How Do You Bring a Brand Experience to Life?

Earlier this week, at the Providence Business Expo, the Business Innovation Factory hosted a session by design consultancy firm Continuum. In “Building Brand Experiences,” Continuum principle Dean Whitney walked us through the process of pumping life into a brand.

How do you bring a brand to life? According to Whitney, it’s deep understanding of human behavior. Where do you acquire that understanding? Not through traditional focus groups – they’re so 20th century. In the words of Whitney, “you don’t go to the zoo to study animals.”

User-centered design is on a roll and people like Whitney are in hot demand as companies try to codify the customer experience. And though most of us will never afford the likes of a power house design firm like Continuum, there’s much we can learn and tackle ourselves.

What’s the secret to great brand design? If you understand people's values better, you can create better products and services for them. Most of the driving principles behind design-based innovation centers on the emotional and behavioral aspects of the consumer.

Designers like Whitney advocate a relatively non-traditional approach to getting into the hearts and minds of the consumer. Instead of the usual starting point of deficiency analysis in a particular product or service, he says we must give priority to understanding the emotions that drive buying decisions.

Intense observation is a common starting point for designers. “You need to look for opportunity,” said Whitney. As a brand, you have to understand that consumers often don’t even know what they need. It’s your job to not only find the solution but, most importantly, give the customer an experience that will speak to his or her values. (Something that particularly resonated with me was when Whitney said we should focus on creating the appropriate brand experience.)

Similar to an anthropologist on location, Whitney told us to follow the consumer journey from discovery to return. In between, map the various touchpoints including attraction, engagement, presentation, support and transaction. During this time, watch consumers closely and interview them in real-world settings. Whitney says you’ll discover many unmet needs and identify unique opportunities.

Using client examples from Captain D’s (a fast casual chain of restaurants) and bike maker Cervélo, Dean showed us that to map the ideal customer experience, you need to go on a journey yourself. Get out of the office, get out of the lab. Watch, listen, ask questions. Once you begin to understand human behavior, time and again, Whitney said, you’ll come up a winner.