Refining Your Brand Experience? Do This.
As a small business owner, your pursuits for the perfect brand experience can be endless. You’re constantly thinking of what you can do to up the ante for your audience. We’re here to tell you that there’s literally only one thing standing in your way. We’re here to let you in on the secret. 😉
We’re almost sure that when we say “brand experience”, you know exactly what we mean and have no idea what we mean all at the same time. It often seems like this lofty thing that no one really knows how to define, but the truth is that it’s super easy to take in, analyze, and engineer once you know what you’re looking for (and at).
The term brand experience refers to nothing more than how people experience your brand using their five senses.
Think we’re kidding? What’s your favorite brand experience? Chances are when you go through the things you like, it’s not just the way something looks or feels, but also the music they play inside their store, the way the website is laid out, the materials they use, and so on. Those are the things that make up the elusive brand experience! That’s it! So, how can you harness this experience design power? Write down how your brand is represented by each of the 5 senses. Yes, seriously.
When you do, really stretch your imagination here - Coca Cola has a patented sound that represents the can opening, although their product is something primarily driven by taste. Think your product is just music? Consider what your artwork looks like as well, and maybe even brainstorm what flavors you’d assign to your music if people could taste it.
Assign adjectives to your brand until you feel like they paint an accurate picture of how you want people to experience it with their five senses. Then, use those adjectives to drive your decision making for everything from what fonts, shapes and colors you use in your social posts and other graphic materials all the way down to the type of background music in your videos, and everything in between.
You see, as prevalent as social media is… people don’t just experience brands with their eyes. The eyes process preliminary information and send signals to all other parts of your nervous system to orchestrate what you interpret as a well-rounded experience - whether that’s from your favorite brand, your best friend’s house, or even a random public restroom. To put it a different way, imagine getting turned off from a sandwich because the bread simply looked soggy. Therein lies the answer.
When all is said and done, humans are dynamic creatures. Life is slowly but surely returning to normal, and most people are desperate to experience things in person after such a long stretch of digital-only interactions. With the small business landscape significantly changed as a result of the pandemic’s ebbs and flows, be sure that everything about your brand is engaging them so they have a reason to come back.