Brand Experience & Why It Matters for Marketers

Over the last 24 hours, someone, somewhere has become aware of your brand. Whether that awareness came from TV, social media, word of mouth, etc… it was the first in a series of interactions that will move the needle up or down on how confident they feel about your products or services. Strung together successfully, brand experiences can ‌add up to a level of loyalty and evangelism that marketers often dream about. Ignored, they have the power to explode your cost of acquisition, slow growth, and even put you out of business.

While great brand experiences usually feel effortless, delivering the thousands of tiny interactions you’ll need to create one cohesively, can be a lot of work. The process requires an examination of your brand’s values as well as collaboration with other departmental leaders to explore how they play out at each stage of the customer lifecycle. And while this effort will impact every part of your organization, the biggest opportunity lies in transforming your marketing efforts.

In this post, we’re exploring why brand experiences are so important to marketers and what they can do to facilitate them.

The Anatomy of Brand Experience

Think of ‘brand experience’ as a measure of your ability to connect an audience’s expectations and outcomes. For example, imagine that as a volunteer on my son’s baseball team, I am tasked with finding trophies for an upcoming championship series. After finding a nearby store called ‘Best Trophies’, I look for options on the website, but several buttons don’t work. Rather than take my chances, I decide to call, but get short monotone yes-and-no answers to my questions. When my trophies come, they feel chintzy, the gold paint flakes, and so on.

“If you’re not proactively managing your brand experience, you’re becoming a victim to it”

This is a dramatic (though not unheard of) example of a negative brand experience. My decision not to return to the brand won’t be the result of a single point of failure, though. Those are often surprisingly easy to bounce back from. Rather, it comes from the feeling I’m left with after a series of negative interactions expose the business’s values: Shoddy, difficult, careless, unresponsive. Remember that new customers come for a product or service and return customers come back for an experience.

Note that while none of these touchpoints directly involve you as a marketing leader, they all have a deep impact on the cost and reach of your marketing strategy. In addition to the first-order consequences of lost business, negative word of mouth arising from these experiences makes it dramatically more expensive to earn new customers. That means that it’s high-tide and you, as a marketer are swimming against the current to avoid losing ground, instead of growing.

Where to Start

Improving any organization’s brand experience takes more than a new marketing campaign. It requires a wholesale shift in its operational paradigm. At larger organizations, the work can take a dedicated revenue operations consultant or team. For the rest of us, the job usually falls to communications leadership to champion. To do it, marketers will have to go beyond their walled garden, though. They need to create a new end-to-end vision for the customer journey, a compelling pitch for how to get there, and buy-in from colleagues about how it should play out. Start here:

Revisit Your Brand

Better brand experiences come from more cohesive brands. To get there, you’ll need to go beyond a new logo and color palette. Start by conducting a deep dive into who your audience is, what they value, and why. The branding process should align your communications, your audience’s values through mission, vision, values, unique selling propositions, et al. Whether you’re starting this exercise from scratch or trying to course-correct an existing organization, the information uncovered during this process should act as a North Star for your customer journey, from advertising to packaging to customer support.

Make a Promise

Our job as marketers is to make a case for the products or services we represent. That includes messaging that not only describes what we’re selling, but how it benefits the buyer. Once you’ve developed your profile, it’s time to spell out what you’re promising buyers. The promise is more directly related to managing your brand experience because it describes the values with which you deliver a product or service. Remember that your promise (the most effective, highest quality, cheapest, most environmentally friendly…et al) will need to be executed at every touchpoint in the customer journey to impact the larger outcome.

Build Consensus

Brand experience is one of the most critical factors in your organization’s business strategy. You’ll need to build ‌consensus around your efforts before you can use them to drive growth, though. Start with gaining buy-in on your vision and a commitment to collaborate from departmental stakeholders at every stage of the customer journey, from sales to operations to customer support. During this process, you’ll need to convince stakeholders to review their existing SOPs and bring them into alignment with your updated brand promise. It can help to remind them that if you’re not proactively managing your brand experience, you’re becoming a victim to it.

Implement a Plan

Once your leadership team has rallied around the brand promises, use them as a measuring stick to assess each touchpoint in your customer journey. Start by highlighting opportunities and pain points, documenting the current experience, the desired experience, and what action can be taken to align them with your desired brand experience. For every potential touchpoint, you should be asking whether the experience fulfills, exceeds, or falls short of fulfilling the promise that’s been made.

Plan for Followthrough

The most important factor in improving your brand experience isn’t a better website or funnier marketing campaign; it’s follow-through. In addition to building processes that ensure your promise is being executed at each stage of the customer lifecycle, empower your team to go outside of your normal business workflow when the need arises. Successful brands use marketing to position their products. Then they follow through on it consistently at every turn in the audience’s journey.

Measuring the Impact

Brands that use this process to achieve super alignment between an audience’s expectations and outcomes, tend to grow quickly. The best place to look when trying to tell a story about the impact of your brand experience efforts? Typically, your work will play out in metrics like cost of sale, customer lifetime value, net promoter score, churn, et al. While brand experiences can take time to impact the bottom line, you’ll begin to see a multiplicative effect as they drive deeper loyalty and brand evangelism.