Understanding Brand Experience

The easiest way to understand Brand Experience is first to understand the component parts:

Brand represents the intellectual and emotional associations that people make with a company, product or person. That is to say, brand is something that actually lies inside each of us. It is our subjective understanding of something, be it a company, a product or even a person. The essence of a brand lies in each of our unique, subjective interpretations, in our understanding of a brand. This is guided by cultural context, interactions we‘ve had with and about what we are evaluating, and our own personal conception of the world. The more closely aligned a company or product is with the needs and desires of customers, the more likely that company is to maintain a strong and positive mental image in their customers‘ minds, customers who can then be moved to take productive action: to buy, to engage, to recommend, or to think. The science of branding is about designing for and influencing the minds of people. This is building the brand.

Experience is anything that our senses perceive, the interaction between people and the world. What is valuable about experience is, like brand, it actually happens on the inside. How and why people respond to experiences is at the heart of successful design. And that is what designing for, or focusing on, experience is all about: understanding people. The same basic principles apply whether someone is reading information or going to a trade show booth or watching a commercial or engaging a Web site. Even as the media changes, the basic human realities of evaluating and responding to experiences remain the same.

Brand Experience in its totality is a rather new discipline, and one that is incredibly complex to execute successfully. Not only does it require a sophisticated understanding of business strategy and a deep, scientific and cultural understanding of people and markets, it also demands a broad and neutral understanding of communications and media. It is, at once, the synthesis of business, marketing, design and technology. And the Web is a vital component to Brand Experience.

A Brand Identity is how others "percieve" it!

Brand and Digital Marketing

Be very focused on the user and the quality of the user’s interactions and experience with the brand. Force feeding messages to people is not effective – what is effective is getting people to participate and engage – which is how we create the deep lasting relationships.

Digital space and the future of traditional and digital marketing?

Today it is a place where consumers shape and own the brand. We are moving rapidly into a place where brands have to completely understand what the consumers’ motivations are and understand that branding means so much more than raising awareness – it’s about activation and engagement.

Online Marketing

These days a website is essential. And depending upon your niche and your objectives, it can be a major part of your marketing initiatives. Creating a website can be made fairly simple by working with a company that specializes in helping small businesses create their web presence. But how about getting the word out about your site, and getting visitors to come back again and again? It's important to fill your website with content that's effective. It’s what you say and how you say it that makes all the difference online. The content (words) on your site must be crisp and intelligent. What you say should grab a visitor’s attention, establish credibility, pique their interest and motivate them to action. There are a number of ways to promote your business online, here’s just a sample of the most popular methods:

Online display advertising – the “granddaddy” of online advertising, involving the purchase of display space on a popular website. Everyone has seen ‘banner’ ads at the top of websites – despite reports of their demise, display ads are still popular for their reach and for the branding effectiveness of graphical ads.

Search engine marketing – this catch-all has two primary marketing tools under its umbrella; search engine advertising and search engine optimization. Both involve driving traffic from the hundreds of millions of eyeballs that scan search results on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines, but the approach is drastically different – be sure you understand the distinctions.

Email marketing – along with online display ads, email marketing got a bad rap, mostly thanks to spammers clogging your inbox with offers to refinance your mortgage. But with new rules and regulations, and much stricter controls on spam, getting your message out through email is enjoying a revival. Email can be an outstanding customer retention tool, so you’ll want it to be part of your online marketing mix.