Brand Experience — a combination of Branding and UX?
What is Brand Experience? Does it have anything to do with User Experience or UX, and why does any brand need to facilitate a good User Experience?
Let’s start with the basics… what is a Brand?
Marketing textbooks define brand as — “A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.”
But to put it simply, a Brand is something your audience recognizes you by, they associate you with either an image, a design, some words or a combination of the aforementioned and many more…. Or as Jeff Bezos puts it
“Branding is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
For Example, the Golden Arches of McDonald's, or three words, “Just Do It” remind you of Nike, or if I ask about your favorite fizzy soda pop, you’d instantly think about either Pepsi or Coca Cola.
But lately, a lot of brands have been focusing on differentiating themselves basis a term called Brand Experience.
But well….How does one Experience a Brand?
The truth is, we all have been experiencing brands, it is nothing but how we feel about the brand, how we perceive it, and the impression we have about a brand.
Some modern definitions do try to bring out this flavor of Branding and Brand Experience…
A brand relies on 3 things:
- Brand Identity and Imagery: How a brand presents itself to the audience, it could be the logo, the typeface, font, designs, and colors being used, iconography, so on and so forth.
- Brand Promise and Messaging: As the name suggests, a brand promise is the kind of message that the brand has, what the brand propagates to the users. It acts as a north star for the internal teams, and a reference to the users or audience. This lays the foundation for the UX with respect to a brand.
- Brand Consistency: This deals with how the brand builds its familiarity with the users, this factor has a great deal to do with what the users feel about the brand over time. It involves building consistency across the different channels, touchpoints, and mediums of communication and retaining those over time. Users tend to associate trust and confidence in a brand basis the consistency.
Enough of the Marketing and Branding lesson…how does UX come into play?
Well, it was imperative that we understood what a brand was and how a brand experience was built… because UX has got a lot to do with understanding your audience and delivering a great experience to them. Capiche?
No? Let’s start with what UX is… Putting it simply, User Experience is nothing but the experience an individual has whilst interacting with your product or service.
“Everything that touches upon your experience with a product.” — Dan Norman
The quote above was said by none other than the person who coined the term UX. Your user starts a journey when she/he starts interacting with your product, and therein, does your user interact with touchpoints, some physical, some digital, some with tangible products, some with fringe services. All of these are bound to follow something called a Brand Guideline — imagery, color scheme, designs, yada yada yada…..
All the things mentioned above, tie into one big picture — The Brand Experience.
Let’s understand further: With more and more products going digital, or brands interacting digitally with their audience, building a great user experience online and offline for the audience is paramount.
Let's take an example -
- You’re the owner of a Pizza chain, that delivers pizza to your hungry customers' doorstep, you want users to order pizza through an application.
- This app must at the very least have your logo on it, to help users identify with your brand.
- Then the design (UI) of the app must follow a color scheme and the design language similar to that of your logo, your outlet, or brand.
- Most importantly, this app must deliver an experience to the user, similar to that of maybe ordering a warm slice of pizza in-store…
These elements tie in to assist your users to find/discover, identify, and differentiate and associate with your brand over a period of time. And end-to-end the experience from order to delivery that your outlet provides to the users becomes a part of their Brand Experience.
I hope you get the spiel now…?
A lot of brands invest time and money and have dedicated teams these days to understand their audience well and figure out great user experiences in the new digital products that they deliver to users. But let’s leave that for another article, shall we?
Until then if you liked the article, and would want to know more, hit that clap button — press hard for 50 claps ;). Do give me a follow…. and continue having a great 2021.
