How does brand experience impact the bottom line?

In our digital world, achieving effective brand management is like hitting a moving target. With internet reviews, smartphones, and the use of social media, word of mouth has become globalized, instantaneous, and loud. Delight or disappoint customers, and the world knows about it immediately.

Capturing attention and converting it to customer loyalty in this environment requires reimagining the brand experience. How can you achieve ideal results? Consider adding the following to your marketing mix:

1. Use experiential marketing to build brand awareness and make lasting connections
2. Collect vital data, which you can use to improve your marketing strategy
3. Marry brand experiences with sensory stimuli to amplify your efforts

What is customer experience in 2024: Definition, strategy, examples

Everything you need to know about customer experience, including: CX meaning, tools, strategies, measurements, and real life examples.

Build a more profitable brand experience

Experience is now the marketing currency of the global economy. Businesses that deliver an exceptional experience are richly rewarded, and those that don’t are swiftly punished.

It’s easier than ever for customers and employees to evaluate which companies provide positive experiences and which ones don’t. With switching costs at an all-time low, customers will quickly move on if they’re dissatisfied with any aspect of their experience with your brand.

To thrive in this market reality, your organization must continuously listen to the beliefs, emotions, and intentions of your customers, employees, suppliers, partners, and all other stakeholders.

You can accomplish this by using available tools to collect customer feedback so you know what customers want, why they want it, and what you can do to make them happy. You can then deploy marketing strategies to achieve your objectives.

Brand awareness: Make it memorable – in a good way 

How do you reach target audiences that are being bombarded by marketing content and have developed “banner blindness” to filter out most promotional material? Experiential marketing.

Experiential marketing is all about creating immersive experiences that allow people to interact with your brand in ways that are memorable and will inspire them to share with their friends both online and off. If you spend a little time in your favorite search engine, you’ll find plenty of sources of inspiration.

For example, think of the Red Bull marketing campaign featuring Felix Baumgartner, a skydiver from Austria who partnered with Red Bull to set the world record for the highest skydive. This one-of-a-kind idea reached audiences far beyond its existing customer base and created a lasting impression about the Red Bull brand.

You don’t have to go to this extreme to create a memorable experience. But you do have to avoid flat, one-sided communication, and instead provide opportunities for people to connect with your brand’s narrative. Gamification, collaborative workshops, virtual reality sessions, live quizzes, active participation, or co-creative environments all provide opportunities for engagement

Data insights pave the way

Achieving brand awareness by itself is a remarkable accomplishment, but your business moves into high gear when you create awareness of brand benefits, not just the brand alone.

Building benefit awareness is how leaders turn brands into obsessions. So while it’s important to measure brand awareness, it’s even more useful to track how many customers are aware of your brand benefits.

By collecting experience data at every meaningful touchpoint, you can analyze and understand customer experience gaps. This gap is the space between how you think customers feel about you and how they actually feel. The experience gap can lead to failed product launches, delayed inventory shipments, high customer churn, and employee attrition.

Correlating experience data to operational data tells you why things happened and so you can identify improvements that will have the most significant impact on your business. With this insight, you can then determine what to do to create customer experiences with the brand that improves perception and positive attributions.

Customer data management strategy: 7 keys to growth, CX, loyalty

Brands need to adopt these 7 key principles around customer data management to help define their overall data strategy and goals.

Brand experience: Closing the gap

The ultimate in experiential marketing are campaigns that deliver imaginative sensory experiences that incorporate two or more senses – sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Think of the smell of a new car. The sound of the horn. The feel of the seats. Determining which sensory signals create a compelling brand experience doesn’t happen by chance.

To understand which combination creates the most memorable user experience requires accurate measurement of responses to see which tap into what you would like to accomplish – which is to have a positive impact on sales and profits and achieve fiscal impact on your bottom line.

When planning any campaign to deliver a positive brand experience, success depends on knowing your target audience – and knowing it well. Then the challenge is to work to continuously improve upon the user experience when customers interact with your brand so they’ll share their positive experiences and become your brand ambassadors.

Just remember, there are no siloed experiences. No amount of excellence in marketing execution can make up for poor experiences across the four core areas of business: customers, employees, product, and brand. But if you close those gaps – you can build lasting relationships to impact your bottom line.