1. THE HERO:
We are bombarded with so much marketing noise these days that it’s increasingly hard to zero in on what brands are trying to tell us. When creating an experience that can break through this clutter it’s critical that brands focus on the most important thing they want to communicate to achieve their objectives. Making sure that you, the brand and the product are clearly articulated, as the hero of the experience, is critical to successful brand experience design.
2: THE DESIGN:
So many people in the brand experience world get hung up on design for the sake of design. Design frames the brand to create an iconic and memorable environment. Design is purposeful, not random. So ask yourself, what do you want the experience to achieve? Make sure your design creates a memorable world for your hero to deliver your objectives.
3. THE MESSAGE:
What is your message? What do you want your audience to feel and think about you? What is your call to action? And most importantly, is your messaging clear and joined up with the rest of your communications? So many brilliant brand experiences are isolated from the overall brand message. Make sure yours ties in with every other channel of your campaign. Leading brands understand the importance of joined-up messaging that embraces the concept of flowing its message through from advertising to video to live – be sure to do this with your experience too.
4. THE NARRATIVE:
Clients are constantly asking us how to create an authentic emotional connection on an individual level. We believe that the best way to make this connection is through emotive storytelling. Creating a narrative where the audience can immediately see how it relates to them. A narrative based brand experience focuses on emotional reaction and connection rather than just a moment. The best narrative campaigns have a pre-event, during and post-communications strategy, and are truly channel agnostic and support the overall message.
5. THE ENGAGEMENT:
Event attendees have evolved from passive to much more active participants. No longer are we happy to be broadcast to, and our attention spans are now far shorter and much more selective. That’s why we believe the best way to tell the story is through hands-on, immersive engagement. Discover by doing and sharing your experience.
6. THE SHAREABILITY:
Creating experiences that can be captured and shared is so important nowadays. This is how a strong emotional connection between consumer and brand is established, and the result is an audience caring enough to share their own brand story and experience with their communities.
7. THE ARTEFACT:
The giveaway of choice used to be a pin badge or a bag, but by creating the perfect brand artefact, you could be prolonging your brand message and increasing shareability. Brand artefacts should be a reminder and re-enforcer of the experience. If you sell pens, then give out pens. The Guinness Storehouse in Dublin created the most emotive ticket (and artefact) ever, a clear acrylic palm-sized pebble with a drop of Guinness within it – the perfect representation of the experience and the brand’s DNA. Just make sure your artefact communicates your brand proposition.
FINAL WORD ON 7XP: At FreemanXP we have developed a process and set of principles that we use in experience design. Called 7XP, it allows us to be “objective” and not “subjective” in our point of view. The 7XP is focused on designing an emotive user-centric experience that takes place across “time” and “multiple channels” to creative hero-brand story-worlds.
