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I am often amazed at how companies slice and dice their customer base into a million slivers in a quest to meet specific needs while overlooking the basic needs of any customer—clarity, convenience, and confidence. Customers want to clearly understand what they are paying for, how to use the product or service quickly and easily, and to feel confident that they have made a wise choice.
When a manufacturer first introduces a product, customers are often so enamored of its function that they are willing to overlook flaws in the overall customer experience. Cell phones and software are classic examples—people bought them despite the fact that they barely worked. However, as soon as the manufacturer progresses to produce commodity products—appliances, cars, and cameras—the customer then ranks their experience in terms of other touch points. Ironically, the product becomes incidental and seemingly small interactions become the memorable aspects of the customer-company relationship.
Over the last three decades, Alan Siegel has become one of the best-known figures in the branding business and a champion of clear communications. He is a pillar of the establishment and a provocative iconoclast, and has built a leading brand consultancy, Siegel+Gale. He advises organizations such as Xerox, American Express, the National Basketball Association, Caterpillar, The Girl Scouts, and The New School, has created guides for The Wall Street Journal on understanding financial markets, and has served on the boards of numerous business and cultural organizations. View the books web site.
One Man’s Eye: Alan Siegel, by Robert A. Sobieszek
This large, elegantly produced volume reflects the eclectic tastes and ardent enthusiasms of one man, Alan Siegel, whose illustrious private collection of photographs rivals that of many museums. Truly one of the stunning volumes of photography to appear in recent years, One Man’s Eye features 120 masterworks by Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Adams, Ezra Stoller, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Walker Evans, Erwin Blumenfeld, Edward Weston, and many important contemporary photographers, including Jan Groover, Tina Barney, Zeke Berman, Tom Baril, Lynn Davis, and Michael Spano. View the books web site.
Brand extension in the technology category isn’t easy. Ever-shortening product life cycles, rapidly converging categories and a constant stream of new technologies give technology marketers little time to establish their brands, let alone find logical ways to extend them. With the notable exception of Apple, who has brilliantly managed multiple brand extensions from iMac to iPod to iPhone, there are few stories of successful brand extensions in technology.
The concept of extension is well-known to consumer product marketers. In the classical definition, there are two types of extensions: line extensions (for example, Colgate creating mouthwash, whiteners, etc.) and brand extensions (e.g., Virgin creating Virgin Mobile, Virgin Atlantic, and Virgin Bride, among many others).