For over a century, brands have played a vital role in our lives by serving as symbols of quality, identity, community affiliation and conjuring memories and emotions.
However, as digital transformation empowers consumers and reshapes purchasing habits, brands must transition from their traditional role as “meaning makers” to “value creators” that tangibly enrich people’s lives across cultural and functional dimensions.
This evolution is essential for maintaining relevance with customers who expect personalized, seamless brand interactions across both digital and physical environments. Companies that successfully make this transition will be equipped to build more enduring relationships with their customers amid persistent digital disruption.
Brands Must Evolve Beyond Simply Creating Meaning
Historically, the power of brands stemmed from their ability to:
- Reassure customers that products adhere to trusted safety and quality standards
- Signal exceptional craftsmanship and cement luxury prestige
- Communicate useful product performance parameters to inform purchase decisions
- Reduce choice overload in crowded retail environments
- Facilitate aspirational social signaling and cultural “tribe” affiliations
For much of the past century, little has changed in how businesses manage their brands. For the longest time, brands were simple "meaning makers," generating commercial value through establishing positive associations and sticky memories in the public’s collective hearts and minds. However, as digital channels have shrunk the perceived differences between brands and empowered consumers with expanded options, companies can no longer rely solely on symbolic brand equity to drive perceived value.
Customers now expect brands to provide more tangible utility that directly improves their lives across a variety of access points. This requires a shift from surface-level style and emotional appeal to actively enriching people's lives in meaningful ways.
Brands Transition to Customer Value Creators
As brands evolve beyond their historical roles as meaning-makers, they’re creating value for people in two interrelated ways: by shaping culture and by leveraging code.
Culture: creating intangible cultural value by facilitating self-expression, social belonging, and promoting positive change.
Code: creating tangible, functional value through convenience, personalization, capabilities, and innovation.
Customer Value Creation Through Culture
As experts like Dr. Marcus Collins have shown, the enterprise value of a brand is closely linked to its cultural value. Cultural value comes from a brand's ability to connect with a particular tribe’s identity, values, language and rituals. As culture changes, new groups become part of the mainstream, and their goals gain social weight, as does what drives them to make purchasing decisions. Savvy brands capitalize on these trends by connecting people in like-minded congregations and demonstrating ways to improve the quality of their lives.
Brands can leverage culture to create customer value in three ways:
A. Facilitating Identity and Self-Expression
People are increasingly using brands to signal their identity and “tell their truth” to the world. Brands that successfully tap into this impulse become vehicles for self-expression. For example, Apple has built loyalty through products that allow creative professionals and design aficionados to express their identity as innovators.
As artificial intelligence improves its ability to analyze cultural identity markers, brands may be able to hyper-personalize brand associations to align with individual customer's desired identities.
B. Strengthening In-Group Bonds and Community Affinities
Shared brand enthusiasm has always fueled in-group social cohesion. However, niche community formation around brands seen as legitimate culture carriers is a newish phenomenon motivating brand fans.
Look at how Trader Joe's and Wegmans have built cult-like followings for their products, which can reach almost religious levels of devotion. Starbucks provides another model, incubating in-store "third spaces" to facilitate first dates, job interviews, celebrations, and other important personal interactions that enrich people's lives. Its brand community attracts customers looking for more than just coffee; they want kinship.
C. Channeling Positive Change and Social Values
Brands like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s have promoted eco-friendly values and social justice for decades, appealing to people’s ethical motivations above and beyond the functional benefits provided by their products.
This type of brand activism, while somewhat dicey to pull off authentically, does offer people accessible ways to signal their support for ideas they care about with their dollars. This kind of cultural brand activation could turn off some customers, but it also lets brand loyalists find happiness in doing things that make them feel good.
Customer Value Creation Through Code
At the same time, brands are focusing on improving their customers' lives by giving them more useful information through digital tools, content, and interactions. Brands no longer just represent ideas to people; they are increasingly doing things for them. They educate them, teach them new skills, expose them to new use cases and applications, and make transactions easier.
Code (software) is a key mechanism driving this evolution because it allows for logistical brand executions. Code improves business capabilities by allowing customers to easily compare options, converse with peers, access information, and conduct transactions across multiple contexts. Code can also help brands generate utility by creating content and experiences that strengthen emotional bonds.
Brands can leverage code to create customer value in four ways:
A. Enhancing Convenience and Efficiency
Brands are increasingly stepping-up to help people save time, money, and effort. Some of the more successful software-based brand innovations we’ve seen include:
- One-click checkout
- Smart wallets and smart cart wish lists
- Virtual assistants that educate people
- Real-time customer service agents
- Dynamic maps that enable people to explore and discover the world of the brand
- Helpful video content to coach people on how to master a new skill
B. Curating Personalized Experiences
Data-powered algorithms enable tailored brand communications, personalized product configurations, usage instructions and other bespoke customer treatments based on a customer's context. Consider Netflix’s personalized entertainment feeds for viewers on its platform. As AI continues its exponential leaps in behavioral processing, brand experiences will become even more responsive to individual needs in real-time. Tik Tok's content algorithm is a good proxy for what we'll expect from every brand we interact with.
AI has already fundamentally altered how we use the internet, transforming it from a network of people and information to one of people and their intentions. AI applications will accelerate brands' transition from simple meaning systems to advanced customer value creation systems. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for brands to strengthen their relationships with their most valuable customers.
As innovation experts like Tom Goodwin and others have already foreseen, as we grant AI more access to our personal data, it will understand:
- Where we are and where we are going (location)
- What we want to buy and how to buy it (money)
- Who we are and who we want to be with (people)
- The day, date, and time of day in which we exist (time)
- How to either anticipate or automate routine tasks for us, creating a heightened sense of flow in life (effort)
Brands will increasingly become intelligent agents in our lives, imbued with real-time knowledge about us, our habits and our intentions to make our lives simpler, easier and, in some cases, more rewarding. You don't need to be a software engineer to see the potential for greater personalization by brands.
C. Building Knowledge and Skills
Beyond showcasing product features, brands are actively cultivating people's creative skills by providing tutorials that expand device functionality.
Sephora teaches its customers about beauty techniques virtually, whereas Peloton develops athletic prowess through digital platforms. Hipster outfitter Huckberry does more than just sell us durable jeans and jackets; it also helps us build a versatile wardrobe of stylish staples for less than Main Street fashion brands charge. Apple offers photography and music production tutorials to help users improve their creative skills on their devices. Educational brand content encourages long-term loyalty by empowering rather than selling to customers.
More generally, a new wave of brands is helping a wide variety of tribes improve their abilities, ranging from practical life skills to specialized hobbies and interests, including:
- Cooking instructional videos teach viewers culinary techniques
- Makeup tutorial content improves beauty application skills
- Interactive fitness apps and platforms teach proper form during exercises
- Educational content for children promotes critical thinking and creativity
- Complex games that help users improve their strategic thinking skills
- Craft tutorial videos enhance amateur art and DIY project skills
D. Facilitating Co-Creation and Co-Innovation
The power of software also allows customers to collaborate to create new products, experiences, and services via participatory innovation networks. Starbucks' Tryer Center is a great example of how to foster this type of crowdsourced innovation. Customers work face-to-face with employees and outside partners in this dedicated lab space to develop new product ideas and improve existing offerings.
Nitro cold-brew coffee and seasonal holiday drinks are two recent innovations driven by the Tryer crowd. This brand-hosted collaboration hub enables rapid prototyping and real-time customer feedback to fuel innovation.
The AI Catalyst: Converging Cultural + Functional Value
As AI unlocks powerful data synthesis abilities, it will allow brands to close long-standing gaps between their symbolic dimension and the delivery of real user value. A new wave of advanced analytics will make it possible for cultural resonance and logistical improvements to work together in a two-way conversation within brand ecosystems.
New Opportunities for Value Creation
AI will close the gap between cultural symbols and logistical benefits by:
- Adapting branding, messaging and offerings to individual wants
- Setting new standards for inclusive, emotionally fulfilling brand interactions across customer diversity
- Managing data ethics and algorithmic manipulation risks to nurture consumer trust
The Value-Creation Imperative For Brands
In a world where digital uncertainty is common, brands need to offer real value that goes beyond style or messaging that sticks. Companies that do not make this change could lose customers, be disintermediated, or become commodities because their competitors are smarter.
Having said that, brands that use more multidimensional tools for creating value can change their whole industry. Instead of following the latest trends, innovative businesses will change the rules for entire categories and build strong, unbreakable bonds with customers that go well beyond offering frictionless transactions.
Emerging Leaders in Customer-Value Creation
This cultural and technological overhaul will further expand the relationship between people and the brands they love. Brands will no longer be restricted to symbolic badges delineating identity tribes or quality tiers; now, they can embed themselves into diverse aspects of customers’ lifestyles as true partners. Brands that successfully transition from "meaning makers" to "value creators" will maintain long-term relevance and loyalty in today's connected world.
Beyond the established giants of The Connected Age like Apple and Amazon, several lesser-known and emerging brands are carving out their own niches by leveraging culture and code to create new value for customers.
Temu and Shein: Redefining Retail
Two brands, Temu, an online discount marketplace, and Shein, a global fashion e-retailer, have used digital platforms to make it easier than ever to get a lot of different items at low prices. These brands have reached customers who grew up with technology by providing useful benefits like ease of use, variety, and low prices, as well as cultural benefits. "Shop Like a Billionaire" demonstrated Temu's clever fusion of code and culture in the brand’s recent Super Bowl spots.
Cocunat: Natural Beauty and Community
The Spanish brand Cocunat, which makes natural hair and skin care products, is a great example of how to use your brand to combine functional value with cultural value. By focusing on the "curly method" and leveraging influencer marketing, Cocunat has built a strong community around its chemical-free product line.
The brand's success comes from being able to understand what its customers care about and give them exactly what they want. The Cocunat Community helps to build loyalty among customers.
Fenty Beauty: Inclusivity and Personalization
Rihanna's Fenty Beauty has made waves in the beauty industry by focusing on being open to everyone and having a lot of products for all skin types. Fenty Beauty's customer-centric approach entails understanding and meeting its customers' diverse needs, which has resulted in a loyal following. The brand's commitment to inclusivity reflects customer values while also setting a new standard for the beauty industry.
The success of these companies shows how meeting people’s diverse functional and cultural needs breeds customer devotion, pushing the boundaries of scale and growth by generating new types of value.
What Should We Take Away From All This?
Brands are evolving from simply being symbolic meaning-makers to providing tangible, functional value in customers' lives. This matters because digitally empowered consumers today expect more personalized, seamless, and even anticipated experiences.
A new wave of modern brands is creating value in two interrelated dimensions: culture and code. They strengthen bonds around identity and community while also enhancing convenience through innovation.
AI is accelerating this convergence of cultural resonance and functional enhancement. Data-driven customization can help brands embed more deeply in their customers' lives.
Brands that embrace this transition to providing multidimensional value will build relevance and loyalty with the connected consumer of today and tomorrow. Those that fail to evolve will find it harder and harder to compete.