Brand Experience from Scratch

To ex­pe­ri­ence a Brand prop­er­ly, one has to give the prop­er at­trib­ut­es to it. This is im­por­tant to make brand ex­pe­ri­ence pos­si­ble. How that works? We have to be­gin at the very be­gin­ning.

To ex­pe­ri­ence a brand al­so means that it has be to made com­pre­hen­si­ble in the con­crete sense. How is it pos­si­ble to trans­form an ab­stract en­ti­ty like a brand to a con­crete one, so that it can be ex­pe­ri­enced prop­er­ly? We have to pro­vide it with spe­cif­ic fea­tures, even bet­ter: with hu­man ones. The term for it is an­thro­po­mor­phism. As hu­mans, we can com­pre­hend some­thing bet­ter as soon as it has the same char­ac­ter­is­tics as us hu­mans. So if we talk about brand iden­ti­ty for ex­am­ple, we con­nect two lay­ers, we give the ab­stract con­cept of brand a hu­man trait.  This is not un­com­mon, we ac­tu­al­ly do it all the time to struc­ture the world around us and make it more iden­ti­fi­able.

Start with a blank page

A brand is a won­der­ful pro­jec­tion sur­face for ex­act­ly that mech­a­nism. We can project iden­ti­ty, mean­ing or emo­tions; we can pro­vide it with such at­trib­ut­es to make the best out of it. And this is root of the mat­ter: you can­not ex­pe­ri­ence a brand per se, how­ev­er you can ex­pe­ri­ence the at­trib­ut­es you as­signed to it. Con­nect it with emo­tions that are based on ac­tu­al, re­al feel­ings. Some brands or prod­ucts can be touched or ac­tu­al­ly set in mo­tion a sense of plea­sure, just be­cause the prod­uct is made for that. Think about choco­late for ex­am­ple. Or the they are con­nect­ed with pos­i­tive mem­o­ries like the toys we played with as chil­dren.

The choco­late ad­van­tage

Grant­ed, if you man­age such a brand, you have an ad­van­tage. How­ev­er, this does not mean that it is im­pos­si­ble for oth­er brands to trig­ger pos­i­tive emo­tions. Think out­side the box and fo­cus on the touch­points with your cus­tomers. And cre­ate your own choco­late ad­van­tage. This is one way to im­prove brand ex­pe­ri­ence. More about this sub­ject next week on this chan­nel.