The Importance Of Brand Experience
/To explain why a positive brand experience is so important for business success, we need to first define brand experience.
What is brand experience?
Brand experience encompases all the experiences online and offline a customer has with a brand, from the initial brand awareness to complex brand interactions and touchpoints.
“Brand experience is conceptualized as sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand's design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments.”
J. Joško Brakus, Bernd H. Schmitt, Lia Zarantonello, Journal of Marketing (2009)
Brand perception is accumulated from both direct and indirect experiences with the brand. However, the direct brand experience has a stronger influence over the customers' perception of the brand than the perception that is based on indirect experience such as advertising and marketing communication only. Therefore, in order to compete brands now need to prioritise customer and user experience and to design a positive brand experience.
The experience defines the customer’s relationship with the brand. Positive brand experience means that every interaction and touchpoint with a brand needs not only to be engaging and enjoyable in order to create an emotional bond with the brand, but to be consistent and reflective of the brand values. Consistently great brand experience leads to customers having strong relationships with the brand thus creating brand loyalists, fans or evangelists (Lindstrom 2009).
“Positive experiences lead to satisfaction, behavioural intentions and in turn, to emotional ties with the brand.”
Anna Morgan-Thomas, Cleopatra Veloutsou. Journal of Business Research 66 (2013) 21–27
To succeed, brands need to design great customer and user experience that meets customers’ needs and brand expectation to ensure brand satisfaction and ultimately to develop brand loyalty.