If you want to capture the attention of your target audience, you need a memorable brand experience. As a business and a brand, your experience is essentially every interaction, touchpoint, or reference to your brand in the eyes of consumers. 

In this post, I’ll provide a high-level overview of brand experience. Continue reading to learn: 

• What brand experience is 
• Why it’s important 
• The four dimensions of a brand experience 
• Elements of a brand’s experience 
• How to design a brand experience strategy 
• Examples of successful brand experiences

What Is Brand Experience? 

A brand experience is the sum of all sensations, feelings, thoughts, and behavioral responses caused by interaction with, exposure to, and/or stimulation by a brand. That’s a long-winded way of saying it’s the lasting impression of a brand and its efforts on consumers. 

Brand experience is not specific to a medium. It’s not just marketing. It’s not just a website. It’s not just in-store. It’s everything relating to the consumer’s overall experience with a brand. While you can have a digital brand experience, the overall experience incorporates in-person events. 

Why Is Brand Experience Important?

Brand experience is the consumers’ perception of your brand in totality – not just in image. It doesn’t get any more important than that. It’s what your prospective customers think of you.

A strong, impactful brand experience benefits you by: 

• Creating brand loyalty: A positive brand experience leaves customers satisfied, wanting more, and willing to spend more for you over the competition. That’s essential when it’s five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. 
• Engaging new customers: Winning over consumers who never heard of you is more likely with a strategic, engaging brand experience. 
• Re-engaging existing customers: Just because they’ve supported you in the past doesn’t mean you have their undivided support. An exciting, fresh brand experience can help re-engage existing customers who have lost touch with you. 
• Helping you remain relevant: Everyone is out there vying for attention – a solid brand experience helps you remain relevant in the eyes of the consumer. 
• Standing out against the competition: A unique and original brand experience sticks in the minds of consumers and helps separate your brand from all others in the market.  
• Generating a positive emotional response: If you craft a relatable brand experience for your audience, you’re likely to generate a positive emotional connection which can lead to brand loyalty.  
• Becoming a memorable brand: All of this works together to become a memorable brand. When the experience you deliver sticks in the back of the consumers’ minds, they’ll remember your brand.

The Four Dimensions Of Brand Experience

To state that brand experience is every touchpoint of your business would be too vague. What makes up the overall experience of a brand? 

Brand experience can be broken down into four dimensions: 

• Sensory: Stimulation through sight, sound, taste, smell, and feel. 
• Affective: Emotional stimulation 
• Behavioral: Elements and actions of a brand that stimulate physical actions 
• Intellectual: Elements and actions of a brand that stimulate thoughts

Elements Of Brand Experience

While the four dimensions of a brand experience are how consumers are impacted, the elements are components a business uses to build its experience. 

The elements of a brand experience typically include: 

• Visual brand identity: Logo, color palette, typography, iconography, photography 
• Additional design elements: Audio taglines or scent branding 
• Brand values: The principles a brand stands for and is built around 
• Tone and Voice: The way a brand communicates and its personality 
• Social conscience: The brand’s position in social issues and activism 
• Customer experience (CX): Everything a customer experiences when buying and consuming a product or service, from initial onboarding to post-purchase stages and renewal. 
• User experience (UX): Experience of using or consuming the product or service itself. 
• Marketing: Direct, indirect, and experiential marketing

Brand Experience And Marketing 

Branding and marketing aren’t interchangeable. That means a brand’s experience isn’t simply their marketing strategy. Marketing does play a major role in brand experience, so it requires its own section in this post. 

Three types of marketing that influence brand experience: 

• Direct marketing 
• Indirect marketing
• Experiential marketing  

Direct Marketing 

When you intentionally target consumers with marketing content and efforts, it’s called direct marketing. The word “marketing” is often associated with direct marketing efforts as opposed to indirect or experiential. 

Examples of direct marketing include: 

• Customer service 
• Your website 
• Advertisements 
• Discounts, rewards, and promotions 
• Newsletters and press releases 
• Influencers, product placements, and endorsements

Indirect Marketing

Indirect marketing is marketing that’s not directly your brand interacting with the customer. While it’s not specifically targeted, it does influence how consumers think of your business. 

Examples of indirect marketing include: 

• Employee engagement with customers 
• Strong online presence with social media and search 
• Customer reviews 
• Press articles 

Experiential Marketing 

The third – and least common – type of marketing is experiential marketing. It’s marketing your brand through an experience. This is different from content in that it transcends common use. 

Experiential marketing comes in multiple forms: 

• A physical event like Red Bull’s “Cliff Diving World Series” 
• A competition like Herr’s “Philly by Flavor” competition to ideate new flavors for their chips 
• An interactive pop-up experience like Van’s “House of Vans”

How To Design An Effective Brand Experience Strategy

Brand experience sets the bar for your brand in the eyes of consumers, so it’s important to approach the process strategically. Every brand has its own story and process, but I’m going to provide a high-level overview of how to design an effective brand experience strategy. 

Generally speaking, the following steps help craft an effective, memorable experience: 

• Create a mission statement 
• Understand your target audience 
• Tell your brand’s story 
• Position your brand 
• Form an emotional connection 
• Personalize 
• Foster customer engagement 
• Create a memorable in-person experience

Create A Mission Statement

A mission statement clearly outlines the vision and goal for your brand based on your values. Your mission statement also helps you identify your target audience, inform your marketing and branding strategy, and ensure you define what you want your brand experience to be.

Understand Your Target Audience 

Before you can craft a brand experience, you have to know who it’s aimed at. More than just knowing, you need to completely understand your target audience. 

To do so, conduct a segmentation analysis. After completing the analysis, you’ll have numerous audience segments. For each segment, create customer or buyer personas that exemplify the ideal customer.

Tell Your Brand’s Story

As I said earlier, every brand has a story. Your brand’s story captures attention. That’s because people resonate with stories and narratives. If you have a compelling story, it’s more likely consumers will remember your brand. 

At a minimum, your story should tell what you do, why you do it, how you started, and where you’re going. That includes your history, core values, unique value proposition (UVP), and more.

Position Your Brand 

To have an effective experience, you have to speak to a specific audience. More so, you need to find your position in the market – where you fit among competitors. 

Through your mission, story, and UVP, you can position your brand and set yourself apart from the competition.

Form An Emotional Connection

The key to fostering brand loyalty and engagement with consumers is forming an emotional connection. That starts with relatability – if someone relates to your brand, they’re more likely to form that connection and remember you. 

Your brand experience should be tailored to your audience with the goal of connecting in every component. 

Personalize 

Customers don’t want to feel like another number in your marketing plan. They want to feel noticed and appreciated. One way to accomplish this is by creating a brand experience that’s tailored to each customer as best as possible through personalization. 

Creating a unique experience that makes customers feel valued and respected – as if every interaction is directly targeted towards them – makes it more likely they’ll remain loyal to your brand. 

Foster Consumer Engagement

Remember how important emotional connection is to your brand experience? Engaging your audience is one of the best ways to form that connection. When you engage and interact with consumers, they feel seen and appreciated. 

Engaging with consumers is a strong way to create a memorable brand experience. Look for ways to get customers to respond and interact authentically with your brand. That could be through social media interactions, reviews, or in-person engagement. 

If you can get consumers talking about and sharing your brand, you create a sense of brand loyalty and advocacy.

Create A Memorable In-Person Experience

A lot of my content is focused on branding in relation to marketing and advertising. Specifically digital marketing and print advertising. In this era of technology, it can be easy to overlook the in-person experience. But people still go to stores and value face-to-face connections. 

The final piece of an ironclad brand experience is the in-person experience. Examples of in-person brand experiences include: 

• Brick-and-mortar shops
• Pop-up shops
• Special live events 
• Experiential marketing 
• Collaborations 

Use live experiences as a way to immerse consumers – and employees – in your brand. Everyone wants to be a part of a unique, exciting experience.

Photography And Brand Experience

Image plays a major role in your brand experience. That’s why visual branding is such an important part of building your brand. It’s difficult to build a reputable visual brand without professional photography. 

Think about all the ways your business relies on images and visuals: 

• Your professional website 
• Social media content 
• Online marketing materials 
• Print advertisements 

That’s just to name a few! You can even leverage photography to capture in-person brand experiences and promote them digitally. 

An important distinction here is professional photography. Yes, you can try and shoot photos on your iPhone – I have a blog with tips and tricks to get better shots. No matter the quality of your camera, unless you have years of technical training and experience you won’t be able to match the quality of a professional. 

You can’t cut corners if you want a top-notch brand experience. Even with a professional photographer, you shouldn’t blindly select. Do your research and find the right photographer for the aesthetic and image you envision.

Brand Experience Examples 

A memorable, impactful brand experience takes time to develop. You don’t just wake up and have an incredible reputation. Although I’ve provided steps you can take to develop yours, it helps to see the concept in practice. 

Below are a few examples of strong brand experiences from large companies that you’ll likely recognize.

Nike

Just do it. Starting with its slogan, athletic footwear and apparel company Nike crafted its brand experience around motivation and inspiration. From emotional visual marketing campaigns to sponsoring major sporting events, every touchpoint of Nike’s branding is centered around motivating determined individuals to achieve their goals.

Disney

Disney is synonymous with magic. From Magic Kingdom to Frozen, Disney creates a memorable brand experience that is impossible to ignore. Whether they’re marketing theme parks, movies, memorabilia, or apparel, there’s a magical, immersive experience to be had. 

The company is so large they have numerous sub-brands within, but the core Disney branding is meant to create a surreal, engaging experience.

Red Bull 

Another slogan: Red Bull gives you wings. While Red Bull doesn’t literally give you wings, their brand experience is bold, daring, and adventurous. Red Bull is a great example of “it’s not just an energy drink, it’s a brand”. 

From hosting live events like the Space Jump or the Cliff Diving World Series to their unique commercials and ads, the theme is always excitement and pushing it to the limit. 

Develop Your Visual Brand Experience With Casey Templeton Photography

Your brand experience is everything. That makes it challenging to provide an all-encompassing overview in one post. While this article may not make or break your brand, I hope you come out of it with a better understanding of what brand experience is, why it’s so important, and steps to take to develop yours. 

A robust, professional image library is a great asset when forming a brand experience strategy. Casey Templeton Photography provides professional corporate and commercial photography services in Nashville, TN, and beyond. 

Casey has years of technical practice behind the lens and experience branding with businesses of all sizes in numerous industries. To learn more about how photography can impact your business branding – or to get the ball rolling on a project – fill out our contact form.