WHY experience branding is important

I’ve written quite a bit about experience branding and the importance of a building unique experiences when it comes to marketing activation.

This week I got an interesting question from a reader/fan (thank you, Anthon): “why is experience branding important in the first place?” Good question! So, let me take a step back, and try to answer:

First of all, let me start by defining what a brand is. “A brand is a promise to a (group of) consumer(s)” [Kurt Frenier ©]. This simple statement is the foundation to why experience branding is important …

1. The most important task for a marketer is to bring the brand promise to life. Building a series of touchpoints is the way to have your target group find out what the brand stands for, both rationally and emotionally.
2. Through experience thinking you will make your brand more personal. Personal wins from rational.
3. Differentiation is key to brands. The unique combination of how the various user experiences are built up creates differentiation versus competitors.
4. People remember experiences. Consumers don’t remember (brand) messages. In the new marketing world, it is not about what you say, but about what you do. If that is the case, then experience branding is the only viable way forward. That’s why the traditional TV-centric sender>receiver model is done and dusted.
5. Consumer experiences influence consumer choice. The battle of the brands is for choice, for being preferred over competition every time choice is at play. Memorable experiences will do 2 things: facilitate decision making in favor of your brand, and, create a high switching cost (i.e. consumers will feel they let go of something very valuable if they choose competition over you, and that is a tough choice)
6. It is a way to premiumisation, to setting higher prices. People want to pay more for something special, and for something that totally fits their life(style). More so, they expect it. If you don’t offer (the right) experiences, consumers might get disappointed in your brand and will ultimately let go.

Here are some important notions when it comes to building the experience ecosystem:

• Think of each and every interaction a consumer has with the brand. In each of these situations, build a unique experience that shows what the brand has to offer, what it stands, how it makes the consumer feel, where it fits in their life, how they can try it, etc. In that sense, the product (experience) itself is only one single touchpoint. There is a whole lot more than that: the discovery experience, the trial experience, the service experience, the shopping experience, the TV experience, the social media experience, the community experience, the after-use experience, …
• Deep insights. Building an experience ecosystem is as much science as it is creativity and art. You can’t create experiences that are not grounded in consumer insights. If not, there will a disconnect between what the brand says, what is shows, what it does and how it is felt and perceived by consumers.
• Keep it authentic. That amplifies relevance. See a blog post of mine on that. Read it here.
• Empower people to participate in how experiences are being built. Involvement creates a stronger bond with the brand. Great example: NIKE, through NikeRun  and Nike+(where your own running experience becomes a story), WIKIPEDIA (invites everyone to contribute to the world’s biggest knowledge bank)
• Reinvent, reframe, rescope, shake the tree. Why? You need to search for unique things. Uniqueness is really really key. Experiences are powerful when they are new, never done before, and have a strong tie with the brand idea. You can’t just copy what someone else has done before and put a brand label on it!
• As always with the search for excellence, it’s not about quantity but about quality. Better to have a few deep connects with consumers than a mass overload nobody really likes or remembers.

Car manufacturers have traditionally been really good in building brand experiences, for years and years, even before the term was coined like that. They know that a test drive works a 1000 times better than a brochure with all the specs, that having big lusheous show rooms matter, that the smell of a new car confirms choice, you name it. These are all experience best-pratices other categories can learn from.

Thank you for stopping by and reading this article. As always, comments are welcome on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and here.

Kurt Frenier,

Tagged as: brand experience, experience, impact, marketing