The Importance of Brand Experience For A Successful Growth Strategy

The importance of brand experience (BX) in a highly competitive business environment cannot be overstated. A positive brand experience can lead to a sustainable business model that is built on inspired and engaging customer relationships that can further a brand’s positive perception in the market. In this article, we discuss how you can measure your brand experience so as to nurture and enhance it, and how businesses in various industries are taking measures to improve their BX stats.

What Is The Importance Of Brand Experience?

Brand experience importance metrics show that a positive brand experience inspires deeper, more meaningful customer relationships that go beyond monetary transactions, leading to a more resilient and profitable business. This is an extremely pertinent point because the most important element of any successful business strategy is the ability to maintain a sustainable growth pattern.

Brand experience is the experience a customer has with a brand, irrespective of whether he has actually gone through with a purchase or not. This means that not only does brand experience comprise a customer’s experience with a product or service but also the feelings that generate within an individual when they think of a brand. In essence, it means how they perceive a brand.

That’s why companies are rethinking the way they have done things traditionally and are opening up experience centers just so customers can get a feel of the brand without the pressure to invest or spend money right away. Vehicle manufacturers are a great example of this brand experience strategy. Pop-up events and showrooms are another example of how companies are realizing and investing in brand experience importance measures.

So let’s enumerate why companies cannot afford to neglect the importance of brand experience.

1. The ROI is unmistakable

It’s more costly to acquire a new customer than to retain one - up to 25 times as the study says. Brand experience insights can give you important pointers to develop strong customer retention strategies that can ensure that you improve your products and customer service in an effective way so that you can build life-long customer relationships thanks to a positive and wholesome brand experience.

2. Your brand trust grows beyond your product

When people think about buying a Yamaha piano, they don’t think twice about it even though they know that Yamaha is a manufacturer of motorcycles, marine engines, and F1 car engines.

That is the power of building a brand image whose trust goes beyond a product or industry. A strong brand trust also means that a company can bear the ups and downs of unseen product defects or recalls and still be the chosen brand for customers.

3. Better sales and revenue

Having repeat customers keeps your revenue stream steady and gives you growing space. It is not necessary for a customer to have made the purchase for them to be important to you. The very fact that a person is interested in your business should make them important.

If this principle is deeply embedded in your business culture, it will have a trickle-down effect through all levels of your employees, customer-facing or not, and thus inherently increase your brand experience.

4. Increases perceived brand equity

A brilliant brand experience makes you resilient to market dynamics because it increases your brand worth. It does not matter how costly or competitively priced the product is. It’s the market demand that builds a company’s sustainability. This is what makes customers anticipate the release of a new J.K. Rowling book or wait hours in the line-up for the latest Apple or Xbox series. Checkout this small YouTube sentiment analysis we did for a comparison video between PS5 & Xbox around 2020 Christmas.

5. Boosts brand awareness

Not everyone uses a Pirelli tire. But almost everyone has heard of a Pirelli calendar. And that’s the power of brand experience strategies that can build brand recognition and awareness phenomenally. As with the example of Pirelli’s latest 2022 project, we can see how companies can partner with other famous brands and personalities to amplify their brand awareness and build a stronger brand reputation.

How Can You Measure Brand Experience?

The importance of brand experience is measured based on customer experience analysis. It can be done manually if you have just a dozen reviews or so to consider. But when you want to conduct a proper analysis of customer reviews, product performance and perception, and brand reputation analysis, you will need to apply a machine learning model that is trained to track and measure brand experience.

The smart thing about an ML-based platform is that not only does it give you numerical metrics but also clear insights that are actionable and can be incorporated into your brand strategy.

An ML brand experience platform measures BX in the following broad steps.

Step 1 - Data collection

You will need to first fetch the customer experience data. The more data you gather the better, and more accurate the results of the brand experience importance analysis will be. Apart from reviews and comments from sites like Clutch, Google reviews, Amazon, etc, you should also consider social media for TikTok insights, Instagram social listening, YouTube comments analysis, and others.

The data can be either manually uploaded, or you can simply input the URL of the YouTube or Google reviews link.

Step 2 - Data processing

The AI platform now processes the data using various ML techniques such as video content analysis and natural language processing to prepare the data for text analytics and sentiment analysis.

If you have video or podcast data, the algorithms will transcribe the content through speech-to-text software. All captions in the video will be analyzed and the text extracted as well. If there are comments or reviews, the platform will extract emojis from it so that it can analyze emojis for sentiment as well.

Step 3 - Data analysis

Now that the audience feedback-driven brand experience importance data is processed and prepared for text and sentiment analysis, the model will apply several ML tasks to break down the data into finer categories for a deeper analysis.

It will first use native speech taggers for each language that it identifies through its multilingual NLP capability. Then it will apply semantic clustering so as to identify recurring topics and aspects such as price, food, convenience, location, etc depending on the data, and eventually pass it all through emotion mining algorithms.

The sentiment analysis API will now analyze each topic and aspect for sentiment and give you an overall score as well as individual scores so that you will know how the market perceives your brand.

Step 4 - Data visualization

All of the analysis that is done in Step 3 is done in the back-end. In order for you to get these insights in an easy-to-understand format, the platform presents all of this hidden information that it has extracted from the data in the form of charts and graphs on a customer experience dashboard.

This dashboard is interactive and also allows you to set alerts for any keyword notifications or any time there is a spike in your social media mentions.

Learn more about social media sentiment analysis.

Brand Experience Examples

Here are some key business examples from various industries that showcase the importance of brand experience.

1. MAC Cosmetics

MAC Cosmetics released its new lipstick by international makeup artist Hindash in an event that was on a global scale. The YouTube video had gone viral, so we analyzed it using our brand experience analytics platform, Repustate IQ, to scrutinize the comments. Our analysis showed that the public loved the product so much that it was sold out in all locations, internationally, and the negative comments were actually about their disappointment at not finding the product in stores.

In effect, this proved that even though the metrics showed a negative trend, comments analysis showed that the reason was completely the opposite.

2. McDonald’s

When McDonald’s TikTok logo video went viral, we analyzed it to understand brand experience importance metrics for the company. On analyzing the video, captions, and the comments, we discovered that the video was viral not because of the logo per se but because the public has begun thinking that it was McDonald’s subtle way of digging into market sentiment before launching Onion Rings on its menu.

Ofcourse, this was not the case, but nevertheless, the brand was aware that people really wanted Onion Rings on the menu.

3. Toronto Maple Leafs

We analyzed the hashtag #leafsforever on Twitter and TikTok to analyze the importance of brand experience for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Out of close to 4000 comments, we saw there was a 60% positive sentiment score. We decided to dig deeper and see what the 40% negative sentiment was around.

Repustate IQ discovered that the negative sentiment was around the fact that ticket prices were high and many fans were not able to attend live stadium events because of it. There were also other factors such as the stadium in-app services such as food, beverage, parking convenience, and such.

Learn more about Fan experience analysis we did for Toronto Maple Leafs’ Hahstag #leafsforever.

4. Wendy’s

On analyzing two popular Wendy’s locations for brand experience importance metrics, we saw that the sentiment for both locations was different. We discovered that the common positive factor was the food, which meant that people loved Wendy’s brand, overall.

The negative sentiment was around staff, seating arrangements, parking, and such factors - things that can easily be corrected if the locations take the time and effort.

Read more about these brand experience examples.

Conclusion

Companies need to leverage the benefits they can easily get through measures that strengthen the importance of brand experience in their business. Industries as varied as retail, automotive, travel & hospitality, and others are already investing in different kinds of activities to amplify and promote their brand experience.

An AI-driven model that can extract hidden gems from customer experience data is just the catalyst a business needs to enjoy the perks of a deeper connection with its target audience and loyal customers through an enhanced brand experience.

Repusatate’s brand experience analysis tool gives you this advantage in 23 languages, and with infinite scalability. Available for every industry with its own aspect model, you are assured of accurate insights every time. Use it as an API or a full-fledged platform with an intelligent dashboard, on the Cloud or on-prem, behind your firewall.