A growing number of marketing experts these days are promoting the idea of brand experience. We wanted to delve into the topic to help you surmise what brand experience is and how you may be able to use it in your digital marketing strategies.
Defining ‘BRAND’
Before discussing brand experience, we first must define what we mean by brand. In this instance brand is not a product or service you offer, nor is it a font or logo. When we talk about brand, we are referring to the customer/audience’s emotional reaction to a service or organisation, their gut feeling towards the business. Things like logos and colour schemes, marketing campaigns and social media can all lend a hand in creating the brand you ideally want people to see, but brands are defined outwardly by customers or potential customers, not by what you think your brand is. A brand incorporates the whole package of what you show to the world, everything from products to customer service to social media to your CEOs LinkedIn page, and then each individual customer or audience member will define your brand in their own way and use this feeling to decide whether to work with you or not.
So what is a brand experience?
whatis.techtarget.com say “brand experience is a type of experiential marketing that incorporates a holistic set of conditions created by a company to influence the feeling a customer has about a particular product or company name. Through a combination of various modes a consumer uses to interact with a brand, companies attempt to create a general atmosphere of goodwill, dependability or trust to create an association between the brand and a specific need or emotion.”
John Hamm, global chief creative officer of Geometry Global added to this in an interview with CampaignLive.co.uk, saying “When I think about ‘brand experience’ I’m thinking about the ecosystem that exists around a brand or product. That could be packaging, retail, innovation, communications, events, customer service, social media, CRM, etc.—all those are component parts of the ecosystem that is the brand. The fundamental thing is, the brand is those things.”
The way we think of brand experience with regards to digital marketing is that it’s about alluding to the experience the customer will have if/when they want to go onto that next stage of working with you. This means, promoting who you are, what you do, why you do it and what it will be like to work with you/your company. Almost like a teaser trailer to a film. If the trailer is good and shows you that the film is likely something you will enjoy, then you will go to see it at the cinema (or stream it I guess… it is 2020 after all). In a marketing sense, the combination of your online presence, your social media accounts, your website and other digital platforms make up this brand experience, this trailer for what being a customer of yours will be like.
How to create a brand experience digitally
How can we use the idea of brand experience when forming digital marketing strategies? We can introduce campaigns and content to help influence peoples feeling for the brand, this all stems into the brand experience you are aiming for. The first step is deciding what you want your brand experience to be… What are you good at? What should you promote? Where are your weaknesses? The idea is to focus on and promote the best aspect of your business. So if you are well known for having excellent customer service, you need to devise strategies and content to show that off digitally.
Over time all of these little factors, all this content come together in the subconscious of the potential customer, they have the brand experience and they form an idea of what the brand is and what it offers… If you’ve done a good job, and the brand experience has induced a positive reaction, then it is likely you can get a new lead or customer.
To get started we think that video is brilliant for building brand experience; it is superior because of the fact you can pretty much show a potential customer what working with you will be like through video. What are the products or services you offer? How about a video breakdown of exactly that? How is the customer service? Here is a video of one of our customer service employees answering our frequently asked questions. What does your company stand for? Here is a video showing where we came from, our roots and history, and here is where we are now… Would you like to be a part of our journey?
Brand experience is built on storytelling (video is the best means for telling impactful stories. A quick example of using video to build on and promote a brand experience is Apples ‘Perspective’ video campaign from 2014. This video perfectly summarises what the brand is about, and alludes to the type of person you can become (with the help of Apples products of course). The video encapsulates the brand and what they stand for in under 3 minutes.