Digital Interactive Services

Brand experience: A guide to the future of marketing

As customers become selective, brands have to keep up with their demand and stay completely customer centric. This has transformed marketing as businesses are investing in connecting and engaging with the target audience to build trust and brand loyalty.

As digitisation seeps into everyday life with hyper-personalisation, competition to gain customer attention has intensified. Businesses today work on their image to ensure relevance in the market through their brand experience.

What is brand experience?

Brand experience combines all the sensations, thoughts, feelings, and reactions that an individual has in response to a brand. It involves leveraging branding to strengthen brand relationships with customers at all times of contact and interaction. To enhance brand experience further, businesses need to convert every customer interaction into a value-add one.

Why brand experience is the future of marketing?

Experiential marketing is the future, and brand experience is its essential ingredient. Brand experience marketing leverages technology, data, and storytelling to create a live experience of a brand for its users and bring them closer to the brand.

According to a study conducted by a leading management consulting firm, brands have become beacons of trust for customers. As choices for consumers increase, ‘trusting’ the brand assumes more significance. Research shows that companies that are brand innovators grow faster than the ones that are less innovative, which function on linear processes.

The future of marketing lies with brand experience because it can:

• Create a positive and broader influence by associating with causes, providing an easy online experience and maintaining effective contact with customers.
• Improve conversions in a competitive market through immersive websites and interactive online experiences where outdoor and in-person experiential activities are restricted.
• Build engagement and empathy among consumers by identifying customer pain points and providing solutions to their problems.
• Enable immediate feedback through an interactive and engaging feedback system in the form of ratings, emails, and continued communication with customers.
• Build brand insight and confidence for customers through a reliable customer interaction system and trustworthy customer education.

How can brand experience benefit your business?

Brand experience works with customer perceptions and affects buying behaviour directly. A recent research revealed that 73% of people who participated in a brand’s experiential marketing were more likely to purchase from that brand.

Brand experience is vital for your business in:

• Growing brand awareness by connecting with customers at a personal level.
• Promoting brand loyalty in the process of creating unforgettable memories that deliver an emotional impact.
• Generating brand value by investing in the details of the experience that customers find rewarding.

Garnering trust with the public over time through positive associations and interactions.

Ways to build a great brand experience

Creating a memorable brand experience requires understanding the audiences’ multi-faceted needs. It involves:

Engaging the senses through colours, smell, sounds, and feelings

An excellent example is that of a leading OTT service that decided to recreate the environment of a café featured in a popular series to stay in the audiences’ memory at the launch of its next season. The use of space, colour, and associations with the famous show positively impacted the viewers.

Creating fluid content and personalising messages to suit the target audience

A content piece becomes engaging when it aligns with the right tools and technology that the target audience uses. For example, customer-generated content in the form of blogs, stories, and videos is a way to engage with the audience and become involved in your brand.

Sharing popular culture by accurately timing marketing activities

Popular culture provides excellent opportunities for brands to connect with their audience. Whether it is a cultural festival or an event like the Olympics, timing the marketing activities and attention to detail can deliver great benefits.

Participating in events that the target market cares about

Live or virtual events are an excellent opportunity for brands to win the audiences’ attention and association through extended exposure. Look for a commonality that runs through the event and your brand voice.

Using interactive tools like gamification and dynamic media marketing to increase engagement

Immersive and engrossing tools like games and dynamic media have universal appeal and engage customers for extended periods. They even encourage repeat engagement, thanks to the rewarding experience.

Brand experience in the digital age

According to a Carnegie Mellon University study, digital transformation of marketing is expected to grow three times in the next four years. This will require brands to focus on the following:

• Digital asset management of the data and value that their brand generates.
• Digital marketing to increase exposure and engagement.
• Content management to engross audience and educate them.
• Marketing technology services that use virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), chatbots, AI, and other tools to build unique and immersive experiences for customers and analyse vital data.
• Investment in converting business that is connected, technologically productive, agile, and sentient, as well as offers a value-added experience anytime, anywhere.

For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.

How Infosys BPM helps transform brand experience?

From digital marketing to e-commerce services, our digital business services leverage technological expertise to bring value to your brand. Using our digital process framework, we enhance the customer experience in various geographies and help drive better leads and conversions.