Strategygram: The Brand Experience Trio

Imagine a music-band trio who you can’t get enough of. The trio play well together—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint, sometimes riffing off each other—but always delivering a holistic experience that you ease into pleasurably.

That’s what a good brand experience is like.

It is three dimensions working synergistically, even if one dimension leads a part of the customer experience journey while another fronts a succeeding phase.

There is the dimension of brand performance: What does the brand do for me? Does it make it easy for me to achieve the outcome I desire?

There is the dimension of brand emotion: How does it make me feel? Do I feel good about it?

And there is the dimension of brand significance: What does it say about me to myself and to others? Am I proud to be using it?

This is your brand experience trio. All the cues that you deploy—sensory, aesthetic, cognitive—create three-dimensional encounters that span the entire customer journey: from first thought and triggering event, to purchase and use, to disposal and recommendation.

Whether your brand is a product or a service or a hybrid, experiences aren’t merely a way to market your brand—your brand exists only through the experiences people have of it.

Your brand is created, as you know, not in the factory but as a net impression in people’s minds from all their interactions with it—conscious or subconscious, physical or digital, solo or comparative.

No experience, no brand.

What’s more, people form an opinion of your brand by the experiences they have of it not only in comparison with others in your category, but also with brands across categories.

Your experience in an airline lounge or in a five-star hotel’s hospitality suite influences how you eye your retail bank’s lounge for its premium customers. Even though all three categories are different in their propositions and profitability levels, you are nonetheless the same person going through the same motions of waiting to be served.

Similarly, your product unboxing experience in one category raises expectations for another; your repair-service experience for one item shapes your views about acceptable standards for a host of others.

Is that fair? No. A reality? Yes.

Your brand lives or dies by how well it juggles all three dimensions to create pleasing moments and pleasant memories, for what behavioural scientists refer to as our ‘experiencing self’ and our ‘remembering self’.

How do you know you’ve got it right for the customer? Your brand’s absence frustrates; its presence liberates.

Sattar Khan

This Strategygram titled ‘The Brand Experience Trio’ is part of the series I’ve created where each Strategygram condenses one strategic thought into one image. 

The series is a visual guide to strategic thinking and provides handy image prompts for brand strategy workouts.  

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