Perfect CX Series Part 1— Brand Experience
From the previous blog, we know that Customer Experience is not a stand-alone concept. Rather, to be able to understand CX completely, you need to study the various types of experiences that cumulatively form customer experience. And the first to fall in line is Brand Experience.
An organization wanting to enhance its CX must focus minutely on how it defines its brand and what the brand speaks about it. A brand is not just a combination of name, color, and logo. It is a medium to convey your ideology behind the brand to your customers and get them on the same page.
Our objective for this blog is to understand what makes the brand experience a unique concept, how it can affect customers, the roadblocks in the process, and finally, unravel how to leverage brand experience to optimize CX with the help of the legendary case of American Express.
So, without further adieu let’s begin!
What is Brand Experience?
What comes to your mind when you hear the brand Apple? Status symbol? Rich lifestyle? Expensive gadgets? Unique features? Market pioneer? Trendsetter?
And what about Oppo or Vivo? Still the same? No! Because your mind perceives each of these brands in a different light. And the reason is their brand experience.
To quote the definition given by Chris Cavanaugh from Freeman,
“Brand Experience is about designing a sensory experience that brings a person into a lasting and meaningful relationship with a brand”
Brand Experience is an experiential marketing tactic used by brands to target their customer’s cognition and influence the way they feel about them. Companies create sets of ideal conditions to give customers an experience that they can remember and visualize a brand by, each time they encounter similar products.
So why is Brand Experience the future of marketing? What matters to the customers?
What Matters to Customers?
Customer values have come a long way in recent years. What used to be just a quest for utility and satisfaction from the products has now evolved into a search for a more wholesome relationship with the brand. Customers seek genuine engagements and transparency. According to Stackla, authenticity is an important factor for 86% of customers in deciding their brand preference.
Customers today are socially aware. It matters to them when organizations are not just being profit machines but are creating ethical, responsible, and sustainable businesses. According to Oberlo, 64% of customers would choose a brand if it has a take on social and/or political issues.
They are also marketing savvy. They know your exact intent behind an advertisement. They are no longer lured by commercials, emails, or offers. They also don’t believe in collecting stuff anymore. They want memories. They appreciate brands that understand them and deliver the exact requirement with the least of their efforts.
So, brands must focus on providing a unique experience, that is not fake or copied, to differentiate from competition in a way that is expected. According to statistics from Google, around 33% of marketers believe that understanding and engaging with the target customers is important to accomplish marketing goals. Only then can they reap brand recall. And this is where brand experience offers a great opportunity.
But the process is not all roses…
The Major Roadblocks
Brand Experience creation is easier said than done. Like any other strategy, proper execution of brand experience strategies has certain constraints and roadblocks. These are:
- Limitation of resources: Company’s limited financial resources have a lot many usages. Thus, any initiative to enhance a brand image is constrained by a strict budget.
- Short term vs long term: Investment in brand experience is a long-term investment. However, managers are required to achieve the short-term goals before strategizing for the long term. This dilemma results in delayed brand experience.
- Maintaining consistency: Execution of brand strategies takes place over multiple channels like website, in-store, on social media, etc. For a successful brand experience, it is a must that the brand message remains consistent across all platforms, media, and time.
- Being unique in the crowd: It is a challenge to be competitive and unique to attract consumer attention in a market where they are bombarded daily with hundreds of marketing communications.
- Customer connectivity: Statistics reveal that a customer takes about 1/20th of a second to form an opinion about the brand, according to 8 Ways Media. Thus, it is very important to leverage each touchpoint very quickly.
- Communication: Developing a customer relationship whereby customers become involved in building the brand promise is an ultimate challenge of brand experience.
- Too much focus on the brand promise and too little on delivering it: Managers usually spend a good deal of time on curating what their brand promise should be. They brainstorm to derive the best value for customers. But often brand promises remain only good conceptually as their delivery is not chalked out as efficiently as the promise itself.
Brand Experience Study from American Express
American Express focuses intently on building and maintaining its brand experience through the following elements:
Logo
Image: The American Express logo across platforms
The logo of the brand celebrates the 168-year-old heritage of American Express stylishly. Building on its brand equity, the iconic blue box logo with two rows of bold outlined font crossing the center of the blue space, reflects strength, simplicity, rigor, and familiarity. The shades of blue represent trust while the use of white provides space to breathe. This new logo cast in 2018 is in line with the new world needs to be more digitally legible and representative for the American Express app, Membership Rewards points, and Pay with Points.
Tagline
The brand’s classic tagline from 1975 “Don’t Leave Home Without It” was reinvented to match the tunes of the 21st century. In April 2018, the brand went a step further with its new tagline, “Don’t Live Life Without It”. This catchy tagline aims to highlight how life and business are increasingly getting interconnected and how their target audience can “Balance their Work-life Balance” with AmEx at their disposal for the tiniest of transactions, from buying gas to purchasing a car!
Brand Personality
If the AmEx brand were to be characterized as a live person, its personality traits would include money-minded, proud, innovative, witty, empowering, competitive, modern, adaptive, trustworthy, and sophisticated.
A combination of these three elements helps AmEx create a brand image that customers cannot forget easily. The brand colors, the taglines, it is all a signature of AmEx and results in immediate brand recall.
Conclusion
Your customer needs to understand your values and thoughts behind the brand. Only then they would be able to relate to your products and the varied touchpoints. Many successful brands have achieved excellence in CX through a strong brand experience game. Only their logo, color scheme, or jingle is sufficient for customers to recognize them. And once your brand experience is to the point, the next area to focus on is the product experience. The brand can attract the customer once, but the product is what will drive them back to you. We shall discuss more about product experience in our next blog for the series. Till then, keep reading and stay in touch!
In the other parts of this series, we will learn more about each of the six varied types of experiences forming Customer Experience
