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Most of a brand’s experience is made by people who are not in the marketing department, and I mean that quite literally. Brand experience is the sum of everything a person goes through when they deal with a brand: not what the brand says about itself, but what it feels like to be its customer, guest or partner. In our business the term is mostly used for the designed, spectacular parts, the launch, the stand, the activation, and I think the more useful meaning is the whole thing, including everything nobody planned.
The academic side agrees more than you might expect. The marketing researchers Brakus, Schmitt and Zarantonello, whose 2009 paper is still the one most people cite on the subject, describe brand experience as the sensations, feelings, thoughts and actions a brand provokes, and only one of those four is about what something looks like. A stand can be beautiful and still leave a visitor confused, irritated or simply indifferent, and all three of those are brand experience too.
The service line and the dealer showroom write most of it
Think of the moments a person might have with a brand over a year. Seeing an ad, visiting the website, walking into a store, a showroom or a pop-up in a mall, talking to a salesperson, using the product every day, calling for help when something breaks, receiving an invoice, being invited to an event and attending it. Marketing teams usually control a handful of these directly, the ads, parts of the website, the events and perhaps the store design. The rest belong to sales, operations, customer service, logistics, finance, dealers and suppliers, each with its own goals, and brand experience is rarely written into any of them.
This is not a complaint about any department; it is simply how companies are organized. But it does mean that when a brand talks about “designing the brand experience,” it is often talking about a small share of it while the larger share happens on its own, in a call center queue, at a dealer’s desk, in the tone of a delivery driver. A customer does not separate these into departments. For them it is one brand, and whatever happened last is what the brand is.
Hotels show this better than most businesses, which is perhaps why the hotel side of our industry talks about guest experience more naturally than brands do. A hotel can spend heavily on its lobby, its website and its photographs, and still be judged by the guest on the minute at the front desk after a long journey, the room that is not ready, the answer to a request at eleven at night. Brands outside hospitality face the same logic with less awareness of it. Their front desk is a call center, a dealer showroom, a courier at the door, and nobody in those places was told that they are where the brand is really decided.
A useful way to see it is to take whatever the brand promises about itself and look for the ordinary task where that promise gets tested. A company that calls itself simple is tested by its registration form and its invoice. One that sells expertise is tested the moment a visitor asks a hard question at the stand and the person there has to go and find someone. A destination that promises an easy congress is tested when a delegate tries to get from the hotel to the venue on the first morning. None of these tasks appear in the brand book, and every one of them says more about the brand than the brand book does.
The registration desk at a big congress venue
Events make this especially visible, because they compress dozens of these moments into a few hours. Let’s say a company invites its key customers to an annual meeting at one of the big congress venues in a capital city. The marketing team designs the stage and the content, picks the speakers and someone to moderate a panel, plans the menu and the gift, and all of it is thought through. Before any of it, though, the guest receives an invitation that may or may not be clear about the address and the dress code, fills in an online form that asks for more than they wanted to share, arrives to find the car park full, waits at a registration desk staffed by people who met each other that morning, asks where the cloakroom is and finds that nobody knows (a small thing, but small things are what guests retell), and then sits down for a program that starts late.
What people remember as a brand experience is usually decided in the unscripted parts: the waiting, the asking, the small moment when something does not go to plan.
By the time the chief executive walks on stage, the guest has already formed an impression, and the beautiful stage and the inspiring speech have to work against it rather than build on a blank page. I rarely see a strong program fully erase a poor arrival. The reverse is also true, and it is encouraging: an ordinary program delivered to guests who were welcomed warmly, guided well and looked after when something went wrong is often remembered fondly. People forget content far faster than they forget how they were treated.
The t-shirt on a temporary worker
Who stands at those unscripted moments? At most events I have worked on, in any market, people who are not on the brand’s payroll. The registration desk is often run by hostesses an agency sent for the day, the ushers may be students called in through a university contact, security belongs to a subcontractor, the waiters to the venue or a catering firm, the technical crew to the production company, and even the agency’s own project team may include freelancers hired for this one job. The guest neither knows nor cares who employs them. A rude security guard, a hostess who cannot answer a basic question or a waiter who ignores a dietary request all become, in the guest’s account, the way this brand treats people. It works the same way when a company chooses to sponsor an event rather than host one, since the guest who sees its logo at the entrance also files the organizer’s queue under its name.
Yet these teams are often the least prepared people in the building. They receive a short briefing, sometimes only on the morning of the event, and are asked to represent a brand they know very little about, and in our business temporary staff also commonly face late payment and unclear insurance, which does nothing for anyone’s motivation. Expecting a warm, confident brand experience from people who are themselves treated as an afterthought is not reasonable. What helps is surprisingly modest: a proper briefing before the day, a named person to call when something unexpected happens, real breaks and food during long shifts, and payment that arrives when it was promised. None of it appears in the creative presentation of an experiential marketing project, and all of it shows up in the guest’s evening.
The weakest points are usually the handoffs between these teams, which the guest never sees as handoffs at all. A dietary request written on the form that never reaches the caterer, a wheelchair user whose request sat in the registration system while the venue team set up a stage with steps, a promise made at the stand that sales never follows up: each supplier may have done exactly its own job, and the guest still had a bad experience with the brand. Accessibility is where this shows most clearly, and the W3C’s checklist for accessible events is a good reminder that access needs have to be planned early and passed on to whoever is actually going to meet the guest.
It also helps to give these teams a little of the story. A hostess who knows why the event exists, who the guests are and what the company hopes they will feel can make small decisions well on her own, while one who only knows where to stand has to guess, and guessing at the door is where most awkward moments start.
A resort dinner in spring and a delivery delay in autumn
Brands love peaks: the launch night, a guerrilla marketing stunt that gets talked about for a week, the gala dinner with a famous performer. These have their place, but brand experience is built much more by consistency than by peaks. A customer who had a wonderful evening at the product launch and then waited three weeks for an answer from customer service will remember the waiting. A dealer who was hosted beautifully at the annual meeting in a coastal resort in spring and then struggled to get stock all autumn will look back on that meeting as decoration. I see this often with brands that invest heavily in events while their daily operations struggle. The event becomes a promise, the rest of the year breaks it, and the gap itself turns into part of the experience; in that situation a smaller event and a better service line might do more for the brand than another spectacular evening. In fairness to marketing teams, they usually cannot fix the service line or the delivery times on their own, but they can ask, before planning the next peak, what guests will live through in the weeks after it, and say it out loud inside the company when the answer is disappointing.
Employees go through the brand too, and more intensely than anyone. A staff member working at the company’s event sees everything: how guests are treated, how suppliers are treated, how the company reacts when something goes wrong and how its own team is looked after once a long shift is over. If the stage talks about care and respect while the company’s own people go without food until midnight, they draw their own conclusions, and those conclusions travel to friends, family and former colleagues. When an employee speaks warmly about the company’s event, outsiders believe it more than anything the communications department produces; when they say “this is how it always goes with us,” a lot of carefully written messaging comes undone.
The feedback form after the event
Most event evaluations ask about the designed parts: was the content useful, were the speakers good, did you enjoy the dinner. These are reasonable questions, but they miss most of the experience. The more revealing ones concern the moments in between, such as how easy registration was, how long the wait at the entrance lasted, whether guests found what they were looking for, whether their questions got answered and whether anything made them uncomfortable. They are less flattering to ask and the answers can be uncomfortable to read, yet they point straight at the parts of the experience that are shaping how people see the brand.
Talking to a handful of guests some days after the event adds what no form can. Ask them what they remember. If they talk about the stage, the design worked; if they talk about the queue, the cold coffee or the person who helped them find their seat, that is the real brand experience speaking, and it is worth listening to before the next plan is drawn up. If the event was meant to explain something, ask them to explain it back in their own words, since a guest who enjoyed the evening but cannot say what the product does has had a pleasant experience of something other than the brand. So when a brand asks me how to improve its experience, I tend to begin with something it rarely expects, which is to ask who was the first person each guest spoke to at its last event, and how much did that person know about the brand they were standing in for that day?