Successful brands in a hyper-digital age must shift towards a platform business model. Examples of platform brands include Apple, Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Tencent, and Alibaba, which succeed because of their ability to bring together different market actors to distribute or exchange products, services, or information. In the pre-digital period, brands focused on developing and maintaining their original positioning through systematic marketing activation involving the 4Ps (product, price, promotion, and place). In the digital era, brands refocused their messaging, meaning, and positioning by using digital platforms and by interacting with customers. In the hyper-digital age, brands have increasingly become platform-based entities that, according to Nick Srnicet in his book Platform Capitalism, “create an infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups.” A platform brand is one that invests in ways to connect individuals and organizations to create networks that offer multiple benefits, including commerce, collaboration, content, and community.

What are the financial consequences of this platformization of brands? A 2020 analysis from the MIT Sloan School of Management concludes that brands and companies that embrace platforms outperform other non-platform entities on key financial metrics. For many platform brands, such as LinkedIn, Amazon, Apple, and Google, there is a substantial share of their total market capitalization that can be attributed to their brand value. While the above findings are primarily correlational (and correlation is no evidence of causation), it seems likely that adoption of platformization could improve intangible value of a firm. 

One example of a brand that has effectively embraced platform thinking is that of Peloton. Peloton brings immersive and challenging workouts into consumers’ homes in an accessible and efficient way. Access to Peloton equipment is not limited to consumers who purchase it for their homes, but also includes guests at hotels, gyms, rental homes, and more! Pelo Buddy is a website dedicated to helping consumers find a Peloton bike or treadmill anywhere in the world, demonstrating the multiple stakeholder aspect of Peloton (“Hotels”).

Peloton effectively leverages four components of platform branding to deliver value:

1. Commerce: Peloton is ultimately a platform for generating commerce through its workouts;
   
   
2. Content: Peloton’s app features various kinds of workouts (such as running, meditation, boxing, etc.) that have been developed by fitness instructors to suit their customers. These live and on-demand classes include customizations for different moods, goals, music styles, experience levels, and schedules, appealing to various customer segments;
   
   
3. Community: Peloton enables customers to work out with other users in live classes, fostering a sense of community;
   
   
4. Collaboration: The Peloton app includes collaborations with several related apps and brands, such as Spotify, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Nike.

There are four stages in a brand’s quest to become a platform.

1. First, a brand has to define which stakeholders (or which types of users or sides) will be permitted to participate in the platform.
   
   
2. Second, a key task in transforming your product or service into a platform brand is to modify your offering so that the multiple sides of the platform can connect to each other through your product or service.
   
   
3. Third, a platform brand has to identify a unique assemblage of different components or blocks (such as transaction, community, benchmarking, guidance and inspiration), that it should utilize in building its own platform.
   
   
4. Finally, a brand must decide the best way to ensure marketplace transactions occur so that all sides of the platform have positive experiences. To facilitate this, brands need to create reputation or quality mechanisms that enable the participants to complete market exchanges and achieve satisfaction.
   
   

AI can assist with various tasks associated with platform creation, maintenance, and governance. Content-based and community platforms can benefit from AI-driven content moderation. Relevant tools such as Microsoft Content Moderator can help detect content that runs contrary to platform policy. AI tools like the Perspective API can enhance content moderation. Related tools such as IBM AI Fairness 360 can check for bias through models/algorithms that are explicitly trained to detect bias.

A key pillar of success for brands in the hyper-digital age is to transition to a platform brand. By leveraging AI-powered tools, traditional brands can enact a transformation to embrace platform thinking. Even digital-native brands can leverage new tools to increase the effectiveness with which their platforms function, in order to enhance customer engagement.