• Market strategies
• Business brands
• Brand Families
• Brand financials
• Brand personification
• Brands
• Conjoint analysis
• Market research
• Business markets
• Competences
• Competitive analysis
• Implementation
• Marketing effectiveness
• Segmentation
• Strategic analysis
• Target markets
• Technology markets

Brand experience

As can be seen brands can be seen in a number of different lights - as relationships, as personalities, as an image, as a set of values.

These are philosophical views of the brand. For the brand to work consistently and successfully the brand as a whole has to work for the customer from start to finish. We describe this as the brand experience.

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The brand can be considered as a set of experiences. A product such as a chocolate bar contains a set of promises and experiences. The experience is how the product design works for the consumer. The way it not only tastes, but the way it feels and looks. However this is not the full brand experience. The brand experience starts before consumption. It includes the way we experience the promotions for the product, where the product is bought, the opening of the wrapper, after sales service and the website. All contribute to the brand experience. A useful metaphor is the brand as a journey. Strong brands ease and signpost the journey and deliver what is promised by managing the brand experiences.

Since the brand represents values and relationships, the brand experiences need to be managed to support these core philosophies. If the brand has simplicity as a core value, a brand experience that is complicated or convoluted such as having to negotiate a poorly designed telephone menu system through customer services, negates a core brand value and diminishes the overall reputation of the brand.

Many decisions that affect the brand experience are taken outside the marketing department. Simple links exist in that operations may decide how a telephone call is answered, sales decide how strongly they keep their promises, manufacturing influence the end quality of the product.

Marketeers sometimes refer to this as the pimple problem. Marketing for many companies is something that the marketing department does and it is about advertising and brochures. These influence brand attitudes, but unless marketing thoughts are endemic throughout the company these are mere pimples compared to reality of the brand experience generated by the company as a whole. For this reason a brand experience is reliant on the culture and values of the organisation. High quality marketing cannot make up for slipshod production. Consequently ensuring that brand values are reflected throughout the customers experience means incubating those values with employees first.

Naturally this implies that making the reality of brand experience reflect the brand values means cost is involved. Many companies make cost-based decisions without judging the impact on the underlying brand values. For instance if a mortgage lender wants to be perceived as market leading and working for the customer, but is slow in bringing it rates down in comparison to other firms it may save cash, but lose business.

However, care is needed from marketeers as this is not an excuse for never changing or reducing the underlying costs in the product. A core feature of successful marketing firms is the ability to manage costs within the confines of the brand requirements. This allows better prices to end customers and better margins for distribution with price as a strong intitial component of the brand experience

Brand personification Measuring brand equity