Now, I am looking forward to more and more mockups on the fly.
Get it here! (iTunes link)

Gilt just made an iPad app that re-imagines what it means to shop a digital store (electronic commerce). They’ve built easier ways to see many photos, photos zoomed in very closely and what sizes and colors are available of a particular product. They’ve also reduced the number of actions it takes to buy something, changed the way something is moved to a cart and placed the cart at the bottom of the screen. I find these changes all quite interesting.

I wonder if Guilt will see the impacts of these design and usability changes on things like number of products returned. I’d be interested in finding out. It’d lend some argument to the ROI value of design and usability.

Brands went and still go to publishers because they have distribution channels for delivering messages. It’s kinda like the rest of us going to UPS or FEDEX or USPS to deliver a package. We pay for the use of their delivery channels. Brands pay publishers to buy space and/or time in their distribution channels to send their ink splatters and light rays to segments of people.

Those distribution channels are valuable beyond the simple utility of delivering a message however. Those channels have been built over time in breadth, depth, and trust. This value came primarily through the role of an Editor. Editors select content, arrange it and bring the important stuff (for the editor or audience perspective) forward. They tell story. They break stories. They report, often in one nicely crafted instance, the weather, changes in business and politics, the traffic and local cultural events, etc. They are helpful and over time build trust which leads to loyalty, recommendation, consideration, engagement, preference, action and so on. This sounds like what brands do. Now brands can be their own publishers.

Brands have the potential to build their brands by building their publishing (both distribution and trust) channels. Most of these opportunities are digital where the role of the Editor is recently being described as that of a Curator.

The question now is if and how brands will learn from and implement for themselves the lessons and behaviors that built the enormous value found in the publishing industry.

Brands can be great distributers with the digital channels now available. Brands have the expertise, the time and the money to be great editors and curators of digital content. It seems reasonable to conclude that one part of being a great brand is now also being a great publisher.

We can get water from the tap and yet if bottled is available we often choose it. We can just bring the clothes home as they were presented on the store rack, just slipped in a bag but often we allow tissue and maybe a sticker to accompany them. Webapps on the iPhone were all we had for quite some time but now we have downloadable ones and often we’d rather have those.

What do we make of this? I think we desire to be cared for, to have things prepared for us. What can you prepare for someone today?

Above are just three examples. How many can you think of?

What if you’re working on something unique? Many teams are. To build unique things the common stuff needs to be placed together in new ways. Or, uncommon things will need to be organized and leveraged in accessible and scalable ways. Neither approach starts with a retail like disposition.

Do you want uniqueness?

It’s a simple question easily answered by brands in the past. Be Us. Be true to our brand everywhere. It’s comforting. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve done. It’s even better (nearly necessary) if we can find great (measurable and effective) ROI. Be us in every place we can control (everyplace we care about) and trumpet (force) our message. In fact, there really was no provocation to the question of who to be. Be Us! Be stable, confident, tastefully arrogant. Hail to the brand.

The question is real now. The unsolicited opinion and desires of the customer for what they think and what they think a brand should be is manifold in most cases, public and easy to access. Should brands be “true” to who they think they are OR should they be who the people they want the kind favor of think they should be?

It’s a current struggle for many as the assumptions of what is possible and best practice for a brand are changing all around. The messaging and communication landscapes have proliferated, time-shifted, gone geographically agnostic and become ubiquitous effectively to the degree of infinity. Tons of stuff that once worked either doesn’t or works quite differently. So now what? Does this change how a brand behaves and therefore influence it’s identity like moving to a new culture would?

I think on one hand, yes. On the other hand, no. Where do you see the lines?