What is Brand Experience and Why Does it Matter?
Photo by William Iven on Unsplash
What is Brand Experience?
Brand experience is the entirety of consumer thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviors elicited by a brand. Other brand constructs, such as brand personality or brand trust, have long been studied and implemented by marketing practitioners. The brand experience concept, on the other hand, is relatively new but increasingly recognized as a critical part of developing effective marketing strategies. Studies show that the majority of senior business managers believe that differentiation strategies based on traditional marketing elements alone, like product and price, are no longer capable of creating sustained competitive advantage.
As the choice of brands continue to rise, so do consumer demands and expectations. Brands that provide engaging and intense experiences instead of merely satisfactory performance are more likely to stand out from increasingly crowded markets. Consumers perceive a brand to be a seamless entity that should meet or exceed expectations at every touchpoint. By approaching a marketing strategy through the lens of brand experience, organizations consider every aspect of how consumers interact with brands through its product, shopping, consumption, and even disposal experiences. This enables the brand to deliver a consistent brand experience throughout the customer journey, and therefore better fulfill the brand promise.
Today, brand is so much more than a communications-led notion – it must be embodied in every interaction between the consumer and the organization. When done well, the interactions that make up a brand experience can deepen emotional connections and foster brand affinity.
Brand Experience is NOT Limited to Live Events or Experiential Activations
There is often a misconception that brand experience takes place in only the physical world or finite spaces of time in the form of live events or brand activations. These are important elements but do not define the brand experience alone.
Events are targeted toward specific audiences that often provide prolonged but time-boxed interaction with a brand (i.e. conferences, trade shows). Experiential activations are creative promotional experiences that create physical and emotional engagement with a brand (i.e. pop-ups, festivals).
Brand experience, on the other hand, encompasses the digital, physical, long-term experience of all current and potential customers. Live events and activations are subcomponents of the larger brand experience.
How is Brand Experience Different from Other Brand Constructs?
To understand why brand experience matters, it’s important to understand how it relates to other brand constructs that your organization probably focuses on already, like brand attitude, attachment, involvement, or personality. All of these are important pieces that either feed into the brand experience or vice versa.
Brand attitudes are general feelings toward a brand like “I like/don’t like this brand”. Brand experiences include more specific sensations and feelings triggered by a specific brand interaction which may shape customer’s brand attitude.
Brand attachment is the strong emotional bond that a consumer can form with a brand, while brand experience is not solely an emotional relationship concept. Over time, brand experiences may result in emotional bonds, but emotions are only one outcome of the stimulation that evokes experience.
Brand involvement is the degree of interest that a consumer shows for a certain brand. Involvement tends to increase as customers research and learn more about a brand as part of their purchase decision. Brand experiences, on the other hand, can happen even when consumers do not display any interest or personal connection with the brand.
Brand personality is a set of human traits that consumers may associate with or project onto a brand, such as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. In contrast, brand experiences are actual sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses.
Here’s the thing. All of these pieces of brand architecture have tremendous value. But we can’t stop at values and emotional benefits. You must transform your brand’s promises into experiential principles.
Let’s say you are leading a wellness brand that defines itself as honest. What honest experiences exist in the context of your customer’s journey? What would an honest customer service interaction look like? Feel like? Sound like? How would an honest company correspond with its customers? How would it empower employees to facilitate honest interactions?
Who Owns the Brand Experience?
The short answer is: “everyone”. While marketers see the delivery of the brand promise as cross-functional, the grasp that different departments have on their role in delivering this promise to customers is poor (CIM). In order to build a brand experience that aligns to the values and quality you wish to achieve; each department needs to take ownership of their part in the experience delivery. Non-marketing teams like customer service, sales, operations, and senior leadership teams have an extraordinary amount of influence on the brand experience.
Each employee within these departments need to understand how they deliver the brand promise to the customer. Additionally, marketers need to partner very closely with HR to integrate brand into the way it manages its talent.
Ultimately, the key is to position the consumer at the heart of the brand with a strategy that is clearly understood, developed, and delivered by people from every touchpoint of the organization. The brands who master this experience-led mindset are the ones who will disrupt industries and win over the next generation of consumers.
The views in this article are purely my own. In no way is this article related to, informed by or endorsed by my employer.