Your brand experience is formed by every touchpoint where your customers encounter your brand. This can be your company website, apps for customers, webinars, digital events and even emails. You need to give customers a brand experience that is authentic, consistent and inspiring at every point. A top-level brand experience is important for communicating your value to customers, so it needs to be good. Really good. The goal is to create an engaging customer experience that shows your customers exactly what you stand for, and what you can do for them.
These days, the brand experience also needs to be ‘digital’ for it to reach the customer and give the most targeted impacts. Physical interactions are certainly part of your brand experience, but these are most effective when they also use digital tools to grab attention and hold engagement.
Digital storytelling is one key part of this brand experience strategy. It helps brands to communicate their value to customers in a highly effective and personal way. It is a vital tool for creating impactful brand experiences.
3 digital storytelling tools for a top-level brand experience in 2022
The tools we use for creating engaging digital brand experiences don’t have to be physical ones, such as hardware. They can also be specific tactics or ways of using digital technologies to create truly amazing, top-level brand experiences.
Digital Signage
Your waiting-room can become part of your brand’s digital experience when it uses Digital Signage to engage and ‘warm up’ your customer. These versatile screens are becoming a standard for creating engaging displays. They can turn a simple sign into a digital event. Using sensors and triggers, these can become more interactive by deploying various digital storytelling assets based on the interaction.
One of the best things about digital signage is how easy it is to deploy in diverse types of locations. Retailers and consumer brands often deploy these in-store, in-window or on the street. This is where their customer is – and it creates fantastic interactions.
For B2B situations, they are more commonly seen at trade shows or used for customer visits to the office. Digital Signage is an essential part of crafting an excellent brand experience in these situations because they instantly capture the customer’s attention and allow you to shape their interactive experience.
Digital showrooms
These offer another wonderful opportunity to showcase what your brand is capable of. Digital Showrooms are virtual 3D digital environments that can be anything you need them to be. So, they can really show your brand in the best light.
Digital showrooms are essentially immersive experiences, and they have the benefit of totally drawing your customer into a world of your making. There is no better way to engage your customer in a brand experience than with an immersive digital showroom. These 3D virtual environments offer many ways to create interactions with the brand - enriched with data, digital stories and physical props.
Digital twins
Finally, Digital Twins are something we at Purple have had our eye on for a while, and they have immense potential for elevating your brand experience. The different technologies behind Digital Twins are not ‘new’, but it has taken until now for them to become mature enough and find each other.
Digital Twins are an exciting way to visualize ‘the big picture’, without missing any of the granular details. These are not the same as ‘the metaverse’ or ‘VR’, but they do have similar features. Digital Twins are virtual digital representations of actual physical objects, processes or environments. These are usually updated with real-time data but can be used to visualize potential outcomes too.
Importantly, Digital Twins are complex mathematical models of real-world phenomena that have been rendered with a 3D virtual overlay. It gives mere mortals the godlike ability to see real-world objects, even entire cities, and to simultaneously access the sensor data that drives the simulation. They can be used to create an incredibly detailed vision of the past, present and future. They have an established use in visualizing data-led decision-making processes, where a visualization of the real-time situation and the actual outcomes of potential changes is very valuable.
Digital Twins are the result of complex data-modelling, which has been rendered in a virtual 3D environment. They are used primarily in areas such as the aerospace, pharmaceutical, medical and architecture industries, where complex interactions and outcomes need to be visualized to make better decisions.
Typical applications of Digital Twins for decision making:
Aerospace – used as a feature of predictive maintenance. Sensor data is used to model digital versions of actual craft or engines. A digital twin of an airplane or spacecraft can be examined while it is mid-flight. Potential fixes or upgrades can be evaluated and visualized.
Pharmaceutical and medicine - to simulate outcomes with medical devices or the activity of drugs and interactions.
Architecture - to visualize energy efficiencies, light incidence/reflection, air movement and heat distribution in potential building designs. These are totally replacing the paper and glue 3D models used by architects and take less time to create. These can go from plan to 3D model in just a matter of days.
Using Digital Twins to create an unforgettable customer experience
The primary application for Digital Twins is still in the area of decision-making - for now. But this is only the tip of the iceberg for this new technology. Their application in brand experiences is still very much an untapped area, with a lot of value to offer. Purple’s immersive digital storytelling technologies are the perfect arena for exploring Digital Twins, because they create an incredible experience and can easily handle the 3D virtualizations (thanks to the versatile Hyro software they run on).
A Digital Twin can be used to tell the story of your company’s physical assets, or how your business model operates. For example, it could demonstrate how your company has made changes to logistical processes to save carbon emissions, or it could be used to show the impacts of your products or displays on buyer behavior in stores.
Using actual data and powerful visualizations your value proposition could not be clearer.
Leveraging a digital twin as a brand experience
A Digital Twin is essentially a virtual digital story of a physical asset. They can be interactive and can help customers explore what you do.
Naturally, these are innately unique to each company or brand, and they can be custom made or adapted to each situation.
5 examples of using Digital Twins as a brand experience
- A multi-brand retailer could demonstrate to their brands the value of physical stores by showing how customers are queuing up right now to make purchases.
- Conversely, it could also be used by brands to show retailers the impacts of their products/displays in a virtual store, using real data to feed the simulation.
- An oil company can show how their facilities are kept safe and transparent or demonstrate the flow of their energy around the world.
- Logistics companies can demonstrate their coverage across geographic areas, with trucks on the road right now
- A software company can show users of their app around the world, and the revenue generated in real-time.
These are just a handful of generic examples, but it does start to build a picture of the possibilities. And of course, these complex models can be used to make better decisions too. Once you have the technology installed, new and better ways of working can emerge.
Digital Twins are an incredible tool in our digital storytelling toolkit, and they can create a centerpiece for a Customer Experience Center. The 3D environments used for the visualization are built using the Unreal engine, so they can be deployed with any hardware that runs on the Hyro software. This means they can be employed with any of the concepts created by Purple. Moreover, they are best experienced with immersive technologies, which enable the highest level of engagement with the virtual environment.
We feel that Purple’s technology concepts are the perfect solution for experiencing digital twins, and these can help you to deliver an incredible brand experience too.
Digital Storytelling FAQs
What’s a Digital Twin?
A digital twin is a functionally accurate digital virtual simulation of a physical asset. It consists of a ‘data layer’, which is a complex mathematical simulation of the asset, and a ‘3D virtual layer’ that enables users to interact with and visualize the data.
What makes a good brand experience?
A good brand experience should show your customers exactly who you are and what you offer. It needs to be consistent at every touchpoint, and to show your true values. Your brand experience needs to offer a clear picture of what you offer, and that can (and should) be an inspirational emotional value to the customer.
What is Digital Brand Storytelling?
Digital Brand Storytelling is the use of digital storytelling to convey the identity of your brand. It should show your brand story with every digital touchpoint the customer has. The use of digital storytelling makes your brand more relatable and easier to understand in ‘human’ terms.
How do you create a brand experience?
You create a brand experience with a careful consideration of what your brand identity is, and how you want to convey this to your customers. Starting with this orientation, you can begin to list the experiences that you want you customer to have whenever they encounter your brand and find ways to create these opportunities. A chief element in a brand experience is an ‘intentional’ experience, which helps to frame all other points of contact. This could be an immersive experience, or a CXC, for example.
What is a Digital Brand Experience?
Your digital brand experience is the way that your customers experience you brand with digital technologies. This will typically be the technologies they regularly use in everyday life, or how they access your services. For most companies, the website is the first port of call, but it can also include emails, webinars, and digital storytelling initiatives that help to define your brand story.
