Using services to redefine your business.
Am currently in the middle of reading the new Hofstadter book: I am a strange loop. It’s a fascinating theory about consciousness that I won’t go into here, but if you have any interest in these things I’d highly recommend it.
Anyway, one of Hofstadter’s points is that humans are unique in our ability to perceive ideas which are high-level abstractions of other ideas. For example, we have no problem abstracting a series of black and white marks on paper into the concept of letters. We can move from groupings of letters into a new abstraction of words. We can rise above words into prose. Move higher still into ideas and onto poetry and so on and so forth.
In marketing strategy, we call this “reframing.” It’s the complete reshuffling of the landscape through changing perspective. Unless you’re the leader in a category, this is likely the goal for any strategy you create.
Marketing strategy is just a set of words, while it may help you create an “open space” on a powerpoint or keynote slide, it doesn’t really change the real world. What you need to change is not what the brand says but what the brand delivers. Adding new services onto your brand is a start but to return to the previous example this is simply like adding more words. It’s only in adding the right words in a sequence that that words become prose, ideas or poetry.
Adding the right combination of services to your brand experience, however, can completely change the business you’re in. This is particularly visible in the digital arena. For example, iPod operates in the music player space. iPod + iTunes operates in the music space, iPod + Nike+ operate in the pedometer space. The addition of digital services completely reframed the same piece of gear and created an entirely new idea or high-level abstraction for us to consider.
Up till now, we’ve mainly seen examples of digital services added to digital devices. There is a whole new landscape of brand experiences when digital services are added to analogue products or services. In fact, services can be added to almost any product or service you can imagine in order to create something entirely new.
To me this is one reason why the pessimism around this current web “bubble” may be unfounded. The first bubble was driven by technology applied to transforming business operations. This is technology applied to transforming business categories. I think, we’re just at the start of companies realising this is a new way to compete.