Operationalizing Brands
with New Technologies
Denise Lee Yohn
Denise Lee Yohn, Inc.| [e-mail]
[ 1] Hemp, P. and T.
A. Stewart. “Leading
Change When Business
Is Good: The HBR
Interview—Samuel J.
Palmisano.” Harvard
Business Review
December 2004.

as operationalizing. While expressing a brand is to dimensionalize it through creativity, to operationalize a brand is to use it to drive the business and to develop an organizational system for delivering brand value.

After all, a brand isn’t simply
a logo, image, or message. A
brand is a bundle of values and
attributes that defines:
Simply put, a brand is what a
company does and how it does
it. And brand building involves
improving what the company
delivers to its customers and
how it runs its business—essen-
tially its experience design for
customers and stakeholders.

January + February 2010

interactions

New technologies—like Twitter,
Facebook, You Tube, Flickr,
social networking, augmented
reality, tagging, wikis, social
indexing—and the applications
they make possible have affect-
ed our culture in a profound
way. Still, I hope they will have
an even greater impact going
forward.
Truth is, the use of these
new technologies has been
quite limited when it comes to
the way companies build their
brands. To date, most technol-
ogy-enabled, brand-building
approaches have focused on
brand expression and commu-
nication.

The widely praised use of social media by Starbucks provides an excellent example. The promotions the company has run on its Facebook page and the engagement ads on Facebook’s home page have helped Starbucks build a larger brand fan base. Other social-media initiatives, such as asking people to take photos of new outdoor advertising and post them on Twitter, and using a YouTube video to promote its Election Day free-coffee offer, are ways in which Starbucks has employed new digital tools to express its brand values and attributes and to communicate with consumers.

But expressing and com-
municating are not the same
Delivering Value to Customers

New technologies can play as
much of a role in operational-
izing a brand as they do in
expressing it. Operationalizing
involves identifying, prioritiz-
ing, and implementing pro-
grams and initiatives to deliver
the brand through the core
organizational operating sys-
tem, fulfilling the first part of
the brand definition.
eBags and Nike are good
examples of companies that
use new media applications and
tactics to operationalize their
brands and design the customer
experience to deliver increased
value to customers.
eBags is a leading online
retailer of luggage, handbags,
business cases, and backpacks
with a brand platform based
on the idea that eBags is your
“perfect bag” expert. Instead
of initiating a new media cam-
paign declaring themselves as
“your perfect bag expert,” it has
focused on developing ways to
be that expert.
eBags provides more than
1. 9 million customer reviews
and testimonials so that buyers
can make informed purchases.
Providing such detail makes
it easy for customers to deter-
mine whether or not a bag is
the right one for them. Indeed,
negative and critical comments
are included, proving eBags’
understanding that being an
“expert” means being honest
and unbiased.

However, the company takes commenting one step further by tagging reviews with customer-supplied information about how frequently the bag is used, what it’s used for, and the occupation and gender of the customer. eBags promises that customers will soon be able to search and sort products by these tags.

There is also an eBags blog
that provides shopping tips and