It was staring us in the face all along, Weight Watchers is the ultimate Brand Utility. It's wonderfully functional and the whole brand is geared around helping you achieve a very specific goal. It's just not as sexy and cool as Nike Plus, that's why we don't think of the utility aspect and it's been around for years, which also doesn't help.
"Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG
game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan
for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells
-- whoops, I mean foods -- you can still use with your remaining
points.
And those 35 extra points you get every week? They're like a special
buff or potion -- a last-ditch save when you're on the ropes.
Indeed, I'm in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word points
as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user
into the semantics -- and fun -- of gameplay. You regard losing weight
as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind."
Clive as give us all a clue as to where the future of Brand Utility lies.
"This puts me in mind of the talk that Jane McConigal- a brilliant and pioneering alternative-reality game designer -- gave
at this year's South by Southwest conference. She argued that game
designers ought to put their skills to use in the real world by reshaping dull, everydayday activities into fun challenges."
So, it's easy to see who can move into this space.
Paul Graham of early-stage VC Y Combinator has a nice list of ideas the company would like to fund. Included on his list are new ways of doing news, auctions, dating, simplified browsing, better photo and video sharing sites and advertising!
"Advertising
could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead
of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in
return for whatever free site they're getting. It doesn't work
anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud
they shout.
What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated
to the web. The right answer will probably look very different.
It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So
the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from
scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to
do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably
the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only
later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.
Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects
are measurable, above all in sales."
A nice challenge for anyone bold enough to take it on.
Peter Hall suggests that buildings and billboards are in the process of becoming a lot more interesting and will provide a whole new communication medium. Something that will need a whole new set of skills to create for. "What if a sign did not simply tout new movies, sodas, and celebrity
babies in one-way feeds, but instead revealed something unique about
the building, its occupants, or its environment? What if the building
could respond, in real time, to the movement of people, the weather, or
the whims of bystanders or behind-the-scenes artists? Digital designers
and architects have begun working together to move beyond the facade
and give buildings a living skin."
VBS has built its brand reputation for pushing the envelope when it comes to extreme news story gathering. This recent venture is no exception as they dispatch one of its junior reporters to the most polluted city on the planet.
