Bridging brand and experience design

Bridging brand and experience design

not what they say'. We were inspired by a shift we observed in the nature of brands brought about by digital and social media.

THE EXPLOSION OF THE BRAND MODEL

In 2006 the dominant model of branding was still largely defined by mass communications and built upon an industrial era product dominant logic (PDL) model of value. In this model, brand value is entirely owned and created by the producer and transmitted to a consumer ( Figure 1).

This model made sense when the primary medium for interacting with consumers was mass media, itself an entirely unidirectional broadcast medium; yet, the limitations of mass media entirely defined branding practice. Traditional branding concepts, like simplicity of message, imagery and associations and the single-minded promise, are not necessarily the best ways to build a brand; they were simply the methods that fit the media of their time ( Figure 2).

A shift towards co-created brands

The aforementioned model had already started to show its age well before we launched but it was the advent of social media and the many-to-many interactions that social media enabled that truly put an end to the PDL model of branding. In 2004, Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch published their seminal paper that called for 'a new dominant logic for marketing', 1 a service dominant logic (SDL). In SDL, value is not transmitted but rather co-created by producer and consumer (Figure 3).

At Zeus Jones, we immediately recognised this to be true. Co-creation of value was one of many of the defining characteristics of what we called 'Modern Brands': brands built in partnership with their audiences and brought to life through interactive and experiential media, not through broadcast or mass media.

An outcome of this model was that modern brands are more complex and distributed than traditional brands. They encompass more touch points, more ideas and more stakeholders. This required the development of new branding practices and new branding concepts like brand belief and purpose. Measures like brand coherence replaced brand consistency, and modern marketers and brand managers sought to build clusters of ideas around their brands rather than a single promise (Figure 4).

The emergence of networked brands

Within the past few years, however, we have started to see even this Modern Brand/SDL model lose its lustre. The balkanisation and fragmentation of society and culture and the ability for groups to self-organise around cultural ideas that reflect their shared beliefs, biases or desires have seen many brands both benefit and suffer. It is clear that an outcome of widespread digital and social media has been the ability for activist consumers or even non-affiliated 'action groups' to dramatically impact brand value in ways a company never imagined. Kristina Heinonen and Tore Strandvik have been at the forefront of thinking about this shift. In 2010, they, along with a number of their colleagues, proposed a further evolution of the dominant logic for marketing -a customer dominant logic (CDL). 2 In their model, the centre of value creation has shifted towards customers or consumers ( Figure 5). Producers still have a critical role, but they need to account for the outsized influence and contribution of consumers and culture to a far greater extent than previously. It is clear they have landed upon an important insight. We have already witnessed a new dynamic in the cultural and political backlash to the actions of former brand darlings like Facebook, Uber, Amazon and Airbnb. In each case, brand value has been dramatically reduced through forces the brand 'owners' could not have controlled or (in some cases) foreseen. In a CDL world, no brand is immune from this kind of scenario, which means that, today, brands cannot be said to be 'managed'. In a CDL model of branding, customers determine brand value through their prior experience or usage, the context in which they hear about or interact with your company or the conversation about your company in culture. That means each and every association a brand has can affect its overall value. A company's partners, suppliers, investors, sponsors, affiliations, donations, spokespeople, employees, its actions or inaction and its customers are all contributors. We liken these next generation brands to networks or ecosystems. Within these ecosystems different activities and platforms have different roles but the value of the brand is distributed across the entire network. Once again, this has increased the complexity of branding and new principles are developing and being developed to help curate these networked brands ( Figure 6).

While brands have been moving from a single-source of value to networked value, experience design has, however, been moving in the opposite direction.

THE COLLAPSE OF CUSTOMER JOURNEYS

The classic construct or model of experience design has been the customer journey map (Figure 7). This was first proposed by researchers Susan Whittle and Morris Foster in 1989, 3 but the concept of an experience having different steps or stages is much older.

Initially these customer journey maps were linear and transactional. They contained a fixed start and end point and enabled designers to plan for very simple services and experiences.

Experience design also developed a corresponding set of practices and principles. In the early days many of these involved tight segmentation of customers, the creation of 'lanes' and a deep understanding of needs and intentions so that a service could be seen to anticipate your needs and provide a tailored, relevant solution. To create services that felt truly personal, designers relied upon personas and user stories to fit their work tightly to a clearly defined need.

Loyalty loops

As in branding, the invention of digital and social media forced the first evolution of this model. As tracking of users became more sophisticated, it was clear that a single journey was often being taken by the same individuals on multiple occasions. This led to designers thinking more about loyalty and iterative loops. Social media became a clear way for advocacy to directly lead to new user acquisition. These two developments led to the creation of journeys that were designed around loyalty loops (Figure 8).

While this did not break all of the prior experience design principles, it started to put pressure on them because an iterative journey designed to both deepen loyalty and attract new customers cannot be so certain of a predictable or stable user state of mind. Rather than designing around user personas or scenarios, many designers shifted towards simply designing around task: a universal constant that could be assumed across many user types and a way of still delivering a relevant experience without having to design multiple versions for multiple kinds of users.

The truly critical technological development for experience design, however, was the mobile phone. Starting with the first iPhone in 2007, the mobile has quickly become the dominant way people access the Internet around the world (52.4 per cent of all Internet traffic globally as of Q3 2018). 4 For experience designers, the mobile has completely disrupted linear, prescribed customer journeys. A user with an Internet-enabled smartphone can move from any point in a customer journey to another instantly. They can interact with parts of an experience and not others. They become aware of a product and buy it on the spot; they can advocate for something they have never bought or used themselves; they can interact with a physical experience and a digital experience at the same time in ways the designers of each never imagined or intended.

Nonlinear customer journeys

In order to design for these fragmented, nonlinear and customer-driven journeys, we evolved our journey mapping tool several years ago. In moving to this new model ( Figure 9) we also had to develop a new series of experience design principles that allowed for a cohesive customer experience despite the fact that every customer could take an entirely different path or set of paths through our experience. One of the primary concepts for us has been that a great experience assumes nothing about its user -even intent can vary. Rather than being tightly tailored to a one segment and one use case, we now need to design around a more universal delivery of value.

Journeys as moments

Just as branding continues to evolve, however, we are also seeing experience design continue to evolve. Technologies like augmented reality (AR), which superimpose digital experiences on top of the physical world, enable the collapsing of multiple steps in a customer journey into one ( Figure 10). For example, Ikea's AR app lets customers digitally try furniture in their homes and buy on the spot. Nike's new flagship store blends membership, retail and discovery in brand new ways, and developments like Siri and Alexa artificial intelligence (AI) assistants in your home, work and car have the potential to collapse all parts of a customer journey into a single moment.

While brands are expanding from singly owned, tightly managed ideas into networks, experiences are collapsing from broad, linear, prescribed journeys into rich, multi-functional moments; yet, while the underlying dynamics of each discipline are diverging, it remains true that brands are built through experiences and that explains much of the complexity in using experiences to bring brands to life.

THE MERGING OF BRANDING AND EXPERIENCE DESIGN

This new field, let us call it 'Brand Experience Design', borrows techniques from each of its parents but uses them in different ways and different contexts. This field is developing as we speak so it is pointless to attempt to fully define or categorise it; however, we have developed a number of different techniques that show this new field is blending old skills in new ways.

Using brand purpose to define intent

I stated earlier that a great experience makes no assumptions about its user or their intent; yet, valuable experiences clearly perform a role that is relevant. We have found that looking to the brand Figure 10 Nonlinear customer journey map. Source: Zeus Jones.

Bridging Brand and experience design

to define intent is more powerful than understanding of the user.

A strong brand purpose contains a clear intention for its customers. Nike believes that anyone who interacts with its products, services or experiences is an athlete who is looking to improve their athletic performance. This idea is not built into its experience principles; it is built into the very fundamental brand idea: 'If you have a body, you're an athlete'.* Similarly, Apple believes that anyone who interacts with its products, services and experiences is a creator. Because these brands are both strong and well defined, it can reliably be assumed these are expectations a Nike or Apple customer will have. This means that the principles of a great brand experience are defined at the brand level, not at the experience level. A strong brand, one with a clear and compelling purpose, is essential for a strong brand experience -not the other way around.

While a retail experience will have a task-oriented set of principles that drive its development, a branded retail experience should, therefore, overlay the brand intention as the larger user goal. A Nike retail experience will assume that a user is buying shoes to improve athletic performance, and an Apple retail experience will assume that its user is purchasing technology in order to create. This is an illustration of why the context inherent in 'Brands are defined by experiences' is not entirely accurate. Brands are not defined by experiences as much as experiences are defined by brands. A Microsoft retail experience will never be an Apple retail experience, despite the fact that they often, look, feel and perform very similarly.

we can probably expect that the converged discipline of brand experience design will also continue to evolve; however, branding and experience design are still considered to be crafts, not professions, by most. Disciplines where skill, technique and aesthetics take precedence over theory, analysis and critical thinking. This leads to a continued focus on the tools of the trade and a blindness to the fundamental context that underlies them. Simply adopting techniques like Marker Moments without considering their relevance or applicability within every context will be as ineffective as applying broadcast-centric branding ideas to digital or social media.

A good example of this are voice-assisted AI agents like Siri and Alexa. The branding opportunities available are quite limited at present, but this is somewhat because the semantic structure of questions and responses is limited by the underlying technology. As technology progresses and new cultural norms form around these devices, it seems quite easy to imagine that these agents will be capable of adopting different kinds of voices and accepting requests structured in a variety of different ways. In this scenario, brand experience design takes on a completely different form.

Beneath all of this is continued fluidity and evolution in the creation and exchange of value that supports the very concept of a brand. While traditional brands delivered one-dimensional, perceptual value, next generation networked brands exchange multidimensional kinds of value. Central to branding and brand experience design will be the continued study of this and the continued development in new ways to exchange and measure the value of brands.

Using marker moments

While experience design has often been driven by largely ergonomic objectives of reducing friction, enhancing efficiency and minimising interaction, brands aspire towards emotional engagement. There is a delicate balance here as no one enjoys an experience that is quite obviously an advert; yet, a purely functional experience will be invisible.

Work done by Antonio Damasio, the David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Southern California, helped us develop a bridge. In Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis, 5 'decision-making is a process that is influenced by marker signals that arise in bio-regulatory processes, including those that express themselves in emotions and feelings'. These emotional markers can be tied to contexts or situations, letting people shorthand decision making and memory of these situations later on.

Our application of this theory has been to design key parts of a brand experience around the delivery of a strong emotional association. These moments do not have be the entirely of the experience but they will still dominate the user's evaluation and memory of that experience. An important concept for us has been emotional over-delivery: what can we do to dramatically exceed emotional expectations at an emotionally critical part of an experience? Another valuable question: how can the worst part of the experience actually become the most enjoyable?

Recently, Marriot and Hilton have accomplished this with their membership apps. Both have automated the check-in process, but rather than simply eliminating it, they have turned it into an opportunity to select personal amenities for your room.

Effectively applied, Marker Moments are an incredibly powerful branding tool. A strong brand with a clear set of emotional associations can deliver a highly branded marker moment. A Nike moment can over-deliver on inspiration; an Apple moment can over-deliver on empowerment. It is interesting to note that these two brands are quite unique in their clear emotional associations. Most brands lack any ownable emotional association. This again shows why a brand experience is defined by a brand rather than the other way around.

Brand experience maps

The final technique we rely upon are brand experience maps (Figure 11). These are ways to design for more complex brand journeys, not user journeys.

A rich brand experience can deepen engagement with a brand through deepening engagement with the brand purpose. A rich Nike experience can actually help me improve my performance in a specific sport or introduce me to new sports and increase my engagement in those areas. A rich Apple experience can help me create in different ways, through music, coding, photography. In cases like these, we need a way of organising different parts of an experience, while still enabling users to take any paths they want through them; therefore, rather than designing against a series of functional goals, we use experience maps to design around aspirational brand goals.

This means a rich branded experience should be the best, most pure articulation of a brand. It is an entirely owned experience that puts forth the clearest vision of the brand that is possible. In a CDL world, it can still be reinterpreted by consumers and culture, but it exists as a comprehensive symbol of what a brand believes. Angela Ahrendts used to refer to Apple stores as the 'largest product they make'. 6 She saw them as an expression of the Apple brand that is as pure as an iPhone. Within this context, it is entirely true that brands are defined by experiences.

THE FUTURE OF BRAND EXPERIENCE DESIGN

Hopefully, you agree that branding and experience design are being driven by advances in technology and culture. Given that neither of these appear to be slowing,