Designing the Brand Experience: From First Exposure To Advocate To Relationship

Credit: Ken Yeung, VentureBeat

I’d like to share a cool experience with you…

I was recently traveling from Denver to Florida. During my layover, I noticed a reference to “X: The Experience When Business Meets Design” pop up.

I clicked through and listened to a brilliant conversation between Alan Hart and Nick Horan, Global Brand Experience Lead for Vanish at Reckitt.

I listened, and found myself nodding along, with a lovely sense of familiarity, on his approach to total brand, product, customer, and user experience design. Especially in an omni-channel world, experience design and innovation is what brands must embrace to compete for attention and loyalty.

At the end of the conversation, he references X as a source of inspiration for his this thinking about experience design. It also inspired the agency’s overall design philosophy.

The book, regardless of date, is still well ahead of where brands and marketers need to be.

We recently went into reprint, and I’d love for you to experience, X. The book design itself, is an example of experience design. It’s meta, but part of the story.

I reached out to Nick to thank him for the reference. It’s leaders like him who can transform the sum of BX (brand) through experience design, UX, CX, SX (service).

His reply…

“Thank you so much for reaching out. X was fundamental to building my approach to brand building at Reckitt and has been adopted by the organisation to guide our creative process. Thank you for writing it and sharing it with the world.”

To quote the wonderful Maya Angelou…

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

That’s what experience actually means. It doesn’t mean touch point or conversion or personalization or loyalty program or omnichannel. Experience is a feeling in each moment. That’s what you’re designing for…a feeling. And that must be weaved into every touch point. It must inform your entire design, brand, marketing, service, product, commerce, loyalty, CX and UX strategy. It all starts with designing the experience, which then guides the rest of the work.

Thank you, Nick.

A little about Nick…

“He is passionate about using design as a tool to drive intentional brand experiences and understanding the consumption habits of consumers to identify the touch point that will have the most impact. Nicks’s role is to craft the entire brand experience framework from first exposure to becoming an advocate and repurchaser and translate this vision into a cohesive experience across various touchpoints in over 70 countries.”