ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Branding is generally focused on telling me how good a company/product/service, communicating a promise to me, but no amount of communication can make up for an experience that doesn’t meet my expectations.

At a DMI conference I heard Wally Olins, founder of Wolf-Olins, speak about branding. One of the major points he made was about the different ways a person can interact or experience a brand. The idea being that you can experience a brand via the Product, Environment, Communication, and Behavior.

It is the behavior of a company (systems, products, people) that has the most impact on me as opposed to communication:

The ATT&T voice prompt system may say “We know how important your time is…” and “you are a valued customer” but the thoughtless voice prompt system asking for my phone number twice, keeping me on hold for 20 minutes and then the person picking up the phone and asking for my number again and when we’re done instead of say thanks and bye, keeps me on the line for an extra 10 seconds to read the scripted sign off telling me how much they appreciate me calling them, and how they appreciate my business and is there anything else they can do for me. No, please can’t you just let me hang up and GO…

Traditional branding methodologies seem to focus on communication first, possibly on product and then maybe environment, and very few talk about behavior. This isn’t surprising really when you look at the history of branding, it started out initially as a method of differentiating a one product on a shelf from another, so branding methodology over the last 50 years really got good at branding FMCG (fast moving consumer goods). This was one reason that Wally pointed out, that no one is really branding services very well, it’s because people are branding a services using the same methodology as if they were branding a box of serial.

Now traditional branding is focused around communication and that’s fine, but someone needs to take care of behavior, product and environment, is that a role for Experience Design/UX? I’ve always thought that branding companies were great at communicating the promise of a company but it is the experience that lets it down.

I think Experience Design/UX can really help companies deliver on their brand promise through interactive systems, services and products. I don’t know how you guys feel about the service aspect but I think there is a lot of work to be done in the area of service delivery. I think there is a great deal we can take from what we’ve learned in the interactive realm to the service environment.