Designing meaningful brand experiences

Brand researchers in the Journal of Marketing define brand experience as “sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioural responses evoked by brand‑related stimuli that are part of a brand’s design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments.”

All of the individual exposures or touchpoints taken together make up the experience. So, in other words brand experience is literally everything you have seen, heard, felt or even smelled or tasted about a brand. A great brand experience needs to be designed with a deep and empathetic understanding of the audience.

The nature of event audiences is changing. Event audiences are no longer happy to be one of the crowd. They will insist that events and brand experiences recognise them and know what they value. The days of thinking of event goers as a passive audience to be presented to are gone. Today’s event audiences are digitally enabled, more demanding, more impatient and have high expectations that events will be more engaging, personalised and participatory. Today, the most successful event experiences are based on significant strategic knowledge of the target audience. This insight is applied to creatively design an experience that is specifically intended to actively engage the audience.

Changing audiences ultimately mean that event formats must evolve. Relying on the traditional approaches and expertise that the events industry has been using for years to design event experiences will not be sufficient to create the next generation of events. Continuing to design events in a traditional, logistics‑led way limits our potential to create engaging experiences that connect attendees in much more meaningful, memorable and shareable ways.

We will also continue to see breakthroughs in new experience technologies, apps, social media, virtual, AI, VR, drones, interactive video, projection mapping, holograms and more. What we now need to think about is how we apply this dizzying array of technology in the best and most meaningful ways to enhance and extend the experience?

Over the next few years expect to see an increasing amount of corporate marketing budget moving to experiences as marketers come to recognize the value of experience as a powerful approach to building and sustaining strong customer relationships and creating opportunities for brand innovation and growth.

The most successful brand experiences will be based on significant strategic knowledge of the brand and its target audience. This insight will be applied to creatively design an experience that is specifically intended to achieve the brand’s objectives. Future experience marketing strategies will need to consider all of the relevant touch points, both live and online for the client to enjoy success and this will require an increasingly diverse range of skills.

Kim Myhre

CEO and Founder of Experience Designed