Brand Experience

It took a while for me to take the term brand experience seriously. I believed it was along the lines of brand activation or experiential branding or something along those lines but when I realized what brand experience was it brought into perspective how much impact it had on building brand awareness and transforming cold leads into happy customers and brand advocates. That’s what I want to go through in this article. I want to lift the fog on what brand experience is all about so you can take it into your processes and the brands that you build.

What is Brand Experience?

Well, it’s the entire ecosystem that lives around your brand that gives a holistic experience to your audience about what your brand represents. Your customer service is as much part of your brand experience as the products or services that you see. This experience consists of every interaction that your audience might have with your brand literally from your brand identity to your website, your brochures, business cards, social media pages, blog posts, video, event stand, any kind of interaction that your audience might have with your brand is part of your overall brand experience and it’s another opportunity for you to solidify the position that you want to own in the mind of your audience. Every single touchpoint of your brand makes up the brand experience. Essentially, your brand experience is the sum of all of your touchpoints.

What is Brand Experience Not?

It’s not brand activation, it’s not experiential branding or any kind of branding that is designed to generate public relations or any kind of awareness. By all means, this make up part of the brand experience. Any touchpoint of your brand, any form of advertising, any form of marketing is part of the overall brand experience but it’s not to be confused or defined as the brand experience itself.

Why is Brand Experience So Important?

If you think about the brand that you do business with like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Nespresso, Nike, all of these brands have people working within the brands analyzing every touchpoint that their consumers might come in front of and they think about the experience that those consumers should walk away with and they design every touchpoint to contribute to that experience. Over multiple touchpoints, the experience that the audience has with that brand gets crystallized in their mind and that crystallization of that experience contributes to the position that the brand wants to own in the mind of the audience. If you think about these brands if they don’t take the time to define the experience that they want their audience to walk away with then their audience will walk away with a different experience than they want their audience to have and that is a dangerous position to be in because they can position that brand in a different place in their mind than the brand intends.

This illustrates the point that brand experience plays a major role in the successful positioning of a brand. Once a brand defines the position that they want to own in the mind of their audience they need to work out what kind of experience will contribute or help to build that image and position in the mind of their audience and then design that experience throughout their brand threat every single touchpoint.

What is a Brand Experience Design?

It’s the design of the brand experience but to take it a little bit further than that it’s about identifying the overall experience that you want your audience to walk away from your brand with when they come to every touchpoint whether it’s on your website or your social media pages. When they open that packaging of the product, what is the experience that you want them to walk away with? It’s all about designing that experience throughout every single touchpoint that you have in your brand.

Example of Brand Experience – Nespresso

Nespresso is a brand that understands the brand experience and they meticulously take the time to identify not just every single touchpoint but every single aspect of their brand from start to finish. They are crystal clear on the experience that they want their audience to have as they walk away from their brand. Everything within the brand from the identity system to the website, to the packaging to the pods, to the design of the product itself, the store experience, the way the store is laid out even the sound of the product itself, the smell of the coffee, all of this contributes towards a beautiful brand experience that Nespresso has taken the time to design and that is an experience that their customer love about the Nespresso brand.

The bigger the brand, the bigger the budget the more resources they have for people to take the time to analyze every touchpoint and design the brand experience that they want their audience to have and of course the bigger brands can meticulously design a brand experience that they want to give their audience but a small business can do this as well. It’s simply about identifying the positions that you want to own in the mind of your audience, identifying an experience that will contribute to that position, and then going through every touchpoint. If you take the time to map out your different touchpoints and design an experience that will contribute to that position then that is how you can utilize brand experience in any kind of brand.