Brand. All the Time. Everywhere.
Image by Chris Haslup
Branding
12.16.2008
So, your work is done. Right?
Wrong.
Good start, but you’ve only scratched the surface. Your smart positioning and striking new identity will only get you so far. Now, the real challenge: delivering on your brand experience.
Experience can make or break your brand. Say you’ve premised your entire brand on exceptional service (á la Nordstrom), but your front-line employees don’t deliver. At all. What stays with your audience is not that winning tagline about service, but the abrasive rep that rubbed them the wrong way. And at that point, no amount of appealing logos or clever messages can salvage your brand.
Retailers are especially conscious of the brand experience. In fact, brand trends in the retail business have inspired a whole cottage industry: perfumers develop special scents for specialty shops and of-the-moment DJ’s craft exclusive brand-inspired soundtracks for store stereos. But before you write this off as a trend for retailers only, think again. While you might not need to rush out for that perfect fragrance for your office headquarters, the lesson is: take a more holistic look at your brand experience.
Getting your brand experience right requires a top-to-bottom sweep of your touch points. So, do yourself a favor. Get your team in a room and start mapping out all the possible ways your audience might interact with your brand. In other words, audit your brand experience.
As a warm-up, start with the obvious: your materials, your website, your ads. But then get into the not-so-obvious: how your staff interacts with your audiences, the atmosphere in your office, how your staff answers the phone, whether your processes reinforce your brand — or just get the job done, the music playing when a caller goes on hold or how you sign off on e-mails. Just to name a few.
Get beyond the big picture and think through all those subtle details that make up the experience. Then, make some changes, start managing the experience and watch your brand take off.
