Brand experience is a term that I only recently learned, but whose concept is quite old. Brand experience, for anyone who doesn’t know, is the idea that every way in which a consumer interacts with a brand influences the way they feel about that brand. It dates back to before global brands and mass media. If a shop owner lived in a town that was large enough to have more than one store that provided similar products, and therefore had to compete for customers, they would likely have given consideration to brand experience. Selection, quality of service, store layout, décor, and location would create differentiation from competitors that could potentially lead to more repeat customers. Similarly, placing listings in local newspapers could advertise the advantages of one shop over another. As the world changed, and the number of ways in which the consumer and the brand interact grew, these techniques evolved to match. To show how this works in a modern setting, let’s look at a couple of brands that do it well.
A great example of a brand that has created a positive brand experience is Nike. Nike has a strong track record of having incredible advertising. Weiden and Kennedy consistently produce campaigns for them that convey a message of striving to better oneself through exercise and sport. First, and most famously, was “Just Do It.” More recently there was “Find Your Greatness.” There are other ways that this message is reinforced, beyond traditional advertising. Nike+ and the FuelBand both empower people to achieve training goals. Nike sponsors athletes, such as a number of high profile professional basketball players, showing their dedication to those who accomplish their goals. Nike also does events, like the Nike Women’s Marathon. Not to mention, there are Nike retail outlets sprinkled around the country that get top marks for stylish interiors and, more importantly, helpful staff who get you in the right gear for your sport or training of choice. All of these different pieces come together and create an image of an athletics brand for those who strive for, and achieve, greatness.
Another solid example of a positive brand experience is Virgin America Airlines. When I flew Virgin America to Vegas for a wedding, a month or so ago, I was blown away by my experience. Virgin’s whole image is about being a fun way to travel. This feeling starts with their advertising. In order to show off the many entertainment features their planes have, they show the entertainments coming to life for the passengers. For example, one sequence shows a crowd enjoying a baseball game, but all of the seats are airplane seats and flight attendants are serving the crowd while they watch. When you get to the ticketing area, they have a different vibe from other airlines, with purple lighting instead of the standard white florescent. At least in SFO, you also get a ticket that doesn’t look like a plane ticket, but more like a ticket to a music show or movie screening. Once you board the plane, the purple tinted lighting continues, and their safety video injects a sense of fun into the proceedings with a music video for a “pop” song written about the plane’s emergency procedures, complete with dancers and artistically abstract representations of the plane’s many features, all directed by John M. Chu, the director of Step-Up 2: The Streets. Once the plane is ready for take off, the passengers are treated to live broadcast television, on-demand television and movies, on-demand music, wifi, and a small meal. All of this is easily accessed from the individual screen in front of each seat, with an interface that mirrors an online marketplace like Amazon or iTunes. The craziest part? It’s all free. On a different flight to upstate New York during the summer, this time on United, they offered only some of these features and charged for every single one. Virgin is said to be cultivating a “nightclub in the sky” feeling, which fits with the funky colors, the safety video, and some of the general vibe. Although I can see the appeal for some, those things aren’t necessarily my cup of tea. That being said, the veritable boatload of complimentary services is what made me a convert. Not only is there power in giving a brand a unified vision, the hip and fun way to travel, but in doing so you can also end up with features that everyone can appreciate.
With Nike and Virgin we have examples of how the brand experience can come together as a cohesive execution. Each aspect of how the brand presents itself compliments every other aspect and creates an image of a brand’s identity and value. This isn’t the only way to think about the brand experience. In fact, I think where brand experience gets really interesting is when you think about it as a complex system into which you invest a marketing budget. Let’s imagine all of the different elements that go into a brand experience as buckets, and the marketing budget is water you pour into those buckets. How one chooses to pour that water changes how much emphasis the marketing strategy puts on each facet of the consumer facing image. When we stretch this idea to its limits, we find some interesting ideas in the outliers. For example, what would a brand experience strategy look like that put all of its money into the Advertising Message bucket and none in any of the others?
There are actually big brands that take this approach. GEICO, for example, appears to have this strategy. They spend a king’s ransom on advertising, with seemingly very little spent on actual customer experience. It is very clear that the marketing team at GEICO has determined that being top of mind for people shopping automotive insurance is the most important thing to them as a brand. And it works. Their ads are clever and memorable, albeit annoyingly overplayed, and GEICO succeeds at achieving high unaided recall numbers in its category.
What about the other buckets? What if all of the money was poured into big attention getting events and sponsorships? Again, there are well known brands that take this approach. While Red Bull broke onto the scene with its animated “Gives You Wings” TV spots, these days their brand recognition comes from the crazy events they sponsor. Red Bull Stratos, Red Bull Flugtag, Red Bull Air Race World Championships, just to name a few. These have been so successful at generating media buzz (the Red Bull Stratos live feed was viewed by 8 million people) that it is no surprise that Red Bull spends so little on traditional advertising these days.
And what if all of the money was put into the customer experience? Two brands that took that approach, one national and the other more local to California, are Starbucks and In-n-Out. Both Starbucks and In-n-Out focus their marketing money on the store experience, with the idea that treating the customer to a great time in-store will lead to really positive word of mouth for their brand. Both provide higher wages and benefits than their category competitors, which makes their employees happier and more likely to treat customers with respect. They both also developed a universal look and feel to each of their stores that is clean and inviting. Finally, they make sure that they have quality product that is worthy of the setting where it is served.
This kind of thinking can even extend to atypical forms of customer engagement. Makers of competitive video games have started to see the value of spending their marketing dollars not on big, lavish ad campaigns but on supporting the competition that has built up organically around their games. Most narrative driven games are like movies, they want large launches with loads of hype, and expect to make most of their money off of one-time purchases of the game, preferably in the first weekend. With player vs. player competitive titles, many companies have shifted towards seeking long term, consistent revenue through continued player engagement. This means that it behooves the publisher to not only look for ways to add new players, but also ways to keep the current player base excited so that they will keep playing and keep paying, whether as a monthly fee or for purely optional in-game content, like aesthetic changes to one or more characters.
For example, DOTA 2 publisher Valve sponsors a massive annual tournament, called The International, that brings in the best DOTA teams from around the world to compete over a multi-million dollar prize purse. Sometimes referred to as the Super Bowl of eSports, due to its ability to attract the interest of fans and non-fans alike, it achieved over a million concurrent viewers from all around the world. The best part? Valve spent very little of their own money to make it happen. They seeded the initial prize pool and covered the venue and production costs for the event. The rest was paid for by current players of DOTA 2 purchasing a special in-game item, called the Compendium, that offered them exclusive game content and other one-of-a-kind features. Since DOTA 2 is a free-to-play game, this integrated perfectly with the expectations of the fans and kept engagement with the title very high, both through the excitement of the tournament and the ability to feel a part of it through the Compendium. League of Legends publisher, Riot Games, has their own tournament structure as well. Riot actually pays to support a competitive league, both in North America and Europe, that broadcasts from Thursday to Sunday, with four games a day. These broadcasts typically reach more than a 100,000 viewers every week on Twitch.tv alone. Their distribution partners over seas, Garena and TenCent, host similar leagues for South East Asia and China respectively, and the Korean TV Station OGN broadcasts a regular tournament series for South Korean League of Legends teams. These all come together in Riot’s own annual tournament for the best teams from around the world, who compete over a similarly large multi-million dollar prize pool. Riot has admitted to “losing money” on the League of Legends competitive ecosystem they have built, but they earn so much player engagement that the move probably more than pays for itself in revenue from players who might have moved on to another game if they weren’t as heavily invested in the competitive scene.
One thing you might have noticed here is that a lot of these approaches don’t require any advertising to be successful. And even if a company doesn’t go to the extreme of pouring their water only into one bucket, there are a lot of different ways the water can be poured where very little water gets poured into the advertising bucket. For an advertising firm, this can be quite scary. Does this mean that a smart company can forgo advertising entirely? Does this mean that design firms like IDEO will supplant advertising firms as places where big brands look to spend their marketing dollars? These are valid concerns, but they should lead to adaptive change rather than panic. Ad agencies still provide a lot of valuable skills to any relationship with a major brand.
They bring an outside perspective. A company like Starbucks may develop its strategy for spending on the store experience internally, and that means that they don’t need to hire an agency or consultancy to help them make that a reality. But often even the best marketers get deeply invested in their brand and begin to lose perspective about what they are trying to do. I remember hearing once that during a client pitch, an agency was told by the marketing department at a candy company that they were really looking to stress improvements to their line of chocolate covered wafers: they had successfully added 1mm of chocolate to the thickness of the chocolate coating without having to change the packaging. Of course, the agency was able to remind them that nobody outside of the candy company cares about that little amount of chocolate being added. What people care about is the deliciously sinful feeling of chocolate dissolving on your tongue while your teeth bite into the crispy wafer. This is one thing an agency can offer, helping marketing departments see the forest for the trees.
Yes, this is something that a design firm or a consultancy would bring to the table as well, but it’s worth remembering that ad people come from a very different place than other consultants. Everyone brings their own particular bias when it comes to solving a problem. A consultant firm like Bane & Company will always think about things from the perspective of a business solution. They gravitate toward answers that address structural problems within the organization of the company and concentrate on strategic directions that focus on product development and R&D. This makes sense, as they position themselves as management consultants and report to the very top brass of the company. A design firm like IDEO comes from a different set of perspectives. Although they often branch into other areas, their core competencies are around creating physical things. Whether that is product design, architectural design, or even UX design, they think about how companies can solve their problems by changing the way physical things function. Is the layout of an office conducive to the kinds of collaboration the company values? Is the effectiveness of a new product hindered by an unintuitive user experience? These are the areas where design firms excel.
Finally, advertising firms come from a communications background that gives them an entirely different perspective: how everything a company does looks to the consumer. What does the messaging of the company say about the values of the brand? How is this reflected in social media, traditional advertising, digital advertising, and sponsored events? Ad agencies have been thinking about this for a long time because it’s a chief aspect of the work they have traditionally done. Thanks to the tradition of art and copy, advertising firms think about solving problems through visual storytelling and the written word, and thanks to account planning, advertising firms think about the consumer as part of the equation as well. What do consumers want from a brand these days? How can that brand image best be communicated? With this specialization comes an abundance of creative capital too. While I don’t doubt that the people who work in the marketing department of a major company can make solid choices about the design of their branding, ad agencies live and die on creativity, so it’s a good bet that they are likely to produce superior work. Isn’t that why companies hired ad agencies in the past, instead of just doing it internally? Take a store like Jamba Juice. Whether it’s the graphical layouts on branded cups or the cute names of specialty drinks, there are tons of subtle ways in which art and copy affect an in-store brand experience. And at a sponsored event, who better than these creative advertisers to develop the images that decorate the event or the text that gets people excited to watch and/or participate.
Jack Morton is an example of how this all can come together in the contemporary marketplace. They started out doing experiential marketing, which mostly involved event production. They were amongst the first to turn conventions into something that would attract and entertain people. Presumably, we have this move to thank for the likes of E3 and Comic-Con today. In recent years, they have added capabilities in traditional advertising, digital, and broadcast design, amongst others, as they make the transition to being a brand experience agency. How do they deal with consultancies and design firms? Well, they peacefully coexist. In fact, they have partnered with IDEO in the past on certain projects and don’t see their two offerings as being competitive at all.