#FutureofBrands: Experiencing brand, shift your focus

In a world with a short attention span, marketers, brands and businesses are constantly looking for new ways to engage with the audiences most important to them. Focusing on audiences’ overall experience with a brand, beyond the logo and the product, is a strong way to retain attention.

What do we mean by brand experience?

It’s a culmination of the feelings and responses elicited by the interactions and touch points people have with a brand, including the brand’s products, services, staff and communications, while factoring in the context and environment those interactions take place.

The brand is experienced by all stakeholders, including current and prospective customers, staff, investors and the general market place. These experiences occur in different contexts, at different times and they mean different things to different people.

Taking a strategic approach to shaping a holistic experiential brand means focusing on engagement and relationships. Having the same experience across all channels of communication and in different contexts will result in greater clarity and brand impression.

When people experience the same brand across all platforms, whether it is digital, in conversation or in person, experiential branding can create a stronger impression by engaging the sensations, feelings and behavioural responses. The requisite of the sensory engagement is a purposeful, well-designed brand that is not contingent on the marketing deliverables, but rather, consumer engagement.

How can you shift your focus?

When it comes to working with partners and affiliates, as well as the companies, not-for-profits or teams in your sponsorship portfolio, it’s important that each plays a role in your overall brand story. Finding to ways to directly link your or their involvement in an initiative or event provides better context for your chosen audiences.

If you’re working with people and businesses who have sponsored you or your event, look for ways to add more value to your sponsors. In what ways can you provide meaningful interactions or engagement to assist them to meet their objectives? Do you honestly even understand those objectives or are you assuming them?

The days of slapping a logo on a program and up on a PowerPoint slide should be long gone, but they aren’t. Shouldn’t they be? Whether it’s distributing branded merchandise to audiences, or providing networking and engagement interaction opportunities, consider the opportunities you have at hand and cultivate them.

Create experiences which unexpectedly delight your audiences and the benefits you will realise in your engagements will increase.

Brands of the future will focus on experience.