.JPG)
The world changes every day. Unless people keep seeing your brand as relevant and current, it will lose its shine.
If you want to shape how people see your brand, then you need to change their experience of it. In this article, we’re going to explore innovative ways to give customers a great brand experience.
With a unique and powerful brand experience, your customers will forget everything they thought they knew about you, and leave with a better understanding of what your brand really stands for.
Read the room: how to identify your audience and customize brand storytelling
Your brand story is never ‘just one story’. This would be like assuming all your customers are identical clones, or that all your employees are.
Your brand experience needs to be customized for each different audience, while still staying true to a core ‘brand story’. There’s no dishonesty involved here – just a realistic understanding that people will experience your brand differently and get distinct benefits from what you do.
Looking at ‘new customers’, for example, you may want to include certain details that are unnecessary for long-standing clients. Likewise, if your audience is an internal one, then you’lll want to focus on different details altogether, like your employer branding and company values.
It’s also important to consider how each audience will engage with your brand experience. Do they prefer remote/virtual experiences, or can they easily visit a physical venue? Would they prefer you to visit them, or are you taking your brand story on the road?
Building your brand story with digital storytelling software
Once you have identified your potential audiences (and what matters to them), the next step is to define your brand story for each audience. By using digital storytelling software, companies can more easily build a range of brand stories that are distinct but consistent, using a common library of digital assets and digital stories.
Your brand story is the foundation for your brand experience. Every other part of the brand experience is there to reinforce and connect with the story, to make it tangible and memorable. It must answer the fundamental question: what do you do for them, and how does it change their life?
Getting creative with brand experiences
There are a variety of creative ways to build an amazing brand experience around your brand story. These should aim to be immersive, multi-stage, and interesting.
For example, physical props can help make the connection between ideas and the real-world. This tactic is especially effective if you can make the props and environment familiar to the specific audience.
Another way to use physical props is to turn them into part of an interactive activity. A company that does this well is SAP, which uses their brand experience centers to immerse visitors in customized familiar environments.
Immersion is a leading tactic for creating an innovative brand experience. It can be in the form of an immersive experience room, an extended reality virtual experience, or as a more physically immersive brand experience with props, sights, sounds, and smells.
Try to create a journey within your brand experience, consisting of different ‘stops’ along the way, and distinct learnings that are gleaned from each one. This enables you to break down your brand story into different focus areas (e.g., your values, goals, methods, impacts, etc.,), which can be customized more easily.
Your brand experience toolkit
There are many ways to give customers, partners, and colleagues a ‘brand experience’. No one method is ‘better’ than the rest, but each has strengths in different situations.
Executive briefing centers
Your company’s executive briefing center is already designed to showcase what your company can offer to clients and partners. Some, however, are outdated, with ‘static’ designs. The ideal executive briefing center should enable active involvement and participation, using tools like digital signage, holograms, and video walls to immerse visitors in your brand stories.
Digital storytelling
This is one tool you cannot be without. Digital storytelling is when you use digital technology to communicate stories, typically with video or extended reality. Digital storytelling enables you to convey complex and abstract ideas in more tangible ways. Your brand can be brought to life with exciting music, relatable characters, and familiar situations. Even better, digital storytelling is highly customizable if you’re using professional digital storytelling software.
Customer experience center
The customer experience center is a more modern form of the ‘executive briefing center.’ It is centered on the customer experience, and reflects the understanding that customer centricity is the only way to properly address their needs. If you want a great example, then look no further than Randstad’s amazing experience center.
By putting the customer at the center of your brand experience, your brand will be easier to understand in terms that matter to them. Customer experience centers use digital storytelling extensively, often as part of an immersive experience.
Virtual studio and extended reality/3D content
A Virtual Studio has many benefits. One of them is the ability to create truly first-class content and digital stories. The Virtual Studio from Purple is equipped with an extended reality capability, enabling you to create immersive 3D content and unique metaverse brand experiences. These can operate with only a handful of technicians, and require no post-production to create amazing special effects.
Hyro storytelling software
The Hyro storytelling software is at the heart of the best brand experiences. It’s also what enables you to show off the best quality 3D content, thanks to an integration with Unreal Engine. Using Hyro, companies can easily customize brand stories and deploy experiences in real-time, using just a handheld tablet to control the entire thing.
What makes your brand experience stand out
Regardless of how you come up with your brand experience concept and brand stories, they should always strive to be unique, exciting, and meaningful to the audience. The Hyro storytelling software can help you build customized digital stories, and make it easy to deploy them in a variety of situations, but you still need to carefully map out the entire journey through your brand experience.
By seeing your brand experience as a progression, it becomes a story itself. Your customer is the hero, and they encounter familiar challenges along the way. And most importantly, they experience how you help solve their problems.
FAQs
What makes up a brand experience? A brand experience is how people think of your brand, based on the total sum of every experience that they have had of it. Some of these are outside of your control, but by creating a powerful brand experience you can help people update their perception of your brand. Your brand experience can use a variety of tools like digital storytelling, physical props, and virtual experiences to communicate benefits and other knowledge of your brand.
What are the 4 types of brand experience? Brand experiences have 4 ‘buttons’ they can press: Sensory, Impact, Behavior, and Cognitive. These are the 4 types of brand experience you can offer. Sensory is all about the sensation; music, lighting, tactile, etc. Impact is about getting the audience to feel an emotional response to your brand, for example trust or relief. Behavioral is about personal interactions and processes, for instance training checkout staff to give each customer a smile and greeting. And cognitive is all the dry, boring facts companies used to use when talking about themselves, for example ‘our washers last twice as long as the industry average, but cost the same.’
What makes a good brand experience? A good brand experience should give people a positive feeling, and create strong memories associated with your brand. This can be achieved by addressing their concerns and making them see that you ‘get them’, and can help solve their problems.
What technologies enable a good brand experience? You can use a variety of technologies and tools to make a good brand experience. These can include immersive experience rooms, digital signage, extended reality, and games.
