Brand experience is a combination of sensations, feelings and responses that are evoked by a brand.

These may be triggered by the visual brand identity itself, or by the brand packaging, advertising and promotions – or it may be from face-to-face service, website UX or major events.   

Whether a customer spends time or money with you will depend on both their perception of and their experience of your brand.  At any brand touchpoint or interaction with your business, they can decide to switch to a competitor and/or leave negative feedback, so taking time to design your brand experience in the right way is worthwhile. 

For service brands, such as hotels, where the journey can be complex, getting the brand strategy and brand experience right is especially important.  For Hub Hotels by Premier Inn for example, careful design of each brand touch point was critical.  

What is the best way to design brand experience? 

Customer experience, guest experience, user experience, employee experience, as well as the interaction of partners, shareholders, suppliers and communities are all part of brand experience.  

In creating a brand experience, from initial market research and brand awareness to engagement, conversion and retention, your purpose is to optimise every touchpoint with your customers and other stakeholders.  A brand may have a superior product but still fail if it doesn’t resonate well with all users at all touchpoints. 

Mapping a brand journey from a customer centric viewpoint first makes the best sense; keeping it simple and gradually building on it over time. This customer journey can later be adapted for other stakeholders including employees and local communities. For example, an initial mapping of a hotel guest experience might look like this: 

The above shows the critical brand touchpoints or moments of interaction with the hotel guest, in particular identifying basic opportunities to delight and add value as well as highlighting the most likely pain spots where smooth solutions to minimise friction are required.  

You can build on this kind of initial mapping by adding in all the brand interaction points with your guests, both digital and real world, remembering that either wow moments or pain reduction moments can be turned into USPs.  

Going through ways to optimise each touch point as a brand team is how you start to build a relationship with your stakeholders and form the basis for nurturing that relationship, improving conversion rates and securing repeat business. 

It is also an opportunity internally, regardless of which channels you are personally responsible for, to work together toward a common goal of providing a seamless service throughout.    

For instance, in building awareness the focus is on digital contact points, SEO, advertising and PR – prioritising how it looks, sounds and grabs attention to make it memorable.  This should move on smoothly and consistently to conversion, service delivery, and brand retention techniques. 

Creating or improving brand experience in practice 

Steve Jobs put it well for the world of technology over 30 years ago: 

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.” 

It’s the same whether you are designing or trying to improve a product, a service, style a website, an event or something else, you need to refer back to your purpose as a brand and the experience you want to deliver. 

The way customers experience a brand at any interaction point or at any moment in time will play a part in its success or failure. To stay focused on optimising the whole experience, below are 8 brand experience tips which are a helpful point of reference to keep at hand for brand development:  

1. Create a clear brand experience vision as part of your brand purpose.
2. Keep finding ways to improve the brand experience; give it edge.  
3. Understand all stakeholders. 
4. Stay on top of market trends and behaviour shifts. 
5. Create emotional connections as well as rational ones.
6. Develop the art of listening and capture feedback in real time.
7. Set brand standards for behaviour (you are only ever as good as your team)  
8. Listen to and act regularly on employee feedback.  

Why brand experience is important to business 

Brand experience is measurable. In the long term, for any business, the qualitative measurement of a brand is as important as turnover and profit; the qualitative measures being predictive of new customers, repeat sales and overall growth. 

Key brand experience measures will include: 

• New customers 
• Repeat business  
• Channels / occasions 
• Referrals 
• Reviews 
• Trust 

When a business focuses on effective brand experience, it can reduce churn, increase revenues and save costs. However, profit cannot be an end in itself, at least not in the eyes of today’s customers.  

Most people today are discriminating individuals who demand exceptional experiences, transparency, respect for employees and respect for the environment. 

Brand values, brand tone of voice and brand design all play a part in building reputation and maintaining the right level of intimacy with your stakeholders.  Depending on the brand’s purpose, that level of intimacy can be quite understated but very effective in smoothing everyday lives or it can be designed to cause a sensation or life changing emotions every time.

Either way, if your brand experience is designed well and aligned to your brand purpose,  your customers, employees and other stakeholders will feel understood, involved, enabled and valued; they should also have a sense of agency and feel in control of their relationship with your brand, rather than feeling pushed.   

Profits will follow as proved by so many companies across different sectors. To finish, taking one great example, here is Unilever’s CEO talking about how the brands in their global portfolio that offer purpose driven brand experiences are delivering 75% of the company’s growth.

Developing your Brand Experience with a Creative Marketing Agency

Our team of branding specialists would love to support you in developing your brand experience, and help to visually bring your business’ brand to life. Please contact us at hello@imlondon.co.uk to request a free proposal to start crafting your new brand experience.