To create more relevant and exciting experiences, you should take a step back and analyze the context of your brand and the specific associated experiences that can be created within.
Understanding your stakeholders, considering the mechanics of delivery, fine-tuning your overall perspective, and adopting a data-driven approach are the four most important elements that shape brand experiences.
Of course, hiring a good PR portrait photographer is recommended if you ever want to use pictures as part of the process of creating outstanding brand experiences.
1. Understand your stakeholders
Profile them
Empathy is highly insightful and offers a solid foundation for creating relevant and exciting brand experiences.
In this case, profiling your key stakeholders can help you keep them center stage and offer a great platform for creating the desired brand experience.
Help them get ‘jobs done.’
The overall ‘jobs to be done’ approach focuses your mind on creating brand experiences that can help your stakeholders achieve their targets or even solve specific issues.
A remarkable example would be the launch of Pfizer’s rheumatoid arthritis pill known as Xeljanz. It focused on helping the users get a particular job done:
Enjoying moments that individuals without chronic pain never thought about.
These experiences include yoga, swimming, or even standing on tiptoes to give your partner a warm hug.
These scenarios were incorporated into the pill’s launch campaign and increased brand awareness by 24% and brand recall by 25%. Experts estimate that prescription volume increased by 95% too.
Encourage stakeholder engagement
Gone are the days of focusing on your customers and talking to them. Relevant and popular brands engage their stakeholders through the outstanding experiences they create.
Manage your stakeholder’s expectations
One of the common things about most brands is that they promise their audience the universe and deliver far less. If that’s what you do, you have been creating the perfect roadmap to the failure of your company.
It is recommended to familiarise yourself with your stakeholders, not just your clients.
Once you understand who your stakeholders are, where they are or go, what they expect from you, how you can successfully engage with them, and what exactly you can offer them, you will be in a perfect position to create experiences that are exciting and relevant to them.
2. Fine-tune your perspective
Embrace transparency
Customers and other stakeholders, particularly the millennial generation, are increasingly getting drawn to brands based on exactly who they are, the specific purpose they stand for, and the primary reason they exist.
This trend appears to be set to intensify with the advent of Generation Z, a bunch of young people who expect every brand to conduct their specific affairs more openly and transparently.
You must have read about Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles and how they show the textile mills and different factories it has been working with around the world.
Unilever also invites kids to farms to learn about the exact things that go into the famous Hellman’s mayonnaise. Standing up to this level of stakeholder scrutiny is key.
Adopt a holistic mind-set
Creating outstanding brand experiences is everyone’s job. Most of the most successful brands opt for a cross-functional approach to creating brand experiences.
It is unlikely that support, operations, human resources, client services, and facilities think that creating brand experiences is part of their job.
Well, nothing is further from reality and so, when creating brand experiences, get ready to cast your net wide.
3. Consider the mechanics of delivery
History has demonstrated that the specific decisions that humans make are majorly influenced by the particular emotions they feel that are probably associated with a particular memory.
Therefore, if your brand doesn’t carry emotions, then, the chances are that it is not playing the right tune to the human brain it targets.
Research has revealed the positive influence emotional instead of rational content has on a specific brand’s favourability.
4. Adopt a data-driven approach
It is wise to focus on acquiring robust qualitative and quantitative insights.
Note that great insights, not anecdotes, must drive the process of creating brand experiences and all the decisions that you make.
This will ensure that you are making the right choices for the success of your brand.
You should also measure your performance holistically. Note that financial metrics tend to be retrospective and are associated with short-term horizons.
These metrics also account for only a small part of the overall brand experience measurement puzzle.
Therefore, financial metrics shouldn’t be your only area of focus.
It is recommended to adopt a more holistic approach when it comes to measuring your brand experiences that span employees, financial metrics, and the brand.
Wrapping up
Before you start creating your brand experiences, it is recommended to consider the specific context of your brand and then the related experiences that will be built into it.
This will help you create more exciting and relevant brand experiences.