The year of the brand makers
Happy new mince pies and all that. Let’s not dawdle, it’s going to be an insanely busy year after all, what with one massive excuse for fireworks and drinking after another. God knows how we’re going to get out of our collective economic hangover when we’ll all be nursing real hangovers for most of the year.
Well, here’s one way that I can see: brands allowing their customers and users to start making their own content, apps and other utilities.
No, I don’t mean some souped-up re-tread of the user-generated content balloon of a few years back that did so little to put Hollywood directors out of a job. It is, rather, the logical extension of what we’ve all been trying to do in developing branded utilities and the like. Y’know, the Nike+, the O2 Priority, the Nokia’s Comes With Music of this world, all examples of how a brand goes beyond mere bonding, into a unique and irreplaceable place in a customer’s life.
So far most of the development of these has happened in house (and/or with the help of agencies), by people clever enough to attack an API and get something out of. But I don’t think that’s ever going to be enough to take it mass market.
And seeing as we know that people love making stuff when they’re given the tools, then one thing brands must focus on this year is making the process of making things as easy as possible. Plug and play is the watchword. Sure, if we can encourage people to learn the rudiments of coding through things like Codeacademy, so much the better. But my dream for the year would be for a brand to make hacking about in Arduino as easy for a non-tecchie customer as If This Then That makes linking up your various web services.
It’ll do something else too: liberate customer data from the clutches of CRM departments. Customers using their own data to benefit themselves – and other customers – could lead to a wave of innovation. Why shouldn’t a street see how much energy they’re using, through a utility’s easy-to-access API, then work together to reduce it? Heck, it’d help society as much as brands.
That’s the challenge. Get to it.
