Brand Experience + User Experience = The Recipe to Solidify Customer Relationships

“It’s easier to love a brand when the brand loves you back.” – Seth Godin

How does an organization make its customers feel loved and valued? By delivering experiences that resonate with their customers and leave a lasting impression. This is where brand experience (BX) and user experience (UX) come into the picture.

Even seasoned marketing professionals sometimes blur the line between brand experience and customer experience. Some take them as the same function while others don’t realize how they work together despite being distinct. In both cases, it can result in monotonous and inconsistent experiences; causing customers to lose interest in your business.

The key here is to identify how BX and UX are synced together to deliver a seamless experience. Let’s get started!

What is a Brand Experience and Why Does it Matter?

When we think about branding, our minds immediately go to colors, slogans, logos, fonts, etc. But a brand experience is a lot more than that. It is a promise that encapsulates feelings, thoughts, emotions, reputation, and actions people associate with a brand over time. When a brand sets the tone, they basically make a promise to its customers. The brand experience is about pursuing your customers to invest in your identity or community rather than just your product. An example of successful branding would be when a person sees a certain color or reads a certain word and immediately thinks about your brand.

Following are the reasons to deliver a meaningful brand experience:

• A brand experience enables you to facilitate positive experiences that foster deeper connections, encourage audiences, and ultimately deliver desired results.
• It enables better engagement by making you a bigger part of their story. When a brand persistently engages with its audience to create new moments, it results in a superior experience.
• It humanizes your organization as people see your efforts to deliver excellent services and products up-close.

A brand experience caters to an audience even before they become a customer. It heavily depends on advertising and designing to communicate brand value and message to the targeted audience.

What is a User Experience and Why Does it Matter?

User experience refers to the journey your customers go through to attain their desired results with your brand. When a customer interacts with your organization, be it a website, mobile application, or any form of device/human interaction, they have some expectations. Those expectations are the promises you make through branding and UX is the opportunity to fulfill those expectations. For instance, a positive user experience could be a frictionless checkout process or smooth customer service.

Here’s why UX is important:

• A user experience aims to turn your visitor/audience into loyal customers.
• UX enables you to test the usability of your current products/services and identify possible improvements. It is the key to understanding the customers’ expectations and how well your brand is meeting their needs.

An interactive and intuitive user experience goes a long way. Not only will it increase the odds of converting visitors into customers but also enable you to establish a great rapport with them.

The Link Between BX and UX: Explained

Your brand strategy will only persuade your customers to check out your services for once. But a successful user experience is what keeps them coming back to you. For the longevity of any business, top-notch collaboration is required between the branding and UX teams. Here’s how BX and UX are connected:

1. Making Promises and Keeping Them: A brand experience is a combination of branding strategy and user experience. Every organization strives to bridge the gap between its brand intent and the real user experience to meet the expected brand experience. Therefore, at the core UX is understanding the expectations of a customer and BX is fulfilling the intent. In simple words, a user experience should always be consistent with the brand experience.

2. Delivering Ever-Evolving Experiences Through a Consistent Branding Strategy: Even though the brand experience is a long-term strategy, it evolves with the evolving customer demands. It creates a certain image of the brand. On the contrary, user experience is more immediate. But it goes hand-in-hand with the brand strategy to deliver a consistent experience.

3. Personalizing Your Brand to Exceed User Expectations: Today’s customers expect a personalized experience while interacting with a brand. So, brands are now leveraging digital opportunities to establish meaningful connections with customers. Take 3D try on by Lenskart as an example. They made good use of the AR (Augmented Reality) technology which enables customers to digitally try on various glass frames before making a purchase.

Conclusion

Brands can’t deliver a brand experience without user experience and vice-versa. Every time you successfully deliver a positive user experience, it impacts their perception of your brand. Therefore, it becomes essential to enable a consistent user experience to incorporate brand voice and elements throughout. All in all, a brand experience and a user experience are two sides of the same coin.

Wish to Deliver a Meaningful Customer Experience? Talk to Us!