Why Brand Experience Is The New Competitive Advantage

Marketing Is More Than Just Having a Good Product

Having a good product, even a great product, isn’t enough. Even with a rigorous marketing plan and advertising campaigns, a good product can’t stand alone. It is becoming increasingly important HOW your product or service is received and experienced by your ideal customers. At Big Red Jelly, we call this your Brand Experience. Brand experience refers to the comprehensive set of perceptions, emotions, and interactions that consumers have with your brand across all touchpoints, shaping their emotional connection and overall brand perception. This can be your newest competitive advantage.

The experience edge you get when you focus on how your ideal customer interacts with your brand and your product is something that can set you apart from your competitors. Developing a brand experience strategy is essential for building, implementing, and measuring a plan that enhances customer interactions, engagement, and satisfaction. Effective brand experience design is crucial for creating memorable impressions and fostering emotional connections, while a consistent brand narrative and strong brand identity help shape how consumers feel about your business. This is the invisible force that keeps your customers returning and turns existing customers into evangelists for your brand, even when there are cheaper alternatives in the marketplace. Brand perception plays a key role in building brand equity, and a strong brand experience can drive sales, support business growth, and increase customer acquisition. Negative experiences can harm your brand’s reputation and even result in a bad reputation, so maintaining brand consistency, a consistent brand experience, and a cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints—including social media interactions, social channels, in store, flagship store, and augmented reality experiences—is vital. While user experience focuses on the usability and satisfaction of specific interactions, brand experience encompasses the broader emotional and perceptual journey, and customer experience is a related but distinct concept. Brands that create experiences which leave a lasting impression and foster an emotional level and personal connection with consumers are more likely to build customer loyalty, a loyal customer base, and increase lifetime value. Your brand strategy and marketing efforts should support these goals by targeting customer personas and key audiences, leveraging customer insights, experience data, and real time data to inform decisions, and monitoring emerging trends to stay ahead of other brands. Experiential marketing is a powerful approach for creating memorable interactions, and brands should always aim to deliver positive experiences, positive user experiences, and an exceptional brand experience. Customer satisfaction and customer feedback are critical for continuous improvement, and brands must identify areas for enhancement by analyzing how customers interact with all touchpoints. Many successful brands have encouraged customers to participate and engage, further strengthening their connection and advocacy.

Why Experience is the New Competitive Advantage

More and more, products and services are moving towards being commoditized. This means that the cost of production, cost of delivery, and cost of experience is being driven lower and lower. If you choose to compete in a commoditized market, it’s just a race to the bottom for who can produce the most and at the lowest price point. Spoiler alert; it’s almost impossible to compete with the likes of Amazon and Walmart if this is your strategy.

Brand experience is the only thing that can’t be duplicated by competitors, big or small. A commissioned study by Forrester Consulting highlights that data-driven strategies and a focus on customer experience are critical for brands seeking to differentiate themselves in competitive markets. Data shows that more customers are willing to pay slightly more for a superior experience or for a product from a brand that they can relate to, instead of a faceless corporation. This is where your brand experience touch points come in to change the game. Instead of racing to the bottom on price and quality, focusing on building the relationship and polishing the experience that your customers have can solidify your brand in their headspace and make your product the go-to the next time they need it, or can turn your customers into brand ambassadors who evangelize the experience and connection they have with your brand.

There is a distinction to be made between brand loyalty and brand habits. You should be striving for brand loyalty, not just habit. Brand loyalty stems from the connection that customers have with your brand and your product. It comes from how your brand makes them feel and the visceral reaction they have to your brand and product or service. The overall brand experience, which encompasses every interaction and emotional response across all touchpoints, plays a crucial role in shaping customer perception and fostering long-term loyalty. Whereas brand habits come from convenience. Think about a brand that you’re obsessed with; do you love it because it’s the fastest and closest? Or do you love how it makes you feel; the quality and the experience of walking into that brick and mortar store? Maybe it’s the customer service and how they treat you? All of this builds brand loyalty. A positive Brand Experience can turn simple habits into loyalty and brand loyalty is much harder to break than simple habits.

The Perception of Your Brand Experience

Take yourself through your own customer journey. Start as a lead. Fill out a form or call your sales team and see how that feels. Walk into your store and pretend like it’s your first time and try to absorb all of the touch-points and brand elements that you’ve put in place to stand out and to build a positive brand experience.

To better understand what works, consider looking at brand experience examples from leading companies. These examples can showcase how brands have successfully created engaging and memorable experiences for their customers.

Go through your own purchasing process to see how pleasant, or not, that process is. Are there any personalized moments or communications that get sent out after you purchase? Do you feel like you matter to the brand and company? What was the most intensively positive experience you had during the whole customer journey?

The Peak-End Rule

Humans remember experiences largely based on two main factors:

1. What the highest “peak” of joy, satisfaction, happiness, etc (whatever positive emotion)
2. How did the experience end? Did it end in a positive or negative?

Think about your last vacation.

1. When you think about the vacation as a whole, do you remember the whole experience? Or just the “peaks” or the best moments of your trip?
2. How did the experience end? Did you feel refreshed and reinvigorated? Or more stressed and drained than when you started? Maybe the flight back home got delayed and you were stuck in an airport for 36 hours.

How you answer those questions has a large impact on your remembering of that vacation experience. And the same is true with all of the interactions or experiences that customers or potential customers have with your brand.

1. What is the highest “peak” that you can make them experience consistently?
2. Do all of your customers feel like the interaction ends positively or on a high note?

Audit Your Brand Experience Strategy

Here are some simple steps that you can take today to audit your own brand experience to make sure that you’re going in the right direction. These won’t answer all of your questions, but it should get you going in the right direction and thinking about the right ideas. Conducting regular audits helps you identify areas for improvement and ensures your brand experience remains effective.

1. Where does your brand experience typically start? Does it start on social media, your website, your physical store? Do all of those possible starting points accurately represent your brand and invoke the same emotions that you’re aiming for?
2. Is there any part of your process that makes the customer “work” too hard? Can that be made easier for them?
3. At what point during the process is the “peak” of good emotion for your customers? Why?
4. What do you do post-purchase to ensure that your customers end on a high note? This can include how it’s delivered, the packaging, personalized notes, followup emails, texts, confirmations, thank-you notes, etc.
5. Collect and analyze customer feedback from sources like surveys, social listening, and reviews to inform your audit and uncover opportunities to enhance your brand experience.

Don’t Sell Products, Sell Your Brand Experience

We firmly believe that the companies that will win in 2026 and beyond will be those that treat every touchpoint as an opportunity to reinforce their brand experience and capitalize on the relationships that they’ve built over months and months or years or years of working hard to establish with their customers.

To learn more about how own Brand development process and service, reach out to us through our contact form or schedule a meeting with our Business Development team here.