The Experience Economy has witnessed an explosion of new strategic alliances which all have one thing in common –how to use creativity and innovation as a way to grow their business. Some of the most advanced thinking in this areahas been led by alliances formed between the entertainment industry, and brand advertisers that are early adopters of experience marketing approaches. These trail blazers are creating new and creative ways to connect with consumers through experiences.
Experience marketing has currently begun to take on an increasingly prominent role in the advertising industry as a way to reach desired audiences in non-traditional ways to overcome the increasingly distressing problem of being “Tivo’d out.” However, the solution, while driven by concerns over ad-blocking technology, holds the potential to be a far superior form of communication with consumers. As Joseph Pine and James Gilmore point out in their book, The Experience Economy:
People greatly value emotional experiences because memories of the experience, when invoked, bring back similar sensations and emotions that were imprinted into the mind during the time of the experience. When branded products becomepart of that experience, you are inherently creating associations between the brand and the pleasant sensations from the experience which linger in the memory of the individual.
Got it from e-Strategic Research Inc.
Branding = experience design; really?
4 comments so far
Branding = experience design; really?
naaaah…
I see overlap Hans in the fields of branding and experience design but not a general equivalence.
Very cool to see a post about Emotion and Design on CPH127…thanks!
“Branding = experience design; really?”
Not at all. The term branding specifically refers to the marking and design of things like packaging, letterheads etc.
I’d agree with Ian (and Niti) that experience design is part of developing a brand, but not equal to.
But I think it is also important to be concerned with the value or strength of ‘experience design’ - because I think what is really being proposed is ‘interaction design’. After-all, how does one really design an experience that is trade mark-able or guarantee to deliver that experience once, twice or repeatedly?
Strategic Horizons (the authors Pine and Gilmore) make a good point that there is an extra layer now demanded by consumers in buying services or products, one of emotion, or a lasting impression. But that isn’t always possible to control because an experience is the outcome of some form of interaction. So I’d suggest, that in an effort to design experiences, you are in fact looking to design interactions that include the ‘reflective level’ to the design, which brings about a certain kind of experience.
So it is similar to designing a brand. You don’t strictly design a brand and put it out there, packaged, branded and ready-to-wear. But you design layers, interactions, behaviours and visual expressions which, as a brand owner, you hope all adds up to the impression you were trying to make.
And I think ‘experience marketing’ is something different entirely. Perhaps a new evolved type of marketing communication which wishes to use different channels and even develop new ones, to be free from the constraints of the limited-experiential ones. I think ‘reaching people’ is a different problem from looking to build a better experience into the product or service. And perhaps rather naively think that if more time was spent into developing a superior and ‘well-behaved’ product or service, then less would have to be spent on looking for new superior and non-traditional ways to communicate with customers.
In this area, I think what CP+B (the Subservient Chicken Burger King Ad people) are doing is interesting, in buying into small design firms, perhaps to blend the emotional design with emotional brand development. They recently bought into Yves Behar’s Fuseproject and Bruce Mau’s Studio.
Brand Experience blog
Hans Henrik had written earlier asking, in his post, whether branding = experience design was valid or not. I came across this PDF presentation titled Creating Engaging Brand Experiences at the Cutting-Edge of Culture, Creativity and Technology by the …