Brand Experience 

Brand experience covers an umbrella of techniques that go way beyond surface-level marketing campaigns. That’s because brand experience takes every opportunity to create memorable experiences which shape how people think, feel and respond to your brand.

Spanning impactful interactions such as digital storytelling, experiential events, in-store experiences and virtual reality installations, these meaningful interactions are designed to improve brand awareness, create a positive sentiment and strengthen customer loyalty.

As highly customised and curated experiences, brand experience is limitless in terms of the creativity that can be explored and implemented on behalf of your brand. Every brand experience is unique not only to your brand, but also to your target customer, industry and overall aims that need to be met.

Gustaf is a leading brand experience agency based in Manchester working across the UK and beyond.

For any brand wanting to reach its audience in the most captivating and innovative ways, here is an overview of what brand experience can achieve.

What Is Brand Experience? 

Brand experience considers all of the ways your customers may interact with your brand either in person or through digital means. The aim is to curate the entire experience to create a positive sentiment about your products and services. 

Going beyond basic advertising, brand experience builds meaningful connections that are based on the emotional, sensory or cognitive impressions which are associated with your brand.

In practice, this could mean anything from attending an event with virtual reality (VR) technology to demonstrate your products. Or, it could mean creating airport retail installations to interact with customers as they shop. Since there’s no end of formats or locations where brand experience can happen, it is a technique that’s totally flexible to your brand, industry, target customer and commercial aims.

So whether your brand is a global household name or an up and coming business wanting to quickly disrupt the market and build brand awareness, brand experience can be tailored to work for you.

The creative brief for brand experience will explore all possible customer touchpoints or opportunities for customer interaction. From there, brand experience is about shaping the customer journey to build new relationships while nurturing existing ones. 

Brand Experience Techniques 

  • Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)

  • Branded content

  • Brand storytelling

  • Digital engagement

  • Emotional branding 

  • Experiential events

  • Experiential marketing campaigns

  • In-store experiences

  • Interactive digital experiences

  • Multi-sensory branding

  • Partnerships and collaborations 

What Is A Brand Experience Agency? 

A brand experience agency (aka Gustaf!) is a team of people who in short, make brand experiences happen. This starts with creating a brand experience strategy to identify the objectives of the campaign. 

Based on the target audience and commercial objectives (i.e. increasing brand awareness or improving customer sentiment), the most appropriate techniques can then be decided upon. These could include attending an event or creating a unique pop-up in a city centre location among endless other ideas.

Brand experience management involves overseeing every aspect of the process to deliver the creatives while working in tandem with the client, along with all those involved in bringing the brand experience to life.

Working with an agency means you’ll not only benefit from a broad range of creative specialisms to create your brand experience, but everything from the implementation of the campaigns to the performance analysis can be overseen by us. 

What Makes A Good Brand Experience?

There’s definitely lots of adjectives and superlatives we could throw around here! 

But based on our own experience as customers, a winning success formula is when a campaign makes a lasting impact on us. It’s heard above the noise, and it causes you to think deeply about what you’ve seen, heard, felt and well, experienced! 

Breaking this down into more tangible terms, a brand experience can do everything from introduce new products to change brand perceptions. So when any essential but difficult to achieve objective has been accomplished, these are all signs that your brand experience has created positive sentiment surrounding your brand, products or services. 

Why Is Brand Experience Important? 

What we know about brand experience is that it's aimed at curating user experience, with a view to creating positive associations about your company. But why does this matter?

Engages New Customers 

Anything brand experience related is designed to grab the maximum amount of attention. All of which can help your brand attract new customers if your brand isn’t a well known name. 

Likewise, if your industry is a crowded market, brand experience creates something unique to differentiate your brand in all the right ways. 

Since brand experience can involve anything from standalone digital pop-ups through to events -  there are endless ways to tap into your audience. Specifically, you can create installations anywhere that’s relevant to your industry or target market.



Re-Engages Existing Customers

With so much choice over practically everything these days, your brand could be forgettable. Or, maybe your customers are at risk of churn and you’ve started to notice numbers drop off.

There’s a common statistic about it costing 3X more to attract new customers than retain your existing ones. Well, brand experience is one of the many ways to ensure you keep your customers loyal and engaged with your brand.

Not only can brand experience get your name out there, but it can also give you the chance to interact with your customers in new ways. All of which taps into customer satisfaction just as it does customer loyalty.


Generates Positive Sentiment 

Any brand can put a post out on social media or even send an old school newsletter. But as we’ve established, brand experience is about leaving the basics behind to create show-stopping interactions and experiences.

Like all investments into your marketing, brand experience isn’t just for fun - it has an important job to do! Improving the sentiment around your brand name, products or services is high on the list. These experiences can reshape how people view your brand, and improve any negative associations or misperceptions.

All of which puts you in the driving seat to building a stronger and better brand overall. In fact, if you’ve struggled to improve brand sentiment up to now, brand experience could just be the disruptive technique you’ve been in search of all along.


Stands Out Against Competitors

Without realising it, brands can end up becoming carbon copies of each other. Even if the reality isn’t true, this is how your company could appear in the eyes of your customers.

Take any trade show or event as an example. There are huge numbers of businesses that attend, but often they can all blur into one without any distinction from each other.

It’s a fair assessment that brand experience couldn’t be any further from blending in. Every experience we create is totally unique to each brand, customer demographic and overall campaign objectives.

Moving away from cookie-cutter marketing techniques with brand experience is how to create lasting impressions with your audience that results in sales.

 

Strengthens Other Marketing Efforts

Brand experience might be a separate entity from your website, social media or video marketing efforts. However, these experiences are actually designed to work in tandem with your existing marketing to create a stronger offering overall.

In addition, brand experience can be used to promote your other marketing channels including through QR codes or even physical branding assets. 


Can Be Used To Meet A Variety Of Commercial Objectives

 When you work with us here at Gustaf, you can tell us exactly what you’d like to achieve within your brand experience.

To get your thinking caps on, some ideas of commercial objectives can include:

  • Boost customer lifetime value

  • Build emotional awareness

  • Change brand sentiment or associations

  • Customer engagement

  • Differentiate from competitors

  • Encourage repeat business

  • Enhance brand image or reputation

  • Improve accessibility

  • Increase brand awareness

  • Reduce customer churn

Have any others to add to this list? This is your brand experience, meaning nothing is off limits! 

How To Measure Brand Experience 

Some obvious methods include monitoring sales or even brand mentions online following your brand experience event or installation.

However, other techniques can include brand perception surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, net promoter score (NPS) surveys, website analytics tracking, competitor benchmarking, customer churn rate and retention monitoring or mystery shopping.

As a brand experience agency, our team can help identify some of the top metrics to help you understand your impact.


Brand Experience FAQs

Still have more questions about all things brand experience?

We’ve answered some of the most common queries below. But for anything else, feel free to drop us a line or give us a call.

You can also see our work in action by following us on Instagram or LinkedIn.


How To Improve Customer Satisfaction

What we know about customer satisfaction is that it measures how happy your customers are with your products and services along with their experience with your brand as a whole. Gaging how satisfied your customers are can involve anything from NPS (net promoter score) surveys along with other forms of ratings or interactions.

From there, improving customer satisfaction is about listening to this feedback and directly improving any pain points within the customer journey. In addition, brand experience can allow for direct interactions to take place with your customers which can also strengthen customer relations and loyalty.

If improving customer satisfaction is a key aim of wanting to do brand experience, then we can definitely explore this within the concepts that we create for you.



What Is Brand Experience Management?

Brand experience management allows your brand to be viewed through a fresh pair of creative and strategic eyes.

Known as BEM for short, brand experience management strategically manages all touchpoints and interactions that a customer has with a brand. These experiences are shaped to align with the brand’s core values, mission and overall brand identity. All with the aim of creating a positive sentiment about that brand to strengthen customer relationships to boost engagement and profitability.



What Is Brand Experience Marketing

Brand experience in marketing considers how all marketing channels (i.e. OOH and digital) can be used to improve brand sentiment, brand loyalty, brand advocacy and the overall customer experience.

 

What Are Some Examples Of Unavoidable Customer Churn?

The top avoidable churn risk factors to look out for include not valuing customer feedback, poor customer service, a complicated product or interface, bad onboarding, lack of customisation, security concerns or a lack of features. 

We know that brand experience can be used to prevent customer churn, since these vital interactions with new and existing customers can tell you so much about how your brand is perceived, while identifying any areas for improvement. 

How Do You Create Brand Advocacy?

Brand advocacy is when people love your brand that much, they take every opportunity to support it and recommend it to others. As a result, brand advocacy can be instrumental in growing your business while retaining existing customers.

As for how to go about brand advocacy, excellent products and customer service are essential to create a positive sentiment. In addition, brand experience can allow you to reach new users while reshaping your brand image to improve previous perceptions of your company.

If brand advocacy is important, then we can factor this in within your brand experience format, messaging and the overall features that people will interact with.

 

Gustaf Creative - Brand Experience Agency Manchester 

Are you looking to improve customer loyalty, change perceptions about your brand or simply grow your business? Whatever objectives you are looking to achieve, brand experience can be tailored to any commercial aims or target audience.

Based in Manchester, Gustaf can create brand experiences for your company anywhere in the UK or beyond.

If we’ve never met, all you need to do is tell us about your company along with what you’d like to achieve through brand experience.


You can do that by filling out our contact form, or giving us a call today on 0161 399 0579. 

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