Another look reveals where the trend is taking brands. Did you know that Netflix partnered with Alternative Herbal Health Services, or AHHS, a West Hollywood marijuana dispensary, to distribute 12 strains of marijuana based on 10 of its shows? They created unique strains and sleek packaging to go along with Netflix content including: Disjointed, Lady Dynamite, BoJack Horseman, Orange Is the New Black, Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later, Mystery Science 3000: The Return, Arrested Development, Grace and Frankie, Chelsea and Santa Clarita Diet.

While Netflix didn’t technically sell the marijuana, its lawyers worked with the state of California and the city of West Hollywood to sort out how it could distribute weed. Speaking to Adweek, Jonathan Santoro, executive creative director of Carrot (the agency responsible for the brand activation) said, “It was essentially a no-brainer to create a pop-up that truly distributed marijuana that we would curate.”

What’s interesting about this is the unexpected union of a major global brand, and an old taboo that is increasingly finding acceptance in some countries around the world. A new report from JWT Intelligence highlights a growing number of cannabis-themed tourist experiences that coincide with the gradual legalization of marijuana all over North America.

Not only are we seeing the advent of privately owned pot tour operators, but also a cultish community, like a new phenomenon called ‘bud and breakfast’ providing a list of more than 400 marijuana-friendly properties. As Laura Powell notes, “Maine Greenyards in Auburn is one of the first such properties in New England. The ‘cannabis-themed boutique accommodations’ are set amid a garden where various strains of the plant are grown and the owners are on hand to provide cannabis education.”

But where it gets interesting is in hotels, that are partnering with celebrity chefs and different product lines to bring the experience to customers. In Los Angeles and Hollywood, The Standard hotels are collaborating with Lord Jones, a manufacturer and distributor of CBD-infused products. The hotels already offer CBD-infused gumdrops and body lotions in minibars for California locations, and there are plans to expand the offerings to hotels in New York City and Miami. Lord Jones is also launching its retail flagship within the Hollywood property later this year, selling cannabis-infused products to guests and the local community.

Portland Oregon is one of the most progressive cities in the US and it’s no surprise that cannabis-driven business has momentum. The 81-room Jupiter Hotel is proudly promoting that it is marijuana-friendly, offering guests an ‘Everything but the Weed’ kit, including coupons for dispensaries and related businesses. According to spokesperson Sarah Schnur, “When marijuana first became legal, the conversation opened up with our team on how we can make it easier for our customers.” The hotel, explains Schnur, wanted to make it clear to guests that accessing legal marijuana is permitted. “We decided we wanted to embrace this and promote conscious consumption. The package has continued to be one of our best-selling since its launch.”

What Does This Trend Mean For Other Brands?

It’s more evidence that unexpected partnerships fuel brands, as Paul Bailey detailed just a few days ago. What I hope it also shows is that before you go develop a chat bot, or bolt on some augmented reality gimmick for the trade publications, think about what unexpected intersection your brand might find with something else, even something that might be a little taboo.

Remember that brands are never finished and the journey to creating value for the customer never ends. New value is often found down the side streets of culture.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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According to Taddy Hall, “Breakthrough Winners don’t rely on luck or genius. The hallmark of successful innovation is that they resolve struggles or fulfill aspirations; they perform jobs in consumers’ lives.”

With that in mind, here’s my 20 suggestions on how to arrive at wonderful products.

1. Rethink what’s assumed.
2. Redefine what gets done.
3. Make something much more accessible.
4. Make it so clear.
5. Do something simpler.
6. Bridge a little gap.
7. Add joy.
8. Connect/combine.
9. Startle.
10. Lift what gets paid for.
11. Address the mundane.
12. Individualize to an unprecedented degree.
13. Re-balance.
14. Transform what’s shared.
15. Break a monopoly.
16. Protect the fragile.
17. Steal wisdom from other sectors.
18. End an outrage.
19. Introduce beauty.
20. Change what gets competed for.

The Blake Project Can Help You Create A Brighter Competitive Future In The Jobs To Be Done Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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We could debate whether people want to be led at all, but there’s little dispute that, in the light of this idea, brand loyalty is probably not what most brand managers have talked themselves into believing it is at all. If Van Praet is right, consumers are not loyal to a brand. Not really. Buyers are most loyal to the feeling that a brand evokes in them and in those around them. The emotion sways them. Perhaps the company reassures them, but it’s the feeling they keep coming back for.

Loyalty is connected with the hopes people have for their lives, not the companies themselves. People are inclined towards stories and ideas and changes that brands articulate that stimulate them and that attract their interest. All of this flies in the face of how brand managers rationalize what they do: that people identify with the brand; that awareness evokes loyalty and familiarity generates action. The thing is, maybe buyers aren’t really looking for the company when they look for the logo – perhaps they’re looking for a sign that the emotion they treasure is present.

This further suggests that brands that communicate but fail to bond people to ideas may not have achieved anything like the levels of loyalty that they think they have. They may get a response – but if Van Praet is right that response is triggered by other reasons: convenience; price; happenstance … Buyers may be moved by a stimulus to act. That does not mean they are hooked into the brand. Contact, even action, is not persuasion.

A brand can reach. But that doesn’t mean they have touched. Most channels aren’t actually touchpoints at all. They’re reach points.

Hilton Barbour has this equation that says it all: Value = impact. If we apply Van Praet’s observation that must mean: Value (for me) = Impact (for me). Hilton continues – “Contribution is just another word for impact … and impact is another way to measure value”. By extension, brands that don’t contribute to the lives of their customers (through purpose, experiences, story, behaviors) fail to make a lasting impact and therefore cannot have lasting value.

Three questions:

1. Forget where are you? Ask: why are you? What do you offer to give people who buy from you that they value (emotionally)?
2. What impact do you have on their lives and the world they care about that other brands don’t?
3. What’s your greatest hope for them as people? And is it a hope they share?

We’ve tended to see purpose as a directional and ethical compass for companies – the North Star that guides what they aim for, what they consider acceptable, what they judge to be right internally. It’s been associated with the softer, more human side of culture. But perhaps the opportunity for organizations lies in the fact that, increasingly, it’s also the only side with loyalty painted on it; it’s the only part that actually touches consumers. It’s the brands that articulate a view of life and for life that people bond with. Everything else is just messages. Everything else is just stuff from companies.

You can be a big brand, a known brand, a brand that people encounter and have contact with wherever they go. But from Van Praet’s viewpoint, if you think that’s enough, it’s not. Because that’s not what kindles and sustains the relationship. Consumers are not buying your brand just to have something in their life. They’re buying your brand to feel something in their life. The minute you stop contributing to that, you start losing value in their eyes. Yes, you’re still reaching them. But now, they have less and less reasons to stay in touch.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop, the Brand Storytelling Workshop Series and Brand Strategy and Customer Co-Creation Workshops

After the re-set in the global economy, people everywhere are re-evaluating and sorting out what is valuable in their lives and what is not. What the world needs now is to have more value added to it. And that’s what brands must do — add value to the world — if they want to lead the market in the post-marketing world.

Creating new value is fundamental to the healthy functioning of our free-market economy. Like the natural law of gravity, creating new value is the natural law of increase. People are always seeking an increase to their lives — wanting to be a higher and more fuller expression of themselves. As brand marketers, when we have the opportunity to serve people well, we find greater meaning and satisfaction in our own life experience.

The Marketplace Is A Slush Pile Of Clutter.
Your biggest competitor in the marketplace is clutter. Attention spans are shrinking, people are fatigued by marketing messages coming at them from everywhere and on every device… attention spans are shorter, media channels are ever changing. One could argue now that people don’t care about brands, and they really don’t want a relationship with a brand — unless they get a discount.

If Your Company/Product/Brand No Longer Existed Would Any One Care?
Does your brand represent an ideal (beyond your product / service function and money-making) that customers highly value? Does your organization focus on innovation that provides your best customers just what they’re asking for, or do you focus on providing future customers what they’re dreaming of and waiting for?

We Live In The Post Branding/Marketing World Everything Is Branded And Everything Is Good.
In a world of me-too products, resonance and relevance is an increasingly difficult challenge for brand marketers in every business category. If your value proposition looks, smells and tastes like marketing, people are more inclined to ignore you.

How Brand Marketers Can Be More Successful.
Increasing your value to people requires insight to be out ahead of the customer’s stated needs and connecting with their unspoken aspirations and dreams. This is what people really care about. The products / brands that best represent these higher ideals are usually the ones that reshape categories, change people’s behavior and lead markets.

If you’re discounting your prices, you’re not leading anything
Only market leaders command premium pricing. There can only be one leader. Everyone else sells on functions and price. And in an over-crowded marketplace, where there is abundant choice, any price is too high. You can’t grow your value discounting your prices. Nor can you increase your prices without providing the equivalent or greater “use value” people are dreaming of and waiting for.

Moving up the value chain implies more than a fair exchange
It’s no longer enough to meet customer quality expectations. Today, everything is good. Good = the same!  To thrive, enlightened business leaders will focus less on urgent transactions and more on creating scintillating, dramatic, unique, relevant and transformative experiences. Experiences people love. This will always involve innovating new crazy ideas that provide far more “use value” than customers pay in cash value. This is the over-looked source code to customer advocacy.

Two choices: the creative plane or the competitive plane
If your brand is to thrive in the new economy driven by creating new value, you’ll have to choose between operating from the creative plane or the competitive plane.

When your organization operates on the competitive plane: It can only win when somebody else loses. You will only bring products to market that are based in incremental user needs, and abundantly available from other sources. You’ll be forced to compete at the lowest price. Crazy ideas that are without form and are unproven will be discounted in favor of the status quo. Your enterprise will be managed based on control, competition and survival.

When your organization creates value on the creative plane: There will be no shortage in supply of opportunity. You’ll innovate and design products that redefine the category, delighting customers with the unexpected, making competition irrelevant. Your customers will experience more use value than they pay in cash value–making price irrelevant. Your organization will be focused on turning possibilities into realities. Your organization will not count transactions but create experiences people love and build trust advertising money can’t buy.

What marketers need to do.

Embrace Crazy ideas
Everything that ever was, is now, and ever will be is at first a formless thought seed in the imagination of a creative mind. Many of the products we can’t live without today started out as crazy ideas– automobiles, airplanes, personal computing, digital music an entertainment, smartphones, the social web – stuff nobody needed or was asking for, but once realized was just the thing they we’re waiting for.

All the stuff that has changed how we live in the world begins as a formless crazy idea. Crazy ideas are always more richly embedded with game changing opportunity than safe ideas. A safe idea is the one you can “prove will work” before it takes form in the world.

Few if any great innovations were proven in advance.

Innovate around a higher meaning
Creating new value always involves proposing new or unexpected meanings. What matters most to people is not the function or performance of a given product, but their emotional, psychological and cultural connection to what the product means to them.

New value is in the “meaning” not in the physical thing. People don’t just buy product, they buy into a higher meaning. This unexpected idea, unsolicited by user needs, once discovered, turns out to be the very thing people were waiting for, just not asking for. Nobody was asking for an iPod, Facebook, baked potato chips, the Swiffer, or any other product innovation that has redefined or reinvented a category.

Forget user-centered innovation
With so many such examples in every industry to benchmark from, I am surprised most marketers don’t seem to “get it”.  Most are heavily invested in traditional market innovation – finding a consumer need and filling it.

Many marketers are focused on how their new product / service innovation has more buttons and is easier to use, has more features and is cheaper than the leading brand. A radical innovation of meaning rarely, if ever, comes from incremental improvements or user-centered approaches.

Most companies continue to improve incremental performance within existing market concepts they know well– leaving only a few visionary companies to gain competitive advantage (market leadership) by proposing new and different meanings.

The message of hope.

Value creator brands are guided by a higher purpose beyond money-making… they earn and deserve the advocacy of high value customers because they represent an “increase to life” itself. In our post-marketing-social-media world, consumers create communities based on shared values. Brands can’t add values to the world unless they have them.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Everything that ever was, is now, and ever will be is at first a formless thought seed in the creative mind. Many of the products we can’t live without today started out as crazy ideas– automobiles, airplanes, personal computing, digital entertainment, smartphones, the internet and social media – stuff nobody needed or was asking for, but once realized, was just the thing they we’re waiting for.

All the stuff that has changed how we live in the world begins as formless crazy ideas.

Crazy ideas are always more richly embedded with game changing opportunity than safe ideas. A safe idea is the one you can “prove will work” before it takes form in the world.

Crazy ideas are like ancient fire – feared until proven useful

As early humans, we learned and adapted within the context of our surroundings. When humans first learned that fire makes life easier (like cooking meat and keeping warm) the idea of fire was eagerly embraced as necessary for survival.

I’ll bet before people figured out the “use value” of fire, it probably was a very frightening thing to experience – consequently something one should avoid.

Crazy ideas are like that.

The music industry fought tooth and nail to avoid the crazy idea of digitally produced, reproduced and distributed music. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine the folly of their resistance to this crazy idea. But they did for nearly a decade at great harm to their shareholders.

Consumers weren’t demanding the crazy idea of digital music be created out of their unmet need for digital music.  Yet once its use value was realized, the crazy idea changed an industry and the world.

The same is true for more commonplace crazy ideas like the Swiffer, which changed how people clean their homes. Netflix which destroyed its established brick and mortar video rental competitors. Even DiGiorno Pizza, which elevated the idea of frozen pizza to freshly delivered pizza status. Nobody was asking for these crazy ideas, yet each one proved massively successful.

Crazy ideas propose new meanings and create competitive advantage

In a me-too world of abundant choice, it’s far better to create new value (propose new meanings) than compete for the value created by others. If your brand is competitively ranked number three or four in a category, you might want to be thinking about a crazy idea that will create a new meaning around your brand that will put it in a league all its own.

That’s exactly what Swatch did.

When their bigger competitors Seiko and Casio were closely monitoring consumer needs for technical precision then inventing quartz technology, Swatch had the crazy idea that people valued self-expression more and created a new category and untouchable competitive advantage in a class all by themselves for well over 30 years.

The key ingredient to competitive advantage is to provide people with more “use value” than they have paid in cash value. That takes crazy ideas.

Although you could buy a high-quality, precision quartz watch from Casio for under $50, it didn’t provide the perceived use value of active self- expression available for $100 from Swatch. The correct time was not what Swatch customers valued. The same could be said of the iPhone over the Blackberry. The power of crazy ideas creates new value even when the innovation is not driven by known user needs.

Two choices: the creative plane or the competitive plane

If your brand is to thrive in the new economy driven by crazy ideas, you’ll have to choose between operating from the creative plane or the competitive plane.

When your organization operates on the competitive plane, it can only win when somebody else loses. It will only bring products to market that are based in incremental user needs and ever-cheaper prices. It will be forced to compete for low value customers. Crazy ideas that are without form and unproven will be quickly discounted in favor of the known and the proven. The business will be managed based on fear, control, competition and survival.

On the other hand, if your organization operates on the creative plane, it will have a compelling purpose and reason for being. There will be no shortage of supply or opportunity. It will develop products that redefine the category, delighting customers with the unexpected, making competition irrelevant. Customers will experience more use value than they pay in cash value–making the price irrelevant. Everyone in the organization will be focused on turning possibilities into realities. Management will not be hyper focused on counting transactions but will create experiences people love earning trust  and advocacy that advertising money can’t buy.

Get crazy if you want your enterprise to move up the value chain.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop and Brand Strategy and Customer Co-Creation Workshops