More on APIs and marketing: Collaborative Objects.
Been thinking more about the last post and while the API metaphor works for some things it probably falls down in lots of very technical areas that I don’t understand properly. I think the solution is to imagine a new class of objects – I’m calling them Collaborative Objects for lack of anything better – that are assets that businesses publish or expose in order for them to be recombined by customers or other business “partners.”
I think about the footwear business which has quickly become a showcase for brand partnerships. There are so many that when I see footwear that just comes from one brand it now seems quaint.
All of these partnerships probably involved lots of negotiation, consultation of brand standards manuals, smoothing of egos, politics and other unnecessary stuff but are still only one expression of potentially pretty cool partnerships. I understand that lots of issues are involved, especially with fashion brands, in how their assets are used. But it seems to me that actually bringing customers or other designers into the act of remixing products could be quite valuable for some brands. This one might be quite easy to achieve. Essentially this is an open version of Nike iD where instead of choosing from Nike options, you could choose from options offered by other partners.
To the comment on the original post: both this and the previous example used product businesses. Could this same concept be brought to a service business like Starbucks for example?
Starbucks has lots of quite useful assets: store location information, bean types, coffee types, etc. It’s possible to imagine that a variety of different partners might want to use that information along with their information to offer enhanced services. An example might be an advertising network buying the back message on coffee cups and delivering geo targeted offers to specific Starbucks locations.