Important Steps in Designing Brand Experience

If you are looking for a way to improve your brand image and marketing, while at the same time designing products that will enhance the consumer’s experience and improve customer loyalty, the way is good brand experience design.

Brand experience is the long-lasting impression a customer gathers after being in touch with the brand in any environment or any stage of their customer journey.

The design of brand experience, on the other hand, is the process of conceptualization, planning, visualization and implementation of brand experience into all branding elements and stages of the customer journey.

It is a method of creating products and features with an approach that puts the brand first and requires strict knowledge of how to incorporate marketing into product experiences without interfering with the user's experience.

In this article, we will go through the design process of BX, colliding with interaction design, and how it helps improve the brand and marketing strategies.

Dig deep into the target audience characteristics

To be able to sell your products, services—and experiences—you need to understand the final consumers very well.

In order to create memorable experiences for your customers, you should create detailed buyer personas that go well beyond the demographic data.

Apart from the age, occupation, place of residence, gender and other demographic information that might be of interest, here are some things that could help you design BX for your customers:

• Hobbies and interests: To be able to design a unique experience through your brand and brainstorm awesome experiential marketing campaigns, you should know what your target audiences like to do in their free time and what they deem to be fun. Their hobbies and interests should tell you where you can find them in their leisure time and what locations or events would attract them to your brand.
• Values and beliefs: Different demographics have different values on a pedestal—whereas baby boomers value tradition and reliability, Gen Z believes in climate change action and inclusivity, for example. Offer a brand experience that will make your ideal customer trust your company because it stands for the same values as them.
• Inspirations and achievements: What inspires your customer, and how do they like to celebrate important achievements? Make your brand a part of their happy and celebratory moments.
• Routines and habits: This will tell you a lot about where your ideal customers can be found, what their day is going to look like, and what they do as a way to relax or empower themselves.
• Places of interest: Cafes, restaurants, festivals, public transport and public spaces, are all places where your brand can place an experiential marketing campaign, pop-up shop, or similar.
• Tools and gadgets they use: Are they Apple or Android users? Are they more likely to be on a PC? Which social media platforms do they use?

Define brand vision and values

No matter what you might create and implement in your brand experience and strategy, it needs to be in line with your brand vision and values.

If you offer an experience that greatly differs from what your company stands for, it will seem inconsistent and out of character for your brand.

A simple blueprint of a brand prism will help you crystallize your ideas and build a voice and character for your company.

The Kapferer identity prism is a model that helps businesses build strong, enduring brand identities that reflect their core values.

Optimize the gap between digital and offline channels

Consumer experience-enhancing digital interactions can be dispersed over multiple touchpoints on the web. Brand websites, social accounts, communication channels, and other tools are only some examples of this.

Finding a precise balance between all of your digital spaces is an important element of structuring your network. This includes your website, social media profiles, and other communication platforms and channels.

At the center of the user experience for all customers is the website, because no matter where they learn about your brand, they will most likely end up looking for more information there. It is, as such, an important part of the brand experience strategy.

The ideal website enables you to harness the power of design, psychology, and technology as a business. At the same time, it gives the customer a one-of-a-kind experience.

Create a detailed journey mapping

You need to pinpoint and evaluate different stages in the journey of your customers’ experience.

For example, they’ll start their journey by exploring and coming across your brand.Then, they will be learning and understanding what your products and services are. They will next dig deeper into customer reviews, track success and compare your business with competitors. The next natural step would be to make a decision and purchase or engage as a customer.

Once a paying customer, the job of your brand is to now turn them into loyal customers, offering a good experience all across the board through nurturing, upselling, evaluation of strengths and weaknesses your company has offered, and getting regular feedback.

Learn the customer intent at each stage of their journey

As users move down the marketing funnel, they can have one of these intents:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration
• Evaluation
• Purchase

Customer intent is the cognitive process that guides a customer's actions while interacting with your brand's content.

When people search the internet, what kind of information do they require? What kind of social media content do they want to see?

Consider what action the target audience does at each stage of its journey and what you should do to meet their needs and expectations at that step.

Create empathy maps for your customers

In order to create an experience for your customers, you need to understand the way they feel and think when using your products and services.

So, you can create an empathy map that both brand experience and user experience designers can use.

The map is a simple chart split into four pieces:

• What does the customer say?
• What does the customer think?
• What does the customer do?
• What does the customer feel?

All of these four areas can be addressed with marketing materials and elements such as ad copies and visuals, concept marketing, packages, titles, content marketing, etc.

Implement your finding in the UX design

When it comes to digital products, a great part of brand experience is UX design.

Through the journey mapping and deep dive into buyer persona characteristics, you could turn your website, app, or landing pages into an intuitive and easy-to-use platform infused with necessary branding elements that will give users an amazing and memorable experience.

Keep a consistent brand identity

As with all strategy and design guides we’ve written before, a reminder to keep a consistent brand identity is a must.

All digital and offline brand experience efforts should contain visual elements that define the brand and help customers easily recognize and memorize it (logos, brand marks, fonts, colors, etc.).

This also relates to the values and vision, which we previously mentioned.