What is your favorite Brand? Now consider why? What element of the company, product, or lifestyle the Brand promotes is most compelling? 

Brand may be hard to pin down. But one thing is for sure, in today’s marketplace, Customer Experience plays a big part! How?

What is Branding?

The promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.

- Oxford dictionary

Branding may result in promoting your products in the market for better sales and profits. But what branding means in CX terms is understanding who your customer is, what they like about you and your product (and don't like), and making a compelling experience that builds off those likes (these likes can be figurative or literal).   

People do not buy goods and services; they buy relations, stories, and magic.

- Seth Godin, Author of Free Prize Inside

Traditional branding "P's" of Product, Promotion, Place, and Price has been overtaken by the new branding "I's": Identity, Impact, Innovation, and Influencers. If these concepts are new to you, let me review them.

Identity - is the Customer Identity and how they relate to your Product (or Company's Identity)

Impact - is the belief in the life-changing (or lifestyle changing) effect of the product with its target users.

Innovation - is the company's ongoing mission to keep the product relevant in the marketplace and move to, or stay at, #1.

Influencers - is the new impact of Social Media sources on creating a community of users of a specific product through the advocation of online endorsements. 

Your Brands' worth is the sum of these factors and is driven by the company but determined by the marketplace.

Brands are essentially patterns of familiarity, meaning, fondness, and reassurance that exist in the minds of people.

— Tom Goodwin

The Red Bull Example

Red Bull is famous for its drink. But even more famous for the lifestyle and events they have built around the drink. While the product is the last thing an athlete should drink (based on the ingredients list). Sports enthusiasts consume the product despite its potentially detrimental impact.

It's all in the Brand. What made them stand out? Their Brand Strategy is linked to the Customer Experience. 

After three years of testing, Red Bull found.

There is no demand in the market for this type of drink.

- Breonna Bergstrom, Red Bull's Marketing Strategy

But, the drink was not what drove the brand, the Customer Experience was.

Today, Red Bull is number one in the energy drink market with $3.3 Billion in sales.

- James Foster, The Caffeine Informer

Their clever tactics to market the 4 P's and their focus on leveraging the four P's and I's. It has been said that wherever Red Bull ran events, they would fill the cities trash cans with empty red bull cans to make it seem like drink was in high demand. This would lead to actual increases in consumption. Red Bull realized that hype and buzz could drive identity, impact, and, through influencers, loyalty.

Red Bull is clear about its Brand and target market. They know their customer, where to find them, and how to engage with their Customer's Experiences. Their ad tagline "Redbull gives you wings" is clearly marketing to this target demographic.  

How Does Customer Engagement create Branding?

In the Red Bull Example, customers initially engaged through product marketing and placement. However, the Brand has focused on the impact and innovation in the last several years.  

What can you learn from their success? The Product community is, often, more important than the product. 

This applies to companies with much better products than Red Bull. Focusing on Customer Experience instead of traditional adverting is a model many are adopting. 

We take most of the money we could have spent on paid advertising and instead put it back into the Customer Experience. Then we let the customers be our marketing. 

 - Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos

Customer Experience can be the means to the end of Branding. As I discussed in my 2022 CX Trends, This is the age of influence. Targeted Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram content will drive buyer behavior more than ads run in mainstream sources. In fact, data shows that these social media sources are now the mainstream. 

From Buzz to long term Loyalty

Savvy brands know that creating buzz is the short game. The long game uses tools and techniques to customer loyalty.

A loyal customer will:

• buy the next generation product without the need for extensive marketing

• watch the entire Youtube post, even when not the target for the message

• will support unproven additions to the product line

This means that the cost for each customer is reduced as long as the compnay:

• stays close to their customer (through continued interaction and community involvement)

• tailors services to their core target audience (to drive satisfaction in a group with increased demands)

• focuses on relevance and innovative

Customer Experience and Brand Strategy demands that marketing budgets be spent but focused differently. The goals and outcomes are based on using the existing base to grow and retain new customers.

With the rise of the 'unique consumer' who wants everything to be super-personalized and hyper-relevant, companies — brands especially — need to custom-tailor their customer retention strategy to fit their own unique needs better.

- Tamas Oszi, Business to Community

Is your Project a Customer Experience product and Brand?

Why, yes, it is! If you are a project manager (and you may be since my channel focuses on project management and the user experience). Then you likely know that your project is or has a brand image. Your customer, users, and stakeholders have a sense of the value of the project to the business. How your project communicates sets expectations and delivers, the project's product will define how the project's Brand is valued.  

How to Build your Brand through Customer Experience?

Through memorable visuals and strong storytelling, your Brand helps consumers come to recognize both who you are and what kind of value you offer. Once you've developed a loyal following, it serves as an ongoing reminder for existing customers that your company is still thriving and there to serve their needs

- Forbes

How to take action on creating the Brand, visuals, storytelling, and ongoing engagement? 

Set the right Customer Experience Goal. Having a clear goal on what a great Customer Experience looks like for you is critical to setting your objectives and linking them to your brand goals. Learn more about 7 top tips for Customer Experience here.

Tell a story. Think Apple and Levi's. How your business tells the product's story can go from market plan to legendary. If you want to see more about creating a story for your user journey, product, or project. See my Video on StoryTelling Tip and Techniques.

Be Innovative. We talked about staying relevant, whether you are a company, product, or project manager. Innovation is a challenge. So the thing about how you innovate. How to keep your teams pliable and thinking about continuous improvement, well, continuously. See my video on 13 ways to innovate.

Know your Audience. You cannot engage if you don't know who your customer is. Create a persona that represents each type of customer, so you can know what they want and how they want it. I give you a free tool to create your Persona and explain it all here. 

Imagine the Journey. You may know your audience, but do you know the journey they want to take? Use this workshop-based design approach to build the journey (and get the workbook in the blog). Then create connections within the organization so that every department supports the ultimate journey.

Liz Hector is the Project Skills Mentor, and a certified Project Manager, with Marketing experience.