Effective Tips for Creating a Unique Brand Experience

What makes a restaurant your favorite? Is it the quality of food, service, the ambiance they provide, or all of the above?

In truth, the ability of a business to deliver on its brand promise correlates to the customer experience and its brand image.

From enticing ads with delectable photos of foods and the smooth reservation process on digital marketing channels to the warm smiles that welcome customers as they enter the door and the flexibility of the staff to accommodate their needs—such as allergy-sensitive or kid-friendly menus—these seemingly simple but impactful factors inform the overall feeling that customers have toward you. Or what is known as the brand experience.

And to create a positive and cohesive brand experience, a brand needs consistency. For example, there needs to be a seamless flow in your brand experience management, from digital touchpoints—like paid ads, social media pages, and branded websites—to purchasing products or services from brick 'n mortar shops and other offline channels. Consequently, this lends to a positive customer experience.

First impressions last, making a well-designed brand experience crucial to any business. After all, offering a consistent brand experience that sets you apart from competitors helps build emotional appeal and acquire and retain customers.

And while perfecting this is not a walk in the park, you can start by understanding the fundamental elements of a brand experience design: user experience, brand's purpose, brand design, and brand touchpoints.

User Experience

User experience or UX is deeply ingrained in the brand experience, requiring prioritization of needs, wants, and preferences. When done right, a good UX can only bring endless benefits in improving your brand experience design.

For example, a positive UX—online or offline—fosters brand loyalty, increases brand recognition through word-of-mouth, and optimizes sales. Customer feedback from UX brings valuable insights that can ramp up product development and innovation.

Positive user experiences are ultimately informed by how they feel in the customer journey. Hence, strategic user research and testing are crucial to learning the latest trends. It can provide an intuitive and engaging customer experience.

Brand Purpose

The brand purpose is the ethos of a business, an extension of a brand's identity, encapsulating why you exist beyond offering products and services for profitability. The brand purpose then becomes a pillar in honing brand authenticity—which is vital to delivering positive experiences and improving brand recognition.

But a brand purpose is not merely a statement to impress people. It is a call to action that attracts new customers who resonate with the brand's mission and values and inspires employees to follow through. It serves as a guide in every decision that the brand makes. And it gives a deeper meaning to the relationship between a brand and its target customers.

Some inspiring brand purposes come from the most popular brands we love:

• Tesla: Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy.
• Patagonia: We're in business to save our home planet.
• Glossier: To give voice through beauty.

Your brand purpose should be clear, concise, relatable to everyone in the community, including your employees, and drive memorable customer experience.

Brand Design

Brand design is the visual representation of your business, including logos, your choice of colors, images, and typography, among others. Brand design goes beyond what looks pretty, in any case. While creativity lends to creating a solid brand design and high brand recognition, it should also successfully reflect your business's brand values and personality.

When choosing colors, for example, certain hues evoke different emotions. Yellow inspires warmth and happiness, while red communicates excitement. A business targeting young adults may prefer a more modern and edgy design, while those targeting seniors may opt for a more traditional and classic approach.

Ultimately your brand design optimizes brand visibility and elevates the brand experience. By investing in quality design, your business can effectively communicate your message and values to your audience. And this is something our brand experts can help you with.

Brand Touchpoints

Curating brand touchpoints that are highly relevant to your target market optimize your marketing investment and the brand experience strategy. It begins by knowing your target market like the back of your hand.

While the younger generation prefers an omnichannel experience, they still have channels they frequent more than others. Hence, auditing your branding channels can help determine the strongest ones and identify gaps in your branding and marketing strategy.

You can then categorize your brand touch points according to a customer's journey: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. Pre-purchase touchpoints may include social media posts, paid ads, and business cards. Purchase touchpoints could be through branded websites, in-store sales, or mobile apps. And post-purchase refer to your loyalty programs and after-sales or customer service activities.

When identifying opportunities or threats, your brand touch point strategy evolves. And that requires periodically brainstorming new touchpoints that align with your brand. To create experiences that sustain, continue making the necessary adjustments to improve.

Understand Your Brand and Its Audience

Understanding your brand begins with knowing what makes you unique in a sea of competitors. Ask yourself the following:

• What kind of service/products do you want to provide, and how do they differ from others?
• What opportunities do you want to explore, and how does your brand address these?

Finally, know the brand values and personality you want to communicate. This brings us to familiarize ourselves with your audience like the back of your hand. As tempting as it is to sell to everyone, having a niche helps you to innovate products/services that others may not offer.

Start by creating a brand persona to pin down the customer profile you want to attract. You can also analyze other competing brands' customers and identify gaps you could fill as you hone your brand experience strategy.

Identify the Experience You Want to Give

Tesla champions cutting-edge automotive design that appeal to existing customers who value sustainability and environmental impact. Disney is known for the magical experience it brings to children and the young at heart, as seen in its iconic movies and theme parks. Another great example is Red Bull, which embodies excitement through its extreme sports and energy-pumping experiential marketing efforts.

These are just some brand experiences that go deeper into the surface value businesses can provide and meet customer expectations. And by identifying what kind of brand experiences you want your customers to have, you are miles ahead in delivering highly targeted and memorable branding and marketing efforts.

Map Out a Brand Experience Plan

Let your brand experience take shape by mapping out a plan. You can begin by identifying the scope of your brand experience strategy and setting your short-term and long-term goals.

Some of the goals for successful brand experiences you may want to consider are: To increase brand awareness by 10 percent in the second quarter.

• To enhance in-store customer satisfaction.
• To boost word-of-mouth referrals through customer loyalty programs that positively influence prospective customers.
• To relate comfort and safety with your brand through your marketing communications.

Identify the channels that appeal the most to your customers from your market research. For instance, consider elevating the digital brand experience of users by creating a branded mobile app. Or collaborate with micro-influencers and hold interactive pop-up events.

Above all else, ensure that your brand experience strategy aligns with your brand purpose, values, and personality.

Put Your Plan into Action

The implementation of a brand experience plan is probably the trickiest part. It involves careful orchestration of teams to ensure the seamless delivery of a positive brand experience on all channels. Your team should possess essential skills to perform the tasks, fully understand your goals, and embody your brand.

Aside from your marketing team and brand ambassadors, the attitude, behavior, and performance consistency of your operations, sales, and customer service departments can also impact the overall brand experience. To attain a happy balance, business managers and leaders must actively work on nurturing a supportive and healthy culture.

Monitor and Measure Your Results

Now that you have launched a plan, is it working? Did you deliver a positive brand experience? To answer this, you need consistent monitoring and measuring of your results.

Conduct feedback surveys or converse with your customers in-store or online, and find out what they say about their brand experiences. Invest in social media listening tools to keep tabs on brand mentions across the digital board. And leverage advanced tools to analyze web traffic, user behavior, and other trends.

In addition to identifying your success points, monitoring and measuring your results help determine threats, opportunities, and weaknesses you can explore.

Keep Experimenting and Innovating

Your job is never done when creating positive brand experiences. Demands, interests, and real-time feedback change now and again, impacting the overall brand experience. Hence, it is vital to keep experimenting and innovating to ensure you have the best products and services in the market. While branding can be a hefty and daunting venture, with consistency and authenticity, you are well on your way to your business taking flight and lasting longer in the market.

No one is immune to occasional pitfalls, not even big brands. Despite having a big budget and well-equipped teams, creating and implementing a brand experience strategy can still take work. But that is simply a part of the branding journey.

Below are two of the most prominent branding blunders in history that we hope you can avoid, however!

Burger King's Satisfries

In response to the growing demand for healthier food options, Burger King offered a healthy product called Satisfries. The brand claims the new product has lower calories than regular fries, making it a perfect choice for health-conscious customers. Although Burger King wanted to elevate the brand experience by expanding its product line, it may have been barking up the wrong tree.

Most health-conscious customers do not expect healthy food from fast-food chains. Satisfries is also only 20% less-caloric than regular fries and is more expensive by 30 cents. Chalk it up to poor market research, social media campaign, and a disconnect in their brand message. The public has spoken. As the Satisfries did not satisfy, it was eventually ditched.

While innovation is highly encouraged in creating positive brand experiences, you should always center around customers' needs. This applies to how many brands should also respond to industry trends or fads. That said, your brand experience data should be highly reliable and accurate.

The Gapgate

The Global Financial Crisis has affected thousands of brands across many industries, including Gap. Wanting to bring back the excitement for the fashion brand in hopes of increasing sales, Gap decided to retire its 20-year-old logo in favor of a more modern and hip design. However, the logo redesign removed too many elements familiar to its loyal community. Many customers and followers resorted to social media to express their dismay, prompting Gap to revert to its classic logo in less than a week.

What your customers say matters to your branding! For a brand that has stood behind its iconic

As people rely on multiple digital tools, businesses embrace digitalization to achieve sustainability. But with numerous channels and changing brand strategies, it can take time for marketers and branding experts to keep track of their progress.

DAM or Digital Asset Management is vital for managing your digital brand assets. Think of Digital Asset Management as a hub where all your branding materials—images, templates, documents, and other guidelines—can be accessed by your team. This ensures seamless collaboration, hence, reducing errors and inconsistencies across channels. Moreover, DAM helps you keep track of branding changes and analyze how effective your assets are in performance and usage. And lastly, having a DAM protects your assets from misuse and infringement.

With that aside, let's look at some brand experience examples that successfully elevated their presence in the digital realm.

Hershey's Happygrams

Giving a bar of Hershey's is a quick way to get a smile. So how can this experience be brought to the digital world?

In one of its marketing campaigns, Hershey's Philippines launched Happygrams to cheer people up on tough days with happy thoughts! The brand leveraged social listening tools to search for users on social media who may need extra motivation to get through the day. And true to its motto of "Sharing goodness," Hershey's delivered eliciting responses on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

With the campaign's growing popularity, the brand created a micro-website where consumers can customize messages they can send to their loved ones. Hershey's even held an online competition where five of the best Happygrams were featured on Hershey's bars sold in stores.

Hershey's Philippines – Happygrams from McCann Worldgroup Asia on Vimeo.

JetBlue Takes Customer Service on Twitter

Another brand that leveraged social listening to elevate its service is airline carrier JetBlue. Aviation is one of the most stressful industries, with complaints from disgruntled passengers aired on the digital space, making brand experience necessary.

Instead of burying negative customer feedback, JetBlue used its Twitter account to address concerns. Soon, these complaints became thank you's as passengers started feeling heard and appreciated. And they were happy to share their experience with friends and family, thus, earning JetBlue more passengers!

Being distinctive and memorable in the industry, especially as a small brand, may require tackling a long road ahead as the brand experience differs depending on multiple factors. But it's all worth it, provided you successfully create a meaningful and compelling brand experience. It can help you elevate your brand equity, nurture trust, and improve loyalty, which is crucial to growing your brand and increasing repeat business.

Ready to get started? Let our professional brand experts help deliver a unique brand experience essential to your growth!