We live in a consumer-driven society. From the moment we wake to the moment we go to sleep, brands are vying for our attention.
But what makes us choose to interact with certain brands over others? Gr8nola recently re-branded its products to improve shelf presence, but the brand experience is about more than just packaging. It impacts our perception of a brand and influences our decision to interact with a company based on how that brand makes us feel.
If businesses want to stand out from the crowd, they need to generate positive brand experiences with both existing and potential customers.
Incredible brand experiences generate interest, trust, and optimism toward your brand. Only when you engender positive emotions through your brand experience can you stand out from the competition, induce brand loyalty, maintain sustainable growth, and be successful in business.
What Is Brand Experience?
Brand experience dictates how consumers feel about brands. Consumers don’t need to interact with a brand for them to establish how they feel about that brand.
Think about Apple. Everyone knows something about Apple products and has an opinion on them. Someone may have never used Apple products, but they will likely recognize that Apple is a high-end and chic tech comm manufacturer.
A brand experience can be anything from seeing an advert on the internet to picking a grocery product from the shelf and considering adding it to your cart. If your phone keeps cutting you off and you end up shouting, “why does my phone keep ending calls?” you will certainly develop negative feelings towards your phone service provider.
A consumer’s relationship with a brand is determined by their brand experience. How humans perceive things revolves around their senses: sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste, and memory. Combined, these generate the relationship customers have with brands.
Simply put, it’s all about how brands make a customer feel.
Why Is Brand Experience Important?
Every interaction, big or small, affects how a consumer feels about a brand and feeds into their brand experience.
64% of women and 68% of men have felt an emotional connection with a brand. Therefore, brands want to generate positive brand experiences that engender positive emotions amongst consumers to build more meaningful relationships with their customers.
When relationships between brands and customers go beyond monetary transactions, businesses can become more resilient and profitable. By using this guide you can become a branding expert for your business.
Brand Experience is important to:
Boost Brand Perception
Consumers do not need to have interacted with a brand to know how they feel about that brand. Brands should strive to build brand awareness with the potential to generate conversions, and brand experience is a great way to do this.
Brands can boost awareness by partnering with other companies. The Dunlop Bridge is one of the most famous marketing partnerships and has been situated at the Le Mans racing circuit since 1932. Dunlop tires may no longer lead the market, but the Le Mans circuit will forever be associated with the Dunlop footbridge.
Improve Customer Retention
It costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain one.
Your brand experience should convey your brand values at every touchpoint. When consumers share those brand values and know they can trust your brand to meet their needs, it converts them into loyal, lifelong customers.
Increase Revenues
Consumers that have positive emotions about your brand are more likely to recommend you to others and become repeat customers. Word of mouth advocacy is a great example of a customer referral plan. It naturally boosts revenues and ensures the sustainability and growth of your business.
Stand Out from the Competition
Products and services crowd the markets. Your brand experience may be the only thing that helps you to stand out from the crowd. Which brand comes to mind when you think about baby products? If it’s Johnson & Johnson, you won’t be alone. Their products have become synonymous with babies, even though they also manufacture contact lenses and pharmaceuticals.
If you implement your brand experience effectively, you too could become the go-to brand for note-taking software tools.
How to Build a Great Brand Experience
How you create your brand experience may vary depending on your industry, but there are some common steps you can take to ensure you build a great brand experience for your customers.
Define Your Objectives
Preparation and the development of a clear strategy provide the best foundations for creating a great brand experience. You need to establish what your brand stands for, what are its values, and how you want your brand to be perceived.
If you want to be perceived as a company that offers convenient contract signing, then you should get a docusign license to make the signing documents quick and simple, rather than making your customers wait for the paperwork to arrive through the post. Even the tiniest detail in the customer experience can influence their perception of your brand.
Define the objectives, goals, and aims of your brand and use them to guide your marketing, target audience, and mission statement. You must apply them across every touchpoint. Only then can you create a consistent brand experience.
In line with its mission statement, Amazon continues to deliver low prices, wide-ranging products, and convenience: “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.”
Know Your Audience
You can’t build a great brand experience if you don’t know what your customers want or need. Only when you research can you attract potential customers through sponsored content or other advertising means and produce authentic and meaningful experiences you want to become synonymous with your brand.
Perhaps you are a winemaker and want to target customers who are connoisseurs of premium, yet sustainable wine. Your brand experience needs to make it clear that your product meets these needs and their refined tastes.
Your target audience’s demographics, their preferred touchpoints, and brand expectations are just some of the basic things you need to learn before you can create a tailored customer experience that meets their expectations and hence, makes them feel happy to interact with your brand.
Inspire Emotion
Building meaningful relationships between brands and customers is at the heart of a great brand experience. Emotions are the basis of human relationships. To build a great brand experience, inspire feelings toward your brand that your brand identity guides.
A great example is Coca-Cola’s “share the happiness, share a coke” campaign. Coca-Cola does not sell happiness, but by linking the emotions of happiness, sharing, fun, and love to the fizzy drink through a personalized marketing campaign, the brand has taken on a personality of its own.
Engage With Your Customers
You can’t build meaningful relationships if you don’t engage with your customers. Luckily, the modern and digital world makes it much easier for brands to generate engagement. As well as traditional touch points such as in-store, call centers and websites, social media provides endless opportunities to create authentic and rich client relationships with minimal effort.
A sales manager may create an engaging marketing webinar to inspire their sales team and generate leads. Similarly, you want to create a brand experience that inspires consumers to develop positive feelings toward your brand.
Influencers
Influencers have a significant impact on brand perception and experience because consumers have come to value the suggestions on influencer videos based on the experiences of real people more than experts.
By partnering with influencers who share your brand values, you can reach a wider audience, improve credibility, and build trust in your brand.
Check Out the Competition
If you want to stand out from your competition and convince consumers to choose your brand over theirs, then you need to find out what they are doing.
What works for them, or what hasn’t worked? How do consumers perceive their brand? Are they meeting all your target audiences’ needs? If not, that’s where you can fill the gap and offer more to create a brand experience that satisfies your customer’s every need and encourages them to put their trust in your brand.
Personalization
Consumers want personalized experiences. They want to know that brands care about their individual needs and will go above and beyond to satisfy them. Tailoring experiences for individuals show that brands care, and their customers are not just a number to them, building trust and loyalty.
Consistency
Don’t be tempted by flashy interactions that you can’t sustain. A monthly team meeting, including lunch at a local hotel may sound great, but a daily standup meeting in the office is more effective to keep your team informed and on track. Likewise, the foundation of an effective brand experience is consistency.
Burning resources on big and flashy experiences might boost interactions for a short time, but they are not sustainable. Likewise, focusing on the same interactions and not trying anything new can mean your brand gets lost in the crowd.
For example, scotch whisky manufacturer, The Glenlivet, is breaking from tradition with its latest campaign and wants to “evolve with the discernible, yet curious tastes of the next generation of whisky drinkers.”
Try to develop a strategy that focuses on building authentic experiences over time, but don’t be afraid to try new ways to engage with your customers if you want to maintain a strong and meaningful brand experience.
Here’s to Success!
Brands are everywhere. If you want yours to stand out from the crowd, you need to offer a brand experience that generates trust and loyalty amongst your customers.
Brand experiences are about generating positive emotional responses to your brand. Whether you create testing automation tools or run an online boutique, you want customers to feel good about interacting with your brand, so it becomes a part of their lifestyle, and they are proud to associate with it.
In this competitive, consumer-driven world, businesses can’t succeed without positive brand experiences to make them stand out from their competitors, build resilience, and achieve sustainable growth.
Business Development Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the Media and Digital marketing sector, Passionate about innovation and bringing the future into new business solutions.
