The Difference Between Brand Experience and Customer Experience
Brand experience specialists work to make their brand easily distinguishable, so the audience can recognize it through specific traits or through the tone of voice used across the channels where the brand lives and broadcasts varied messages. In this article, I try to plant a seed for a question many have asked: is customer experience the same as brand experience? Are they two sides of the same coin?
An Introductory Example
Take a novel as an example. The author conveys the brand experience by describing the main character in detail so the reader can imagine and visualize them. Readers can read a dialogue between several characters in the novel without their names being mentioned each time, and still figure out who is speaking — thanks to the novelist’s success in firmly establishing the characters in the readers’ minds.
The customer experience of reading this novel, on the other hand, is embodied in the emotions formed in the readers’ minds and the feelings the novel leaves behind — the echo it stirs in their chests thanks to its carefully chosen words during and after reading. It’s also tied to their desire to re-read it many times, to buy copies to gift to friends and family, or at least to recommend it to them, or to write a review on Goodreads.
The Gap Between Them
The purpose of marketing revolves around brand positioning, deploying marketing strategies, and using the elements of the marketing mix to build consumer expectations. The purpose of customer experience is to deliver an easy, smooth, and consistent experience across all touchpoints of the customer journey. The gap occurs in any company (even when CX is part of the marketing department) when the two strategies are developed in isolation (each develops its strategy separately).
This problem is the root of evil. If the brand makes attractive promises that pull customers in, but the actual customer experience does not match those promises, the brand’s reputation will ultimately be damaged due to this institutional dissonance.
In a book I recently read titled We’re Doing CX Wrong… And How To Get It Right by Nicholas Zeisler, the author critiques some popular CX metrics and proposes a simple metric he calls the Brand Alignment Score. Its main purpose is to measure the gap between promise and reality. The question is posed as: “Our brand promise is (X). Based on your most recent experience, to what extent did we deliver on this promise?” The author didn’t specify whether the metric is on a 5- or 10-point scale. The important thing is that it include a quantitative component and an open-ended question (qualitative) to learn the customer’s view when the rating is low.
Which Is More Important, or Which Comes First?
This question is like asking “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Both are important. To be fair, I think brand experience comes first in many companies — and in such companies there may not be a CX function or person at all. Professionally, who comes first doesn’t matter; what matters is narrowing the gap discussed in the previous section.
I’d be exaggerating, even sounding arrogant, if I said delivering an exceptional customer experience can replace investment in marketing because customers will market the brand for free through word of mouth. This idea isn’t realistic. Reality requires every company to invest in marketing no matter how outstanding the experience. The result is that customer experience and brand experience complement each other — one cannot do without the other.
If brand experience is about the feelings the customer has toward the company, customer experience is about the feelings the customer has about themselves when interacting with the company. Bridging the gap that arises from a lack of coordination between them is the secret to success. There must be alignment between the two on setting and managing customer expectations and on the brand promise.
Customer Experience Is the Big Umbrella!
When practitioners describe customer experience as a very big umbrella that encompasses multiple disciplines such as user experience, brand experience, or marketing, we aren’t understood or accepted. It’s as if we’re saying, indirectly, that we have custodianship over them and that those disciplines should sit organizationally under CX — and that isn’t accurate. In many companies, all of the above disciplines may sit in different parts of the org chart and there’s still harmony and noteworthy success.
I prefer to compare CX to the pituitary gland, which sends signals to all the body’s other glands (departments) to push them to create a hormonal balance in the body (the company) and deliver an experience worthy of customers. But in the end, you can’t do without the other glands. If one becomes sluggish, the pituitary can’t do its job, the body becomes disordered, and symptoms of a sluggish gland appear that negatively reflect on the experience the customer receives.
The Cold War
Many marketers don’t realize the impact of their marketing messages on resetting customer expectations or on giving explicit or implied promises (despite their colleagues in other departments being unable to deliver on them). Here comes the role of the customer’s defense attorney (CX) to stand in the way of releasing these ads or messages, calling for them to be stopped or for certain modifications to be made to ensure the company can deliver. If those running brand experience are giving the promises, the role of those running customer experience is to ensure those promises are kept.
On the topic of keeping the promise specifically, CX specialists should be consulted before launching any visual, audio, or print ad — until the marketing and brand team members have the right mindset and sufficient empathy to deliver content that’s easy to understand, with a clear customer call-to-action, that doesn’t raise expectations, and that contains promises the provider can deliver on.
Customer Experience Is the New Marketing
I’d almost assert that having an outstanding marketing team that attends to all seven elements of the marketing mix (the 7 P’s) — not the updated thirteen — would eliminate the need for a dedicated CX function. But I haven’t found a company yet that has mastered all elements of the mix. Most companies focus on promotion more than any other element. I lean toward the hypothesis that customer experience is the new marketing.
It’s very important to remind our brand colleagues that customers, in the end, value what they encounter on the ground when experiencing the service or product — not what they see or hear about it through promises.
Imagine a smartphone app with breathtaking interface design but a miserable user experience — many features don’t work or lead to dead ends. Will that app succeed?
Take corporate values as an example: does the company truly hold itself to the values it claims to believe in and to use as a compass in its daily decisions? Or are they just lifeless slogans on the walls? If they’re just slogans, employees and customers will feel negatively because the company claimed what it doesn’t practice.
In Closing
It’s said that “by opposites, things are known.” This article is just a humble attempt to bring the concepts together — not to draw separating lines or favor one field over the other. I hope I’ve succeeded. As a final conclusion: brand experience and customer experience complement each other (like male and female), and one cannot do without the other; neither is favored over the other; and the points of similarity and the relationship between them are greater than the points of difference.
The cover image is inspired by a book written by Lewis Carbone, one of the veterans of our field and one of its spiritual fathers. I highly recommend it to all practitioners in our field — it’s a foundational, top-tier book. The author lays out the complementary relationship between customer experience and brand experience by saying: a company’s brand value is built on the commercial value derived from the consumer’s perception of the brand; this perception is built on the value generated by the customer’s feelings about themselves when interacting with the brand (the customer experience); and that experience in turn creates loyalty to the company’s products/services, ultimately leading to financial results or a rise in the company’s share value.
Related concepts: CX ROI Model, Voice of Customer (VoC).
← Articles MOC