Not many clients approach advertising agencies and announce that their goal is to become an ingredient brand. Most clients want to make their brands global, famous and top of mind. Being an ingredient in someone else’s recipe just doesn’t sound ambitious enough.
That is until one considers what Intel were able to achieve in the 1990s by becoming an ingredient brand, making the Intel brand global, famous and top of mind. In the 1990s, Intel followed a model that had been pioneered by DuPont when it placed its Lycra and Teflon technologies into clothing brands to enhance their performance. Intel, with sales of only $500m at the time, negotiated to put their processor into numerous original equipment manufacturer brands, such as Compaq and IBM. They then committed a whopping $110m advertising the fact that Intel was inside, thus making Intel the component that justified the PC’s premium price. So successful was this marketing campaign for Intel (and I can guarantee you have the mnemonic ringing in your ears right now) that clients did start briefing their agencies for an “Intel Inside”.
Sadly, apart from Intel, it’s hard to think of another famous ingredient brand; possibly Lycra or NutraSweet. The truth is, one can literally count the number of famous ingredient brands on the fingers of one hand.
This is despite the proliferation of apps, technologies and platforms that all require brand identities and distinctive strategies. Too many have fairly undifferentiated offerings, have been devalued due to being available for free, yet still clamour to be noticed by a population with an ever-decreasing attention span. Conversely, investors require mass participation in these services as evidence of their potential to reach some kind of global scale.
Enter the ingredient brand.
No one seems to have noticed but the route to mass awareness for a component of your daily routine, such as an app or a platform, should be through ingredient branding. Google already exists and so does Facebook. These are category creators that scaled quickly and cannot be perceived as the norm. Most others are smaller technologies or platforms that can never hope to reach 1 billion users. So, instead of expecting everyone to come to their platform, they should identify a host brand in which they could implant themselves. That way, scale starts to look more likely. And the beauty of ingredient branding of course is that it is a co-operative strategy. The ingredient brand doesn’t only find one host, it can live inside many, and wherever the host goes, the ingredient brand gets distributed too.
The battle is against our own preconceptions. If ingredient wasn’t such a dirty word in branding, we’d be happy to recognise Beats as an ingredient brand. As soon as Apple acquired it, it found its host. And there are others too: Spotify, Skype, Netflix. I would classify them all with the potential of being the next Intel Inside. However, the service with the most potential to become the most recognisable, most famous, and most mainstream ingredient brand has to be Twitter. Perhaps Twitter sees itself more as a masterbrand, creating its own Twitter brand world, rather than as an ingredient brand inhabiting other brands’ worlds, but that is one of the reasons Twitter faces a challenge as a platform right now.
We are embarking on a new era of communications. In the future, not only people but every thing in the world, will be connected to the internet. This means that every thing will be able to communicate for itself. What if every thing, and not just every person, had a Twitter handle; what if Twitter was a notification service inhabiting every single product or service in the world. This would see Twitter’s future addressable market leap from 7 billion people to 25bn things or more.
Imagine with Twitter Inside a park bench how it could notify people roaming the park that a bench nearby has just become free; with Twitter Inside a can of Coca Cola it can connect anyone to someone else who wants to share a drink; with Twitter Inside Grayson Perry’s new shrine-to-the-everyday B&B, passing tourists receive alerts when a room becomes vacant for that night. Scale comes from news, views and notifications being expressed and exchanged by everyday things everywhere, not just by people. In other words, everything’s a handle now and the whole world can become a host for our tweets.
Tracey Follows is a futurist and the founder of anydaynow.co. Follow her at @tracey_lou
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