What does it mean to create Brand driven experiences?
Art might be the purest form of something man made that creates a feeling in us. Each person that looks at a painting or listens to a song will be left with a different emotion and if you are left void of emotion can we even call it art? The presence of emotion distinguishes art from craft, as we don’t have a stencil for art.
A Brand can be thought of as the sum of emotional memories between an individual and a company built over a history of experiences. The challenge with this is that it is formed out of the intangible concept of feelings, which cannot be engineered — it’s like with art, we don’t have a stencil. A painting is static, in that it is created in a single point in time, whereas a Brand is dynamic. It lives with and interacts with us over time, like a person. Strong Brands are not built on what they say, but what they do — and the memories left behind from these experiences.
“They may forget what you said — but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Carl Buehner
So all we have to do is to create a good experience and we have a brand? Well no… A Brand just like a relationship needs time to form. In order to build a strong Brand, you need to create a good experience over a period of time, and this requires consistency; consistency over time, services, touchpoints and messaging. This is where we tend to fail because meaningful consistency does not happen with a decision or an investment. It is created through a Brand’s purpose, attributes and value proposition brought to life in the form of identity interacting with people forming experiences.
A Brand acts through its products and services as well as the people working with it. Maintaining consistency requires the following:
1. Understanding your Brand’s positioning in its market and what customer segments it is targeting
2. Clarifying a Brand’s purpose, value proposition and attributes
3. Careful design of all products and services to be in line with the above
4. Building an organization that keeps the product and services relevant and consistent over time
5. Purposeful design & cultivation of a strong culture that forms the behaviors of people within the organization
With the above we can see why building strong Brands is so damn hard, and most fail… You need the stars of purpose, design, organization and culture all to align. But if you succeed, magic will happen and people will love you for introducing it into their lives!
At Pond we are thinkers and doers — all with a different story, to imagine and realize extraordinary experiences in the digital and physical worlds. And increasingly where the two converge.
We are the Brand innovation company.
This post was written by our CxO Heikki Härkönen.
Heikki is an avid but whimsical sailor
