Branding and the Center of Experience

The Center of Experience starts with brand for a few reasons.

One, it’s the first thing that most audiences will see and experience about an organization, and because of this it has a powerful effect.

This article is based on ideas from my upcoming book The Center of Experience: a Blueprint for the Experience-led Enterprise

The importance of both employee experience (EX) and customer epxerience (CX) is now well-known, with a majority of companies competing based on both factors for both top talent, and customers. Because of this, a comprehensive brand experience, or customer and employee experience combined, must be achieved by companies. I refer to this combination of EX and CX within the enterprise as a Center of Experience.

The Center of Experience starts with brand for a few reasons. One, it’s the first thing that most audiences will see and experience about an organization, and because of this it has a powerful effect.

While brands have become much more sophisticated over time, there is still a very basic element of recognition and response that benefits successful brands, and has very negative effects on brands that make missteps. While there have been countless definitions of branding over the years, our Center of Experience divides a brand into three primary aspects with two elements that comprise each:

The Six Elements of a Brand

As we see in the diagram above, the brand experience framework divides brand into three major categories with two elements in each.  Furthermore, each of these elements has both an employee experience and a customer experience component within it, since a brand is both an internal and external expression of an organization. Let’s discuss each of the elements of brand in more depth below.

Existential value + belief

We start with how an organization defines its goals and its reason for existence. This category of brand elements is often far-reaching and sometimes abstract, but without practical tools for defining and measuring, it will fail to be successful. Great brands understand this balance.

Vision

This includes a brand’s mission, or what it aims to achieve to benefit its customers, employees, shareholders, and the world at large. It also includes its promise to those audiences.

Values

These include what a brand stands for. What will it always (or never) do, and how will it always stay true to its mission? As with all of the other elements of a brand, these values are for both internal and external audiences, though they may be expressed differently for each audience.

Recognition + differentiation

The second group of brand elements relates to how an organization positions itself as relevant to its audiences, and the methods it uses to connect tangibly with its customers, employees, and others.

Position

This defines how an organization distinguishes itself from competitors, and the place a brand occupies in the minds of its audiences. It includes how a brand positions itself both internally and externally.

Attributes

These are the words, symbols and personality a brand chooses to represent itself. While a brand may have variations used for internal and external audiences, the attributes should be cohesive and consistent across all mediums and targets.

Value + joy

The final category of brand elements talks about the emotional aspects of a brand as well as the articulation of the tangible returns its audiences can expect from their experiences.

Experience

This is how audiences interact, communicate, and consume a brand’s products and services. It includes both the customer and employee experience.

Benefits

This defines the value proposition that audiences get from their interactions with the brand and its products and services, as well as the tangible value gained. While this varies greatly depending on the brand (e.g. quick service restaurant versus investment firm), it is a critical aspect of a brand, nonetheless.

Brand audiences

Internal

As its label would suggest, these audiences are those that are within a company or organization. Employees, board members, shareholders, and others with knowledge and input on the inner workings of the company comprise this group. 

Often, a company will have a unique way of presenting itself to these groups, though to be successful it must align with the external brand.

External

This group consists of current and prospective customers, and other groups that don’t have direct lines of communication or input on the brand itself. While successful brands find ways to gather feedback and communication from external audiences, they are always shown a specific “view” of the brand that is often different in nature than the internal one.

Other

This final category could almost be construed as another internal or external set of audiences, depending on how you look at it. Think about partner channels, vendors, and other individuals and companies that interact with your organization regularly.

This “other” category can be very important because of its network effect. For instance, a partner or vendor that has a lot of mutual or potential customers could either greatly help or hurt a brand’s reputation depending on the motivation.

Distinguishing between “branding” and “brand experience”

Branding, as defined within the context of the Center of Experience, is a key aspect and, because of its highly visible nature, is the property we address first. First and foremost, however, we want to concern ourselves with brand experience when discussing COX.

When we refer to branding, we refer to the subjective and objective ways that one company or product sets itself apart from its competition, as defined above in the discussion on the six elements. While branding is a wide-ranging discipline with many aspects this book cannot possibly cover in depth, the subject of brand experience is both different in aim and broader in scope.

Brand experience, on the other hand, is the sum of all the interactions, interfaces, and any other touchpoints that all audiences have with a company or product. The role of the Center of Experience is to ensure that the brand experience is optimal for all audiences.

While branding is often a collection of items dictated by a brand for customers to consume, brand experience is often a two-way dialog between the two.

Successful brands

A brand that is deemed successful has alignment across its audiences on all of its individual elements, and there is a long-term plan to maintain this alignment. While individual elements may evolve over time, a brand’s identifiability, cohesion, and demonstration of value to its audiences ultimately determines its long-term success.

This article was based on ideas from my upcoming book The Center of Experience: a Blueprint for the Experience-led Enterprise