What is brand experience and why should you care about it? This is a really important question whether you're a business owner or consumer.
Today, instead of just consuming marketing content to form opinions, we are influenced by friends, family, social media, video content, and review sites. As a business, that means you need can’t just rely on traditional marketing like print, radio, and tv ads but rather, you have to cut through the noise and build connections with your consumers. That’s where brand experience comes in.
There are so many different definitions out there but here’s how I view it:
Brand experience is a sensory experience that combines brand strategy, customer experience and user experience.
I love the way that Air Inc puts it.
It’s the emotional, sensory, and tangible experience a customer has before, during, and after interacting with any facet of a brand. It’s how your customers experience your brand identity on a holistic level, and in the digital age, it’s more important than ever. Remember that consumers are not only deciding if they want to buy your product, they’re deciding if they want to buy into your brand experience.
This means that your unique value, your messaging, your products, services, and your community needs to fit into their world! Buyers are smart and they consciously or subconsciously ask the question, “what does buying this or investing in that say about me?”
Thanks to the digital age, consumers get are exposed to your brand through more than just print, radio, and television ads. Today, we engage with brands on social media, we get emails, we watch videos online, and some brands also have apps and social media accounts that we engage with too.
Brands that do this really well:
- Whole Foods
- Apple
- Starbucks
- REI
- And pretty much any luxury vehicle company
What do these brands have in common? A cohesive experience across all senses.
For example, when you walk into a Starbucks, you will immediately breathe in the coffee scent (which is actually through scenting oils, not just from brewing coffee all day), the space feels warm and inviting, the coffee rich and perfectly packaged, the shelves are lined with casual yet pricey products that make you feel good. That is why people love to carry a Starbucks cup with the same Pikes Peak roast that they could brew at home in a traveler’s mug!
Let's break this down a bit further
What’s the difference between Pikes Peak roast brewed at home vs brewed at Starbucks? At first glance, the main differences are that it comes in a white cup with the green Starbucks logo on the side and a price-point that’s 10x the cost of the beans to make it.
However at a second glance, it is more than that! You’re not just paying for the cup and the coffee but for the entire experience that Starbucks has created! Starbucks coffee is a micro-luxury and they want you to feel amazing spending $7 on coffee due to the culture, convenience and status that holding that cup brings you.
The Impacts of a Fabulous Brand Experience
First of all, when you focus on creating a brand experience that puts your customer first it does a lot of different things that benefit and catapult your brand. Here are four reasons to focus on brand experience.
The first thing that it does is it actually creates empathy.
Your audience may not always tell you what they need but by being engaged with them, you’re going to better understand their desires. This means better data and insights which oftentimes influence product and service decisions as well as content creation so that you can build a stronger connection with your audience.
The second thing that a quality brand experience does is improves engagement.
So when you can build deeper connections with your audience, and they feel a deeper connection with your brand, which leads to increased sales and brand loyalty.
The third thing that brand experience can help you with is having a wider reach.
Think about your digital experiences via your website or social platforms like Instagram or YouTube. When done well, you can actually increase your brand visibility and reach so that more people become aware of who you are and what you do. This is as important as it is for big companies like Apple and Starbucks as it is for smaller companies and for entrepreneurs who are just starting out.
Your brand recognition and brand authority are huge. It’s so important that when people see hear or experience different pieces of content or touch points from your brand, you want them to feel like they can actually trust you.
The fourth benefit of a solid brand experience is building trust.
Consumers are smart and they want to feel like the products and services that they buy from or they’re invested in, even from an idea standpoint, are trustworthy and that they are going to deliver on their promises.
Gone are the days of relying only on traditional marketing tactics where you blast your content everywhere. No, you actually have to tell a story and engage your audience in a way that they feel seen heard and understood. The goal is to help your audience feel emotionally attached to your brand and even consider recommending you to people in their community.
How to Up-Level Your Brand Experience
If you’ve made it this far in the blog post, chances are you’re serious about creating a holistic, sensory-driven, strategic brand experience. This is where we shine! If you’re a DIY-er, I highly recommend hopping on my email list for brand and marketing guidance. And if you’re ready for a team of pros to do all this for you, get in touch with my team at LMC Agency!
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