What is "Brand Experience"?

In the past, experts have defined Brand Experience as a wider term when it comes to comparing it with customer experience. They would state that "one can have some experience with a brand without being its customer". Well I strongly disagree with this statement and find it untrue. I believe everyone is subject to brand experience, regardless whether they are customers or not.

 Now, in this modern world, the first thing I did when I was trying to find a definition of "Brand Experience" for this article was to search for it in Wikipedia. To my surprise and disappointment, I found that there is no article aligned to this title at all, only  a link to the "Customer Experience" page! …so ...no help there if you ask me!

Delivering an ideal customer experience is only possible when you understand the link between brand and customer experience. It's what makes us human. But again Brand is not the same as "Brand Experience". To understand about "Brand Experience", I turned to my background and knowledge in Customer Experience. I spent many of my professional formative years at RightNow Technologies, A Customer Experience software firm. One of my new business prospects when at RightNow was the very talented CX professional Ian Golding. I've kept in touch with Ian throughout the years and he recently published a book titled "Customer What?".

Ian cleverly defines Customer Experience as " the sum of all interactions a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services for the duration of their relationship with that supplier. This can include awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy. The quality of the experience as a whole will determine whether it is a one-off or a continuous relationship"

 Now, as soon as I read this, I had a revelation and I made a mental correlation or, may I dare call it… analogy: Is Customer Experience equal to Brand Experience? It could work right?, with the exception that a brand experience is not only an interaction that lasts a moment…it can have a lasting impression.

 Most customer experience and marketing experts agree that knowing your brand, or customer for that matter in its entirety is tricky. One really needs to map it all out to truly understand it, but this is usually not a straightforward task. This is a task that creative agencies always demand of their clients (us here at 2Heads are no exception)... we call this "mapping": the creative or project brief. Golding has a chapter in his book about customer mapping and its importance. He quotes the wonderful and eccentric Terry Pratchett and makes the link to this "art of mapping out a strategy" (or creative brief - to align it back to our Brand Experience topic) in the following way:

 "Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other tiddly bits of cartographic furniture that they often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all". I love this quote….and this is exactly what happens when you try to map a strategy of any sort and what our clients are faced with every time they want to write a creative brief. Once all monsters as well as rivers are finally drawn into the body of the brief and this is handed over to the creative agency, it is then up to the creative/experiential agency to make your band experience come to life!

Golding references CCXP Jerry Angrave's Customer Experience model to explain how organisations have to put some work in to deliver a "Differentiated Experience". Apparently, according to Angrave, there are three stages in the evolution of experiences: Random Experiences, Intentional Experiences and Differentiated Experiences. The exciting fact about this is that 95% of customer experiences are random! Ian states that a link between customers and the business has to be explicit…and this is when the alignment between customer and brand experience comes into place....this is so exciting!

 Businesses need absolute clarity on the experience you intend to deliver and communicating business/brand strategy is an art. Golding again graces us with a perfect analogy: "A ring is the perfect analogy for how our relationships with a brand/customers should be - never-ending and continuous. You cannot tell where the relationship starts and ends." A a great customer or brand experience is a combination of a stable, well-executed journey and a handful of special signature touchpoints which signal clearly to customers that you are different and distinctive. Experiences are built in layers and again, I will agree with Ian that "when a customer first chooses to connect with your brand…you should consider that first interaction to be the start of a long prosperous relationship - not just a one-off transaction.

 Ally Mansell-Cook

Senior Brand Experience Director - Business Development

Ally heads global new business development at 2Heads, a brand experience agency with a goal to assist new clients in deploying programs that are cost effective and that drive brand performance.