What is Brand Experience,

By Delali Komla - Jan 12, 2022

Have you ever heard of a specific brand’s name and felt a strong wave of emotions come over you? You might have had an extremely poor experience with a brand, or maybe an extraordinary one. Whatever it is, it has led to a specific brand perception in your mind that has the power to influence your future purchase from the brand.

Many sweet memories in our minds are associated with a particular brand. Whether it was spending a beautiful day at Disney World or Netflix movie night with your friends, the brand has stuck with you through these wonderful times. This is all part of the brand experience management.

What is Brand Experience?

Every company wants to build a brand that provides excellent customer service to ensure that its prospects turn into loyal customers. Brand experience is the perception of your customers regarding your brand. As a matter of fact, 96% of customers have said that customer service is an important element in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

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Brand experience influences how you customers feel about your brand after their encountet. Every thought, feeling, and reaction that a person has regarding a brand sums up to create a brand experience.

Brand Experience vs User Experience

Brand experience and user experience (UX) are a part of the marketing lingo that are often used interchangeably. However, both are quite different from one another.

Whilebrand experience vs user experience seem quite different, one can not exist without other. As a matter of fact, user experience influences brand excperience to a great extent. A positive user experience leads to a positive brand experience.

What are the Factors in Brand Experience?

With social media, many companies have bridged the brand and customer gap. Even so, many brands have failed create a positive brand experience. This is because brands fail to consider several elements that make up the part of the brand. They are:

What is Brand Experience Examples?

Every brand wants to create an impactful impression on their customers. For this purpose, Several popular companies have used effective and clever strategies to ensure that their brand leaves a long-lasting impression on the minds of their customers.

Plus, customers who have positive associations with the brand are five times more likely to purchase from your brand again and four times more likely to refer a friend to your company.

Netflix

Take Netflix, as one of the brand experience examples.

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Withover 214 million global paid memberships, Ntetflix is one of the most popular streaming websites. However, Netflix does not have any fancy movie theatres, costume parties or holds any events for celebrities to meet the fans and promote their movies. Despite, Netflix movies and tv series have broken viewersgip records constantly.

How?

Netflix revitalized various popular shows on the streaming site, such as Arrested Devlopment and Gilmore Girls and marketed them to their loyal fans with some clever tactics.

For example, Gilmore Girls was off the television for a while and made a comeback on the streaming website. Netflix marketed it by remodeling many coffee shops just like Luke’s Diner from the popular show. This led to a lot of positive response in the audience, who consequently rewatched all the seasons of the hit show on Netflix.

Starbucks

There are thousands of coffee shops in the US, yet Starbucks is the most popular brand for coffee. With its intricately designed logo, green and brown palette, thrilling ambience, a customer does not only feel like they’re getting a coffee but a Starbucks. Compared to its competitor Costa Coffee, Starbucks has generated more than 10 times the revenue!

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Starbucks has incorporated several strategies and tricks to ensure that they standout among all the other coffee brands. Founded in 1971, it didn’t take long for Starbucks to become a global phenomena all because of its brand experience innovation.

Suppose you go to a Starbucks, you are immediately taken by the sleek machinery, free wifi and cozy seating arrangements. You place your oder, wait in the waiting area and when your order is ready, you name is called out. You get your coffee persoanlized with your name on it.

This combination of comfort, trend, personalization has led to the popularity of Starbucks globally.

Dove

While many beauty companies target the insecurities of women to market their products, Dove stands out among this crowd by encouraging and inspiring women to cherish their natural beauty. Dove created an ad, Dove Real Brauty Skecthes that showcased women of all age, race and shape to be their true self.

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As a result, Dove challenged the traditional perception of beauty for women in a society that defines beauty as a model on a magazine cover. The ad received a lot of popularity because it encouraged women to accept their beauty as it is. This way, Dove created a sense of trust, loyal, authenticity and realness to its brand.

Coca Cola

Despite its popularity, Coca Cola has marketed its product worldwide to boost its sales. Many campaigns ahev failed, but several others have succeeded. One such successful campaign is the #ShareACoke campaign.

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In 2011, Coca Cola has one of the best brand experience examples as it launched a campaign in Australia that generated so much buzz that the campaign was expanded to over 80 countries. What happened? Coca Cola replaced the logos on their bottles with the phrase “Share a Coke with” followed by a particular person’s name. Just like Starbucks, this created a feeling of personalization among the customers.

People started finding the beverage with their names, or the names of the loved ones and share the photos on social media. With more than 600,000 #ShareACoke on Instagram, this creative strategy became one of the most popular social media marketing campaigns ever. For the first time in four years, Coca Cola observed a boost in sales in the US market.

How to Maximize the Brand Experience?

As we have said before, many businesses leave to make a lasting impression on their customers due to the inconsistency of the brand experience innovation. If you want to boost sales and grow your business, you should start looking into brand experience in marketing. Here are some of the ways you can maximize your brand experience:

Know your audience

Familiriarizing yourself with your audience, their needs and requirements can help your business tailor products, services and campaigns accordingly.

For instance, if your target audience is teens then you might want to do a little research to see what the teens are gravitating towards these days. For teens, you should market your products on TikTok and Instagram. On the other hand, if your target audience is middle-aged then you might wanna to go back to Facebook.

For this purpose, you can email surveys to your audience. Additionally, you can go through the followers insight on your social media to find out the perception of people regarding your band, and use the information to improve the brand experience.

Personalize the brand

Clearly, the most creative marketing strategies – #ShareACoke and Starbucks – have employed the use of personalization to generate more sales and revenue. This is because personalization creates a bond of trust between the consumers and the brand, thus elevating the brand experience.

Participate in events

By participating in events or orgazning your own, you can create a thrilling brand experience management for you customers, and even find new potential customers too. Events – music and food festival – are an excellent place to get yourself out there, and engage with your customers.

For example, if you are running a cafe, you can organize a food stall at one of the food and music festivals, and offer free meal to the customers who wins a certain thrilling game at your food stall. In addition to the discounts, you can create a photobooth and ask your customer to tag the photos with your brand’s hashtags. By doing so, you are engaging your customers and generating more buzz around your product. This will also attract potential prospects who will compete in the games, take more pictures and ultimately, market your brand.

Consistency is the key

If you want to make sure that your brand experience in marketing does not go down the drain, have consistent brand experience. Several companies have been the victim of inconsistency which has led to a lot of damage.

One of the most popular examples of consistency is Wendy’s twitter. Wendy’s social media account rules Twitter for it’s hilarious tweets, clever comebacks and sassy replies to followers and competitors. Interestingly, this has led to growth in sales of Wendy in 2017 which exceeded the target of $10 billion globally. Amazing, right?

if you want to make sure that your brand is easily recongized everywhere, use the same typography, logo and style to leave your mark. Plus, treating all the customers equally and with utmost respect regardless of the age, race and religion also factors in to a brilliant brand experience.

Inspire emotions

Every watched an advertisement of a community smiling, laughing and enjoying themselves in a park and felt yourself filled with happiness too? That’s because the advertisement targeted your emotions.

There are several emotional appeals in advertising that brands use to invoke a certain feeling and sensation in their audience. It can be anger, sadness or happiness. Moreover, people tend to react actively to the emotional aspects of the ads rather than the texts.

If you want to create an impactful ad, make sure it targets an emotion of hour audience because the audience tense to share the adds that are based on emotions more than the ones that don’t.

For example, Coca Cola’s campaign Choose Happiness encouraged the customers to share all the happy memories and experience of their summer.

Improve the experience

There’s always room for improvement for a brand. Companies that tend to improve their customer experience have observed the employee engagement increase by 20% on average.

Ask your customers through surveys on how you can improve your brand. You can remodel and redesign various strategies with the help of this.

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For instance, you are running a tea store and launch a new flavour. The flavour does not go so well with the audience. It might be because the taste is too strong or the packaging is dull and boring. Whatever it is, listen to what you audience has to say to improve your business and drive your sales. Interestingly, brands with a good customer experience have generated 5.7 times more revenue than competitors with a poor customer experience.

A seamless journey

If you want to optimize your customer’s brand experience, make sure that they encounter the least obstacles while interacting with your brand.

For example, your website should not be a labyrinth for the customers. Your website should be beautifully designed, fast, and responsive so your customer has a wonderful time while adding your products to the cart.

Moreover, if you customer has a query or confusion regarding a product, you should be able to respond as soon as possible.

Be real

Striving for perfection is mainstream, and quite impossible. If you want your audience to deem your business a credible, be authentic and real. When customers try to reach out regarding a problem, listen to them and find the solution to fix them. We are all humans who make mistakes. Accept yours, fix them and move on.

Key Take Away

Brand experience is the sum of all the thoughts, feelings and sensation that formulate a particular perception regarding a brand. If you want to drive sales, and observe a steady growth in the market, it’s crucial for your customers to have a good brand experience. his article enlists several ways and strategies you can use to to elevate the consumer’s brand experience.