Brand Experience
Brand experience involves any activity that brings a person closer to a brand, across any of its touchpoints.
What is brand experience?
Brand experience refers to any activity that influences our perception of a brand. Naturally, this encompasses every touchpoint across the consumer journey, including products and merchandise, spatial design, physical and digital activations, and customer service.
A positive brand experience can help strengthen its brand positioning and boost its perceived value, making people more likely to recall a brand and recommend it to others.
Since consumers form a holistic idea about a brand around every one of these interactions, brand experience is a particular focus for in-house teams, who manage these touchpoints day to day. Keeping them tied to a brand's visual and verbal identity is key to creating consistently meaningful impact.
What does brand experience cover?
Customer Journey
The path that people take from first discovering a brand to becoming a fan of it.
Touchpoints
Every moment along the journey where interaction occurs, from a single social post to a multi-floor space.
Environmental Branding
A physical space built in a brand's own image, so people can immerse themselves in it.
Brand Signage
The physical or digital displays that make a brand's presence known, from retail fascias to wayfinding.
Retail Brand Experience
Any on-shelf or in-store activity designed to amplify a brand's presence where it's sold.
Brand Merch
Any products that carry a brand's identity into everyday use, from apparel to collectibles.
Brand Campaign
A coordinated run of communications built around a single idea, designed to get one message noticed.
Employee Experience
The way a brand shows up to the people who work for it, and anyone who might in future.
Sustainability Branding
Building sustainability into a brand's idea and experience, so its commitment is felt in everything a consumer sees.
How brand experience works in practice: Chester Zoo
A Zoo that strips away any negative connotations of the word, Chester Zoo funnels all their funds back into global conservation, breeding programs and research. Most people weren't aware of this fact, and it was time to share with the world.
So we got to work repositioning their brand with equal weight on the experience within the Zoo gates, as their greater purpose to serve nature as a whole. Enter adventure…
Chester Zoo
If the core idea behind Chester Zoo's brand identity was 'Force for Nature', every part of their brand experience puts that claim on display.
Above the gates, there's a custom logo celebrating its history of supporting critically endangered Eastern Black Rhinos. Once they're inside, visitors are treated to vibrant wayfinding that tells the story behind their conservation efforts. At the gift shop? Plenty of merchandise that turns something as simple as a stationery or apparel into a moment of advocacy for our declining wildlife population.
The feeling of action continues through the brand's digital touchpoints too, from a mammoth website full of immersive video content through to a ticketing page that makes planning your own trip seamless.
Outcome: The zoo became the UK's most-visited paid attraction outside London.
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