We don't like each other but our marketing services will grow up to be friends.
The news circulating recently about Microsoft’s attempts to make friends with the Linux community along with the recent NY Magazine story about Steve Jobs is raising, once more, the fact that it is increasingly difficult (and irresponsible) for companies to draw hard and fast lines between themselves and their “competition.” Interoperability, open standards and cooperation are hallmarks of the new services-based web.
This has been discussed ad nauseum so I won’t waste more pixels on it here, but this thinking has yet to hit mainstream marketing and branding frameworks. We lack the tools to describe, think about or create brands which will be used within various constellations. Yet that is exactly the context in which brands will be consumed. The brands that “play well” with others will (obviously) be integrated into many more different circles, consumed by a wider variety of people and enjoy greater success. John Grant’s thinking around brand molecules works to establish one framework for how brands can interoperate but the majority of brand thinking creates brand separation.
Fortunately marketing as a service is an easy way for brands to collaborate and cooperate (in some cases without prior agreement – think Google Earth mashup). Thinking about creating marketing services that are platforms for other brands to build upon is an easy way to create more modern marketing. I predict that Nike+ will be siezed upon by other manufacturers as a platform to develop services on. This Timex rumour is just the beginning.
image via Cadillac Machinery