One more time: the brand experience
Do you remember the experience concept? It was launched 10 years ago as a reaction against a boring marketscape in which so many firms’ branding and communication efforts have become standardized and predictable. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore were the main inventors and advocates of this concept, and they talked about an urgent need for firms to rethink their businesses along experience lines.
At the heart of this concept was that the firm should create experiences for the customer – something personal, intensively positive and memorable. Such experiences, it was argued, would serve to differentiate the firm from its competitors. In Sweden, this gained much attention, particularly among retailers interested in developing their retail brands, and they were encouraged to boost the experience content by using their physical environment. Theming the store and adding positive, catchy elements in terms of smells and sounds are some examples.
Yet not much happened. We did not get stores inspired by NikeTown. And we did not get brandlands such as Autostadt. Visit Expert, Ur & Penn, MQ, Nilson, Kjell & Co or many other retail chains – and make an attempt to think away the displayed products. Then, try to find anything in the physical environment informing you about in which store you actually are. This will be very, very difficult.
In terms of academic research, it may be noted that very few studies were carried out to assess the effects of the experience construct. One reason is probably that an “experience” is a very fuzzy construct; in a sense, an experience is just about anything registered by our senses. In any case, eventually even Pine and Gilmore gave up and moved on to launch another buzzword – authenticity.
Recently, however, some researchers have made a serious attempt to revisit the experience construct from a brand point of view – to define it, to measure it, and to assess its effects. Their main idea is that an experience produced by a brand, a brand experience, is not just anything. It is something that affects the customer in four specific dimensions: it should make strong impressions on several senses, it should have affective (i.e., emotional) effects, it should produce bodily effects, and it should have intellectual effects, in the sense that it should encourage curiosity and problem solving.
Having conceptualized a brand experience in such a way, the researchers then set out to measure the extent to which a pretty large selection of brands scored high or low in these four dimensions. And this was possible by using an impressively low number of questions to customers. The researchers also measured customer satisfaction and loyalty for each brand – and concluded that a brand scoring high on experience content indeed produced more of these two outcomes. The winners, by the way, the top five brands with the highest overall experience scores, were Lego, Victoria’s Secret, iPod, Starbucks, and Disney. Check out the full report, “Brand Experience: What Is It? How Is It Measured? Does it Affect Loyalty?”, in Journal of Marketing (May, 2009).
This, then, suggests that it may be viable to again think in terms of what experience a brand creates for the customer, but to do so in a formal and systematic way. After all, the marketscape is still full of me-too brands with little to distinguish them.
Magnus Söderlund
Professor in marketing, Stockholm School of Economics
Magnus.soderlund@hhs.se, tel 08-736 9541
I think it is definitely interesting to add value to a product by an experience. The victoria secret shows have the easy way out by the concept of the runway that is part of the fashion industry. But the autostadt is amazing! Or like in Paris Louis Vuitton had exhibition with art that definitely talked to all senses, emotional, touch, and perception of light influencing the body. As a person I do not like Louis Vuitton but this definitely changed my view on them after living that experience. It is definitely an idea that should be implemented by all brands, from head to toe instead of always concentrating on the employee experience and turning blind in what you represent.