Modern customers have very different brand
expectations to previous generations.
Exponential technological progress has radically changed the operating landscape when it comes to branding, creating new expectations from digitally native customers about what they expect from any brand.
These consumers naturally gravitate towards those brands that are specifically tailored to their own needs, interests and requirements. What they care about the most is, “what does this brand mean to me”?
This means that, for brands to flourish in the modern consumer environment, they need to be personalized, and agile enough to mold themselves around the specific needs of individual customers.
Immersive Brand
Experiences
The way that world-leading companies achieve this fit is through what are known as “immersive brand experiences.”
This term describes the way in which businesses lever a whole range of touchpoints with their customers, to influence how they perceive their brand. They are about creating brands that work for individuals, not just broad customer segments.
Some companies do this brilliantly. Take Starbucks, for instance. From entering the coffeeshop, the décor, personalized service, products and environment all reinforce a sense of what the brand stands for. Similarly, an established brand such as Harley Davidson does not just sell motorbikes, – it sells an entire experience and set of values, about power, boldness and freedom, which customers engage with and respond to.
What brands like Starbucks and Harley Davidson understand, is that modern consumers are engaging with their brands in different ways, across multiple platforms, all of the time. Engagement with their brand could be a fleeting moment, but by offering a more immersive brand experience these companies find ways to capture and retain those customers, reinforcing key brand messages throughout.
So, what are the four key steps that your business needs to take to start to create more immersive brand experiences for your customers?
Step 1:
Understanding Customer Behaviours
In the past, brands were generic, not specific. There was an imagined customer, and an imagined customer journey. Your brand was designed to speak to that imagined customer.
Modern technology has fundamentally changed all of that. It means that you do not need to imagine your customer any more. Instead, using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, you can uncover the behaviors of your customers through numerous digital touchpoints. This deeper level of understanding and patterns helps your brand connect with consumers in a way that works for them.
And the more you learn about your customer base, the more you realize it is not one single, monolithic entity. Instead, it is a collection of individuals, each with their own interests, values, history and needs.
Immersive brand experiences start with this awareness of different needs and behaviors, and build an approach which is able to have personalized brand conversations with individual customers.
Step 2:
Focus on Personalisation
Good brand experiences start with this deep awareness of individual customer behavior. They then use this understanding to create multiple pathways for customers which allow them to design specific customer journeys that work for that individual.
This means that you need to be flexible enough to develop multiple paths, to be alongside them every step of the way. You need to plan and build your brand by thinking about individual customers, and walking through your products and services in their shoes.
Remember, with immersive brand experiences customers are in control of their journey, not you. What you are in control of is how you ensure that every moment, every decision they take on that path, provides an opportunity for your company to connect with them.
When we are designing a brand experience, we help you identify these multiple opportunities and use them effectively to build strong and sustained connections with your customer base.
Step 3:
Get Integrated
For immersive brand experiences to work well, every communication channel and contact point needs to be utilized.
Central to this is integration. Think of your brand like an orchestra. Each instrument plays something slightly different, but the experience of the audience comes from hearing everything played together in harmony. That is how your brand should work. Digital, print, social media, website, premises. All of them need to be involved and working together, reinforcing the brand at every point.
Step 4:
Have a Clear Strategy
Of course, the potential risk of a personalized approach could be that you end up fragmenting your brand. After all, what is the point of even having a brand if it is different for every customer? Isn’t that essentially having thousands of separate brands?
The answer is that it should not be. Even though customers may have different individual brand experiences, there needs to be a unity to those. Imagine a big sporting event like the World Cup Final. Each person in the crowd might be watching the event from a different angle, seeing slightly different things. But they are all still watching the same game.
Think of your brand in the same way. Each person might experience it slightly differently, but that is because they are different individuals with different needs that you need to fulfil.
Achieving this balance requires a strategy, one which enables you to keep your key brand values at the heart of your offer, but then allows you to be flexible in how those values find expression with individual users. Getting that balance right, is at the heart of creating immersive, individually tailored, brand experiences for your customers.
How Spark Can Help
Spark specializes in creating immersive brand experiences that connect your business to customers. We have already created brand experiences for clients like Piatto, and can do the same for you. We help build a strategy based on your brand values, map the touchpoints that you have with your customers, and ensure that you are alongside them every step of the way. To find out more about how we can help deliver immersive brand experiences for your customers, get in touch
