“Scott Bedbury, who is credited with building strong brands like Nike and Starbucks, says, “A great brand taps into emotions. Emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions. A brand reaches out with a powerful connecting experience. It’s an emotional connecting point that transcends the product.”
― Douglas Van Praet, Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing
Emotion at the centre stage
Brands are diligently crafted with a lot of planning, strategy, and hard-work going into every detail. But sometimes we tend to overlook the vital role of emotion in creating a successful brand. The more we move into branding, the more we step onto the emotional aspect. What makes a consumer choose one brand over another for the same product? There must be an intuitive factor, a personal connection that a consumer can make with a specific brand. This is what triggers him or her to go ahead and make a choice of one over another.
Taking advantage of that emotion that is created by the brand by applying it to the product and the service design is what creates a difference. A brand can only become exclusive by conveying its core values and the emotion it reflects to its customers. Make him feel the difference the brand has to offer over the others in its customer journey.
There are several brands now in the market offering similar products and services. What makes a brand unique from its competitors lies in its storytelling, its copywriting, the colours it chooses to portray, its logo, the way it communicates with its customers, everything in combination reflects their core branding.
Map out your customer journey
Mapping your customer journey is useful in understanding the user experience at every touch point. It is a representation of a typical customer experience that allows you to stay focused on your user’s needs. We will deal with customer journey mapping in greater details in our later blogs.
Do not skimp on research
User Research
A one to one in-depth user interview is one of the best possible tools helping experience designers. The right set of questions help us understand a person’s behaviour upfront, his needs and his motivations of preferring a specific brand. The number of interviews varies between four to five people and is enough to obtain candid and inspiring results. These interviews help us gain inspiration to design creative solutions and improve customer journey.
We try to gather if the user apprehends what the brand has in offer for him. Whether he notices the selling points, the brand is trying to pass on in its message. For example, some brands may have devised an excellent customer service, but the question to be asked is, do the customers feel that excellence? Do their problems at every step get resolved in a way that is seamless?
Sometimes brands can be solely focussed on building their processes and their products. It is possible that they miss out on the chance of taking feedback from their end users about the brand perception in the market. The user interviews are conducted with the purpose of knowing if the users view their brands in the way it was intended to be perceived. This, in turn, helps an experience designer in his storytelling and creative solutions.
As an experience designer, it is crucial for graphility to understand what a user feels about the brand. It is also important to know about his pain points in his overall experience. We aim at resolving them in the best possible way so that the user can undergo a meaningful, quick and stressfree experience. We aim to understand a user’s primary needs and expectations in different contexts and help to adapt the services accordingly.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is useful in differentiating our clients from its competitors. It helps to create a unique identity for our clients which will stand out in the crowd. We aim at being different and make that difference in the lives of every customer.
Prototyping
Before sending out the final product in the market, we propose to reproduce a subset, a more tangible representation of the larger picture. Thus it is a way of simulating one or many features of the given design. Thus, the purpose of prototyping is to make customers feel engaged and part of the whole creation process. To get their feedback on the product or service design and implement the same into the next prototypes and reiterate the testing process. Thus prototypes are a way of getting dynamic feedback while the creation is still ongoing.
Workshops
We conduct workshops which range between eight to sixteen weeks. We organise these workshops in the presence of both the customers and the different involved stakeholders. They share their opinions with each other, and we try to reach onto a mutual common ground of what the product will achieve or how we can go about improving it. This understanding becomes what we refer to as the value proposition. This means we arrive at an understanding of what the product intends to deliver and how can it be unique. Once every party understands that goal very clearly, we can set the motion for further steps. This involves prototyping, gathering more insights and little by little build towards the final definition of the product or the proposed improvements.
Thus workshops help to bring everybody into one room to discuss design, operations, customer service and finance. Hence it can lead to resolving anomalous situations, unforeseen insights and unblocking any bureaucratic obstacles.
Working with an Experience Designer
It is to wonder how an experience designer would go about achieving something so abstract as an emotion in a viable and concrete fashion. Integrating emotion and empathy to a brand may be challenging but a doable task at the same time. As a very first step, graphility aims to understand its client’s core values and their unique selling points. Next, we plan on user interviews. Here we try to understand if the user’s needs match with what our client has to offer.
Facilitation
This is a way to achieve a balance between a customer needs and the business needs. Facilitation is about consistent dialogues with our clients to keep up with their business requirements. There are many objectives that a product might want to achieve involving many departments of a company. Every department, in turn, has its agenda and its budget.
For example, the IT department might have limited resources it can use; the Marketing department might be in need of a bigger budget for its campaign to promote the product. Hence there is an involvement of a lot of departments, and all of them might not agree with each other. To arrive at a feasible solution, we have to mediate communication between the different departments. We have to facilitate and explain what are we trying to achieve, who are we aiming for and how can we best do it while coordinating with everybody.
As designers, we are the voice of the customers, to provide creative solutions. The whole discipline of experience design is part of the customer experience, advocating the mindset of a customer. However, we also prioritise the client’s business needs and try to reach a compromise which is the best solution for both parties.
These are some of the best strategies to help improve your branding experience. Stay with us for more insights on how we at graphility believe in improving branding, storytelling and marketing solutions.
Do you find the above strategies useful? Tell us how they have helped your business.