The experience is the brand

For brands, it’s a brutal world out there. Globalization still appears the way forward, especially for the conglomerates. But as these global brands enter more new or emerging markets, they are rapidly confronted with regional brands that are eager to return the favor, and take the fight to their home market. In emerging markets the home court advantage of these largely unknown brands is more beneficial to them than what an established global brand can count on in their home turf.

Meanwhile, marketing and brand leaders, on both client and agency fences, are held accountable to drive the growth and economic results for the product portfolios they represent. It’s understood - in large - that there is no one silver bullet to make success happen. It’s also recognized that these professionals rarely ever have the desired influence needed to make change happen. What’s a brand to do?

Brands can redefine their success by taking ownership of the entire customer experience and orchestrating the interface between the company and the customer. And when I write interface, I mean this in the broadest sense - the exposure and interaction between brand and people. Be it tangible, digital, verbal. That is what User Experience [buzzword UX] actually is—going beyond the product benefit and message to re-imagine the whole journey for customers and delivering new signature moments.

The term user experience seems to have originated in the early 1990s at Apple when cognitive psychologist Donald Norman joined the staff. He shouldered the official title of User Experience Architect, so quite possibly the first person ever to have the combo of U and X on his business card.

User experience is a modern field, but it’s been in the making for about a century. To see its beginnings, you can look all the way back to the machine age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ergonomics started here, and with it the bigger picture question of how humans interact with an object in an efficient and effective manner. As such, User Experience is actually media-transcending.

But Brand Experience is a notoriously messy thing to describe. It’s a little like taking an inkblot test; whatever matters most ends up being what you see. No single definition has prevailed, and as such it is a bit of a controversial concept. What helps for me is to take two layers in account here; the professional practice of designing and calibrating interactions, and the resulting planned-for outcome of those designed engagements. Designing Brand Experience means to practice a set of methods and techniques for researching what users want and need, or did not know they wanted or needed, and to design products and services for them in a way that can reflect or represent a brand's attitude and character. I’ve always felt that perhaps People Experience is a better description, as brands influence both active as well as passive; even a bad brand experience is a brand experience.

But brands are built by what people say about them. And what that entails is their personal takeaway experience of the brand and the interaction they had with it. It is that encompassing, that holistic. It is the joy of the purchase with the rage that comes from a bad un-boxing.

To truly turn customers into advocates, Branding’s holy grail, it needs to offer experiences that create an emotional resonance with customers. Something that captures hearts and mind. Seeds to creating brand loyalty. Companies like Nike Plus and Virgin Airlines have all embraced the notion of experience by redesigning the customer experience with their brands. These are brands whose focus on what intangibles a brand, its product or services, could offer atop functionality or status is increasingly the difference maker.

Here are a few guiding principles that brands could adopt to find success through designing the experience:

Create delight, not just better products:
Experience design are emotional markers for a brand. The best ones are memorable events; get picked up by Virgin Airlines for example. Addressing this holistic end-to-end experience from within the brand world will inspire engagement, which in turn is a delightful emotion. A highly desirable one. A better product is just that. It’s only brand housekeeping at its best.

Look beyond the box:
Opportunities for experience design (and innovation) require the courage the look beyond the narrow product category a brand is in. It’s not just where you are today, it is where the category is heading to as of tomorrow. Recognizing – and by extension being able to influence – the opportunities that come with broad ecosystems thinking allows brands to expand their base, markets and interactions. Allowing them to introduce or anchor their products or services in the need space of the customer. For example, Starbucks and how they branded new formats like mobile payments, reward apps, even a wine bar concept.

Focus on the consumer, do not follow them:
We all know Henry Ford’s quote on customers wanting faster horses. People cannot tell you about the things they really need but haven’t yet imagined. Consumers cannot be expected to articulate how they will do things differently in the future. While there are things to uncover and stress-test in customer research, the danger is to become a brand that is customer-led as opposed to one that is customer-focused.

It’s the journey, not the idea:
There is magic in different ideas. And breakthrough technologies have a black-hole like gravitational pull. But neither are ownable for a brand. So here is why it matters all the more to deliver on branding the total experience. That comes from a continuous and connected journey, that makes up the very fabric of a brand.

Branding the experience should be viewed as a new approach to doing business, with the aim of finding new avenues for ownable differentiation. Brands that adopt these principles will take a broader view of their role. Their branding expressions will own all of their customer touchpoints, not just those typically handled by their marketing departments. By creating memorable experiences for people, these brands will be nourishing customers for life.