Building Brand Experience from a Business Perspective

Brand experience refers to the overall impressions and emotions a consumer feels during interactions with a brand. This includes every touchpoint, from advertising, the website, customer service, to physical products and services. The primary goal of building brand experience is to create consistent, positive experiences associated with the brand (rather than individual channels or products), which help develop brand awareness, image, and purchase intent.

Do you think this doesn’t apply to your brand? Or maybe you think it’s not worth worrying about? Let me surprise you—everything you do, from your communication style to how you package orders and interact with customers via call centers, contributes to building the brand experience. You might be doing it unconsciously, but it’s far better to have control over how others perceive your brand.

What should you focus on? Brand experience can be broken down into four key areas that are closely interconnected:

Brand identity: the appearance and communication style that create a unique image.

Interactions: all customer touchpoints, both online and offline.

Emotions: the emotional impact the brand generates in consumers.

Memory: long-lasting impressions that remain with the customer.

By focusing on these, you can build a strong, recognizable brand that attracts and retains customers.

Assessing the Current Level of Brand Experience

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for determining where your brand currently stands in terms of brand experience. However, you don’t need to spend a massive budget on complex and time-consuming research. Here are a few actions you can easily implement internally or with the help of an agency.

Surveys and Opinion Research

• Online surveys: Regularly conduct surveys among your customers to find out how they rate different aspects of their interactions with the brand. The questions can cover satisfaction with products, customer service, the website, or the overall brand impression.
• NPS (Net Promoter Score): This simple metric, based on the likelihood that a customer would recommend the brand to a friend, reflects consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

  
  Social Media Analysis

• Social listening: Monitor mentions of your brand on social media to understand customer sentiment and opinions. Use tools like SentiOne or Hootsuite.
• Comment analysis: Regularly review comments and feedback on your social media profiles to identify both problems and positive aspects of the brand experience.

  
  Qualitative Research

• Focus groups: Organize focus groups where customers can freely share their experiences and opinions about your brand. This provides deeper insights into the emotions and expectations of customers.
• Individual interviews: Conduct interviews with users to obtain detailed information about their experiences and suggestions for improvement.

  
  Touchpoint Data Analysis

• Customer Journey Mapping: Identify all customer touchpoints with your brand, from the first interaction to post-sale service. Analyze how customers move through these stages and where potential issues may arise.
• Sales data analysis: Review sales, customer retention, and average order value data to understand how different aspects of brand experience impact business outcomes.

  
  Monitoring Online Reviews

• Reviews and opinions: Analyze product reviews on platforms like Google Reviews, Yelp, or industry-specific forums. Pay attention to recurring issues and positive feedback.
• E-commerce platforms: Monitor reviews on sales platforms (e.g., Amazon, Allegro) to understand how your products and services are rated by customers.

  
  Performance Metrics

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Measure customer satisfaction after key interactions, such as a purchase or contact with customer service.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): Evaluate how much effort customers need to solve a problem or make a purchase. Less effort typically translates to a better experience.

  
  Benchmarking

• Competitor comparison: Regularly compare your results with those of your competitors. Understanding how your brand performs relative to others can help identify areas for improvement.

3 Trends to Remember When Building Brand Experience

Now that you know where you stand, it’s time to choose what’s most important from both a business strategy perspective and the customer’s point of view—meeting their expectations and needs. While certain elements of brand experience remain consistent, the overall experience is influenced by what’s happening around us. Therefore, it’s wise to carefully select the direction in which your brand moves.

Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Sustainability has become not just a trend, but a necessity. Consumers increasingly choose brands that demonstrate real actions toward environmental protection and local community support. Companies should invest in product circularity, eco-technologies, and transparent communication regarding their ecological and social impact. A good example is the fashion industry, where second-hand clothing and eco-innovations are gaining popularity. Actions toward sustainability and social responsibility are critical in building brand authenticity (I recommend checking out the Authenticity Gap Report published by FleishmanHillard in 2021).

How to Build Brand Experience Around This Trend?

• Blockchain technology implementation: Utilize blockchain technology to allow customers to track every stage of production and delivery, ensuring transparency and authenticity in sustainability efforts.
• Zero waste initiatives: Organize programs where customers can return product packaging for reuse or recycling, offering discounts on future purchases.
• Partnership with local organizations: Support social projects such as building schools, infrastructure development, or sustainability education programs.

Anywhere Commerce as an Extension of Omnichannel Experience

The integration of online and offline experiences has been a key focus for a long time. However, maintaining consistent brand interactions and a seamless purchasing process across all channels remains a challenge for many brands. A-commerce responds to customer expectations for the ability to shop anytime and anywhere, using any medium. Brands that leverage this trend put the customer, their needs, expectations, and experience at the center and build strategies around it.

How to Build Brand Experience Around This Trend?

• Augmented reality for virtual try-ons and product interactions: The convenience and immediacy of this solution allow customers to better evaluate products and make more informed decisions, no matter where or when they shop.
• Contactless shopping and payments: By introducing features like self-checkout or scanning products with mobile apps, customers experience a smooth and convenient shopping process.
• Personalized experiences using AI: Artificial intelligence analyzes customer actions and compares them with data from users with similar preferences. Based on this, the system generates recommendations for similar or complementary products, simplifying searches and final purchases.

Data-Driven Organization: Building a Competitive Edge Through Data

Intuition and experience are increasingly giving way to data. Data-driven organization is an approach where business decisions are made based on data—from multiple verified sources, with well-configured analytics, consolidated into a single model. This approach is gaining importance, especially now, due to changes in data, such as the shift to a cookieless world, where traditional methods of tracking online user behavior using cookies will soon become obsolete. Instead, companies must invest in alternative technologies or collect first-party data, which complies more effectively with privacy regulations. Companies that start collecting, aggregating, and working with data will gain a significant competitive advantage. With better customer understanding, more accurate trend forecasting, and faster responses to changing market conditions, they will be able to adjust their strategies and offerings more effectively to market needs.

How to Build Brand Experience Around This Trend?

• Personalized marketing communication: By analyzing user behavior, purchase history, and preferences, you can segment your customer base and provide them with content tailored to their needs and interests. Personalized communication increases engagement, improves campaign effectiveness, and builds stronger brand relationships.
• Product offering optimization: A data-driven approach allows for tailoring the product offering to market expectations by analyzing sales data, customer feedback, or market trends. This knowledge enables companies to identify the most desired products, forecast future trends, and modify or eliminate those that don’t meet expectations. This allows for quicker adaptation to changes, increasing profitability and competitiveness.
• Improving customer service: Data analysis helps identify the most common customer problems and needs, allowing you to create efficient support processes and personalized shopping experiences.

What’s Next? How to Consistently Build Brand Experience

Two key words define the title here: consistency and coherence. To effectively build brand experience, you must focus on doing so consistently (across all customer touchpoints) and coherently (which demonstrates your authenticity and builds trust). To wrap up, here’s a list of areas to assess and improve—these are often the weakest links in brand perception, and the customer-brand experience frequently suffers:

• Ensure consistent brand communication: Focus on maintaining visual, linguistic, and content coherence. These efforts boost brand recognition and build awareness.
• Be mindful of where you appear: Carefully choose the platforms where your ads are shown, make informed decisions about partnerships with influencers, and be cautious about the campaigns you sponsor.
• Remember transparency: Include all important information from the customer’s perspective in your website descriptions or ongoing communication. Don’t make them search for it.
• Ask for customer feedback on product and service quality: Regularly gather feedback and implement improvements based on their opinions.
• Verify customer service quality: Ensure that customer inquiries are resolved and assess satisfaction levels. Invest in employee training to equip them with the necessary skills and knowledge.
• Develop effective upselling and cross-selling strategies: Anticipate customer needs and offer complementary products or services.
• Prepare a crisis response plan: Brand image crises happen often, but with proper preparation, you can minimize the damage.

Key Takeaways for Those in a Hurry 🙂

• Brand experience is the sum of impressions and emotions consumers feel when interacting with a brand. It’s a critical element of building brand image, awareness, and purchase intent, covering all customer touchpoints.
• There’s no universal method to assess brand experience. It’s worth combining various tools and metrics: online surveys, NPS, social media analysis, focus groups, individual interviews, customer journey mapping, and monitoring online reviews. To evaluate the effectiveness of brand experience efforts, metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) or Customer Effort Score (CES) can be useful.
• In brand experience efforts, consider aligning with three global trends: sustainability and social responsibility, anywhere commerce, and data-driven organization.
• To effectively build brand experience, consistency across all customer touchpoints and coherence in actions are essential for building authenticity and trust.
• Practical steps to improving brand experience include consistent brand communication, transparency, regular customer feedback collection, verifying customer service quality, effective upselling and cross-selling, and preparing a crisis response plan. These are key actions to enhance the brand experience.