Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less
by Brandon SchauerDoes the brand define the customer experience, or is the customer experience the brand? Your work may involve both, but you probably attack problems with a bias for one or the other.
Earlier this year I asked Josh Levine of Great Monday to simply describe the relationship between brand and experience, and I like the balanced answer he drew:
However, I had to go back and dig deeper with Josh to clear up the differences between his diagram and the way I often see the relationships between brand and experience being practiced. What emerged was this illustrated question and answer, attempting to untangle brand and customer experience in just 9 minutes:
Entries (RSS)
November 11th, 2009 at 2:20 am
Would like to add that process although not so linear with passive, interpretative customer base. Nevertheless that you do drive home a point that I share, brand creation for the sole purpose of supporting communication, is a model that has become obselete.
I believe more and more we will moves towards a model where the company meets customer to make experiences which becomes the brand. Or to push it a little further under the paradigm of customer centricity, its actually the customer that designs the company to make experiences which transpire into brands. Great post
November 11th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Josh is brilliant. This should be replayed to all ‘brandies’.
November 11th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
[...] Brand & Customer Experience via Adaptive Path [...]
November 11th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Excellent distinction between brand as reputation vs. brand as look and feel. I think you hit it bang on when you described employees being the major influences on the brand experience. To add to your point with another example, every positive CS story I heard about Zappos had to do with a customer interacting with an employee.
It makes you think that more money should be spent on employee-customer interaction vs. corporate advertising (advertising still has value, but only in driving new prospects into the funnel)
November 15th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Thanks! This demystifies something which has always confused me. Keep up the great work.
November 19th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Josh hits the nail on the head at the 5:45 mark! The interface is the product is the brand is the experience is the interface. I just posted about this in my blog as a result of a talk Kristian Andersen gave at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing last Friday. Kristian is the founder and president of Kristian Andersen + Associates, a boutique branding and experience design firm. BTW, he even gave a shout out to AP about exactly what is going on here in this blog. Something so circular about this!
If you want to see an expanded representation of this from another great mind in the brand experience design field, check out the blog post I wrote which summarized Kristian’s talk. And thanks for posting this video.
November 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm
[...] Adaptive Path. Good presentation, [...]
November 24th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Amen! Thanks you Josh. Brand is not just a pretty logo, or your color palette. It’s EVERYTHING. It’s visual and experiential. Why don’t many companies with millions of dollars for marketing understand this? You can’t gloss over poor customer service, defective quality or inconsistent buying experiences with a new ad campaign (well, you can for a short burst only to have customers be sorely disappointed) If it were that easy, we’d all be Apple. It’s all about communicating the promise and then living up that promise through every touchpoint in the organization. Great video with very easy to understand visuals. See more on what makes an effective brand strategy here: http://vimeo.com/7691405
December 3rd, 2009 at 10:35 pm
[...] Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less from Brandon Schauer on Vimeo. A bit of background over at the Adaptive Path blog. [...]
December 18th, 2009 at 10:25 am
[...] Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less (adaptivepath.com) [...]