet and we had like 99% usage right away – home run.
So, brand and design I think interact and I know you all have your 'ah-ha' stories. When I think about the future I sort of have a bit of a curmudgeonly opinion and give you a comment about the past which is, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think customer-centricity is a new idea. And I think when we sit in groups like this and talk about making the customer, and listening to the customer, making the customer central to our business – are we kidding ourselves to think that we just thought this up? I mean, did we build Western civilisation by default or by mistake by not listening to customers?
This is not a new idea. In fact, when I look – and I write about this, and I talk to clients about this – when I look at this idea of the customer being central to what we do and – in fact, in the branding world – outsourcing our brand to the crowd, I’m scared to death. Not because, again, I’m a curmudgeonly old guy, but because I think that’s a dumb idea. Again, I think we need to think a little bit more about what does customer-centricity really mean? Because when I look at history the whole idea of the crowd running things is dumb. We know it doesn’t work. I mean, the Greeks said it was just shy of anarchy, right, as a form of government. The French proved that it’s not necessarily the best model for keeping your head. In business the idea of listening to customers is not new. Ford did it. Microsoft still does it. When I look at entertainment, when I look at the arts, this idea of user generated content being the new 'ah-ha' in this unleashing of all this creative talent, latent talent in the universe, I think to myself, 'Oh my God, what’s happening?'
So, when I see these slides – and somebody else showed this slide yesterday, I don’t mean to be insulting – but when I look from a technology perspective, we look at, sort of, the proliferation of tools to let people talk and share. It’s a marvellous opportunity but I don’t think we’ve figured out how the hell to use it, at all. There were some great examples here and it fits very well into what I want to tell you, but I think generally we haven’t figured it out. So, when stuff like this passes as entertainment – yes, that’s me – I’m scared to death.
Vijay wanted me to talk about customer-centricity and the business of the future, so I’m going to throw what I think are, hopefully, new ideas about what that might mean. And this is, sort of, a big 'ah-ha,' sort of, ‘going forward’ type presentation to finish this segment.
So, what do I think about customer-centricity? What I think we have to do from a design and brand perspective. First, I think we have to realise that everybody’s a customer. This idea that we have customers or a crowd to which we’re going to outsource or otherwise engage, is sort of foolish. Who isn’t a customer? I’d argue we don’t have employees any longer, they’re just different kinds of customers. We don’t have vendors or suppliers anymore, they’re just different kinds of customers. And what I mean by customers is they buy stuff from you. They do things that matter to your business. They’re not passive consumers of things but they have to be active buyers of things.
Everybody is a customer. We talk a lot about – and I think Anna was talking about the employees... no, it was Joe, when he showed that place in the terminal – your employees are customers. If you’re not selling something to your employees they’re not necessarily loyal. If your customer isn’t buying something from you, you can call them a customer, but if they’re not buying they’re not customers, they’re would-be customers. They’re past customers.
I think this idea of understanding the – if you will – reiterating, and reinserting the business commercial purpose of why we engage with people is something we haven’t figured out yet. We have a lot of models of engagement and interaction with 'The Brand,' as if it’s some theoretical thing that people touch. I say, if we’re not selling stuff to people we’re just talking and I don’t know if talking’s enough.
Because I think the substance of that transactional nature of how we talk to people and what we share with them and what they do as a result, that’s ultimately the product or service your business is in. Ultimately you’re not in the book business, you’re not in the airplane business, you’re not in the gizmo business for navigation, you’re in the relationship business. Relationships with your customers – i.e. everybody – is the language of your business. That’s what you... That’s your value? That’s what you do.
Customers aren’t just a data file. Customers are not just a list of transactions. Customers are what you do for a living. So, think about that for a minute. If you were going to assess your brand value, if you were going to design your business around preserving, growing and strengthening relationships – irrespective of what you sell – how would that change your business model? Pretty profoundly, probably. Because remember now you don’t have end users anymore. Everybody’s a customer with whom you have a relationship, some more healthy than others.
That means your brand is a network which is, what are these relationships do and how do they interact and how do they overlap? So, brand design isn’t necessarily the way things look or feel or taste, it’s not just user experience. It is the reality of these relationships in these networks that you maintain that is the evidence and purpose of your brand. You have no brand when this network isn’t working. More importantly, when this network doesn’t like what you do or doesn’t like to participate in it, you have a crappy brand.
That means the brands themselves are episodes in this network. It’s when things occur, when behaviours occur in this network that you maintain... that’s when you have evidence of brand. I love it and I talk to clients – and I write about this – when they say, 'We’ve done a qualitative survey, we know what our brand is and what it stands for and it has xyz value,' and then there’s a downturn and the company goes in the shitter, or the stock market crashes and all that intangible stock value evaporates overnight. And I ask myself, and I ask them, 'So how’s that brand value doing for you?'
It’s funny that for something that is so important can cease to exist when we most need it. You’d think there’d be more brand strategists saying, 'Huh, there’s something wrong with this equation.’ Well, there’s definitely something wrong with this equation. Your brand is an episode in this network. When things occur you have a brand; when they don’t you have nothing more than a potential or a memory.
I think one of the realities of the technology that we live with now is that we have the capacity to see our brand in real time through transactions of reality. It doesn’t have to be just qualitative what-if? It could be a quantitative here-now-then.
Finally, that means your company’s a narrative. We had a thing yesterday about higher purpose and I’m not certain I necessarily believe your company needs a higher purpose or a higher good cause, it just has to mean something other than the company exists so it can exist. It has to do something and do something really well. And when I think about narrative, in the branding world we talk about narrative being, you know, kind of like, we’re going to tell a story, and we talk about brands as promises, and again, this is sort of intangible. I’m saying; narrate the ongoing experience of your brand. Your company is the narrative of these customers who form your relationships interacting through their networks in episodes of real time.
You see, sort of, an equation happening here? Customers, relationship, networks, moments of interaction in those networks, and your company then is that story that’s being told. And how do we as communicators, as brand strategists, as designers, build that equation and deliver it?
To me I think that’s the future of customer-centricity in business. I think ultimately there is no centre for the customer to be in because your company’s everywhere and everybody’s a customer. So, I think we still are, kind of, wedded to some old thinking and old models of how we look at centricity and how we look at how we build brands and design them. I think there’s immense opportunity to see the, sort of, real-time narrative of experience as being your brand.
Now, this is the kind of thing I write about and I research and this is my propaganda page, but I’ve written a couple of books, I do a lot of consulting, I do a podcast, I write a blog. I want to ask you to please, if we can’t do it here, share with me your ideas, share with me your stories about how you’re delivering brand, how you’re designing brand and making it tangible and real, because I’m always looking for stuff to write about.
And, more importantly, I’m looking for stuff that’ll make me smarter, so if there’s something I’ve said today that either deserves more thought or better thought, I’m all ears and I mean that sincerely. I would love help in perfecting my thinking.