How Does Your Brand Impact Your Customers’ Experience?

How Does Your Brand Impact Your Customers’ Experience?

Today, the experience is the brand and the brand is the experience. 

Take a moment to think about every interaction a customer has with your brand. Consumers no longer think of your logo as your brand. Your brand is the sum of every experience with customers—the entire customer journey from awareness to loyalty. But, I’d argue, that branding is more important than ever before. In fact, 2019 has been dubbed “The Year of the Rebrand”.

Traditional branding still matters, it’s just not enough.

Brand isn’t the logo. It isn’t the color palette, ad campaign or tag line. And while getting those things right is wildly important, in the experience economy, that importance is becoming increasingly outweighed by the impact of the quality of the interactions consumers have. A great brand today isn’t owned by marketing. It’s more a set of guiding principles. It lays the foundation for why your business looks and feels the way it does, of course, but it also dictates the kinds of products your company should create, informs the creation and of the digital properties your company will generate. The customer journey today is less linear than ever, and what ultimately amounts to your brand in most consumers’ minds are a collection of fleeting encounters, not the direct line from campaign exposure to sale.

Exceptional experiences = exceptional brands.

The most successful brands define an aspirational state of what the enterprise would like to achieve or accomplish.They provide a clear guide for evaluating business choices today, as well as evaluating and prioritizing future plans of action.

It’s no longer enough to maintain a consistent voice in the market, companies must maintain a coherent experienc eacross every interaction. Marketing teams understand this value and have mastered the art of protecting your brand and maintaining consistency. But what about other areas of your business? How about product management teams, innovation teams and digital design teams? How is brand relevant to all other areas of the organization?

Creating brand positioning for the experience economy.

Your brand needs to focus the efforts of the entire organization. Yes, you need your brand style guidelines (i.e. how to use your logo, fonts, etc.). But, just as important, you need to articulate what your brand stands for. What is its purpose? Companies should create overall brand positioning that provides employees a clear and succinct understanding of how the brand should be reflected in every experience, fromR&D to digital design. The best brands start by creating a brand positioning that reflects a greater purpose or mission.

Here are a few great examples of how todo this:

Patagonia: “We’re in business to save our home planet”

• Build the best product

• Cause no unnecessary harm

• Use business to protect nature

• Not bound by convention

Oracle: “The Oracle brand is built upon a consistent set of brand behaviors. These are our measuring stick for all communication.”

• Simple

• Authentic

• Adaptive

• Engaging

• Knowledgeable

• Relevant

Airbnb: “Of course, an identity is about more than symbols. So we’ve redesigned the entire Airbnb experience to better reflect the people who make up this community. Our shared vision of belonging is the thread that weaves through every touchpoint on Airbnb.”

• People

• Places

• Love

• Airbnb

At the core of every experience is a brand—which is paramount to any marketer’s success.