Move Beyond Branding! Create Brand Experiences.
Your brand is not just a logo. It’s not just the colors you use on your marketing materials. It’s not your website. Not your store-front. Your app or your product. It’s not just your TOV, typography, or slogan. We’ve all heard this before. But what IS your brand then? Well, easy! It’s all of that. And more. It’s everything that makes people EXPERIENCE you. That’s what we call Brand Experience. While each of the individual elements mentioned above is part of the branding process the outcome, its ultimate goal, is a holistic meaningful brand experience. Let’s break this down.
Why Brand Matters
Building your brand is important. A distinctive brand has always been, and still is, an identifier. It gives people direction and helps them to make choices. Many companies know this nowadays and put a lot of effort into designing the visual appearance of their brand. That’s great and important. But it leaves a huge opportunity on the table. The opportunity to not only help people identify you, but to build a connection with you.
Creating Brand Experiences
We understand the world by experiencing it. That’s true for everything, no matter if it’s a product, a service, or an interaction with another human being, screen, or robot. So, as company owners, we need to strive to create holistic, memorable, and meaningful experiences across all touchpoints people have with us. I think a tangible way to describe what creating brand experiences means is building spaces, which create room for dialog and enable connections to form.
Build Spaces (physical & digital)
To interact with each other, we need a platform to do so. This can be a physical space, like the members’ clubs of Soho House or the iconic Apple stores where you can’t just buy their products but attend events like Today at Apple and meet like-minded people. Another very famous example is Starbucks’ coffee shops. Starbucks, from the very beginning, considered its shops “the third place between home and work” and aligned everything on creating a unique experience - with the physical space at its center. But today more than ever, spaces are also digital. Airbnb for example, is not just an App where I can book a bed for the night. It’s a space where I can discover hidden secrets, get excited to explore the world, or even find inspiration on how to decorate my own home.
Source: Apple Newsroom
Create Room for Dialog
When people come together they will inevitably start to exchange their knowledge, stories, and ideas. For this to happen, though, people need a space where dialogue can take shape. A subtrend of the health megatrends is the rise of FemTech. One reason for this is the rising awareness of the unique characteristics and needs of the female body. Another is that many FemTech companies, mostly startups, are brands that create a platform for dialogue around topics that have been tabooed in the past. The period tracking app Flo, for example, doesn’t just help women track their period. It also offers insights, consultation from health professionals, and “secret chats” where fellow app users can exchange on topics ranging from female hygiene over sexuality to pregnancy.
Another example is the German not-for-profit, responsibly-owned company called Goldeimer. They are committed to a sustainable sanitation transition and secure sanitation for all. A key pillar of their brand is building a platform for talking about… well, shit. A topic most of us probably don’t regularly discuss at the dinner table, but which has a huge impact on our health as well as our planet. Beyond providing a lot of information on their blog (German only), they also organize projects and initiatives where people come together to re-think the status quo. In their currently running pilot project “Windelwald” or “diaper forest” they’re testing ways to conveniently recycle and compost baby diapers and their, uh, contents. (If you live in Hamburg and have a diaper-wearing household member, maybe you want to consider signing up for the pilot if it’s still on?).
Reddit is (or was) one of the most famous examples of a digital space where people would come together to share their knowledge and find like- and unlike-minded individuals to exchange their thoughts and ideas with. Since the enshittification of social media platforms (read more about this here) has taken over Reddit and Twi… uh X has gone south, there’s been a huge migration to alternative Feddiverse platforms like Lemmy or Mastodon. People want spaces to exchange. They want dialogue. But they don’t want to be the product. If companies respect this and creatively think about how they can create platforms for dialogue, as Flo or Goldeimer do, they will be able to create meaningful connections with people.
Enable Connection
By building spaces that create room for dialogue, organizations enable meaningful connections. And this is what sets great brands apart from the rest. Think about how Lululemon, for example, has contributed to making a niche spiritual practice like yoga become a lifestyle movement. They made this possible, by creating spaces (their shops aren’t just beautiful stores to buy their goods, but also meeting points for yoga classes, workshops, and gatherings) where people can get in touch with the world of yoga (e.g. through their well-honed community of brand ambassadors). Through this, people use their clothing and yoga mats not only for their functional purpose but to express themselves through them - they feel connected to the brand and the way it makes them feel.
This is also what Lego does. With their product, they’ve given generations of children the space to imagine. To express their dreams and ideas and show them to the world. Initiatives like Lego ideas or the Lego Braille Bricks are all contributing to creating meaningful connections that go way beyond the core product. By the way, this also holds true for non-profit organizations. The German NABU is a prime example. They regularly organize meetings where people can come together to connect over a common goal, like building an urban farm in Cologne, Germany.
Through these shared experiences people form meaningful, long-lasting connections with a brand.
Source: LEGO News
Branding is Static. Creating Brand Experiences is a process.
We don’t live in a static world. That’s why we need to stop thinking of our company’s brand as a static, carefully polished logo, color palette, or asset, which is there to last. We need to live our brands through the experiences we create with our employees, customers, and partners – every single day. Only then we can build spaces, that create room for dialog and ultimately enable long-lasting connections.
This is also what will truly set you apart from the competition as it can’t easily be rebuilt or copied. As we all know from our personal lives, creating connections takes time, energy, and a lot of trust. In order to last, connections need to be honed and cared for, e.g. through shared experiences. So, let’s stop branding stuff. Let’s start crafting experiences. 🚀