Liberate your donors

Brands can do two different things, says a great post at the Brands Create Customers blog: Managing the brand agenda for customer growth. They can contain the customer or liberate the customer.

Before you decide which kind of brand you'd rather be, read these descriptions of them:

Container brands

Customers cease being market equals and potential innovation partners in a value network. Instead, they're relegated to the status of passive "consumers," where their consumption can be managed. This is one reason why traditional brands often devote considerable resources to brand spectacle, symbols, icons, emotional drivers and rewards. These are the artificial stimuli for kept consumers.

Liberator brands

These brands intend to free the customer from current brand dependencies and lock-ins, which can impose a virtual lock-down on the customer's ability to move forward. . . . Such an agenda requires a company to be highly innovative, agile and resolutely focused on delivering customer value.

This may look purely commercial, but the issue very much impacts nonprofit brands. A nonprofit container brand relies on long history, high (at least high enough) name recognition, and raw marketing budget. A successful container brand is one to which large numbers of donors can give without thinking about it. All in all, not too bad a place to be, if you can afford it. But that's changing.

A nonprofit liberator brand breaks the pattern. In their mission and in their marketing, they're more interesting, more targeted, and more donor-centered. It's harder work than being a container brand, but the rewards can be much higher. And as time goes on, more and more donors will demand liberator brands for their charitable giving.

It all comes down to this: How much power are you willing to cede to your donors?

Technorati Tags: fundraising, marketing revolution