What Branding Means In The Experience Design Era~Julius Talvik

Chief Innovation Officer Julius Talvik was recently invited to pen a second blog for The Next Web about how the notion of brand is or is not changing in a world where brands must now be pervasive. The full article is published below, but you can also visit The Next Web to read the story, as well.

I have a friend who drinks a lot of coffee. So, when Starbucks introduced its wildly popular loyalty app, he was among the first to download it.
He uses the app daily. In fact, he goes out of his way to use it. At his local Safeway, which has a Starbucks, he buys his whole beans separately from his groceries so he can earn rewards stars for the purchase. He’s been known to fetch an empty bag of beans out of the trash to remove the proof of purchase sticker in a quest for more points. This guy loves his Starbucks app.
As my friend demonstrates, customers are quite literally adapting how they live to the brands they love through technology. This is driving increased preference for the brands that do it best. It is as if Starbucks has cracked the code, much asApple and a handful of others have, that allows the company to modify its customers’ behavior, rather than the other way around.
Starbucks is, in industry parlance, “killing it.” To no one’s surprise, every quick service restaurant under the sun is rushing out its own loyalty app.
It’s hard to imagine a world filled with a different app for each restaurant, but just last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had reorganized his senior management specifically to put himself more in charge of the company’s digital integration.
So who can say?

 

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