Brand Experience

The 4 Levels of Experience

Mathew Duerden, co-author of Designing Experiences, once defined four types of experiences:

1. Ordinary (neutral feelings)

2. Memorable (evoking emotion creates a strong anchor)

3. Meaningful (some insight is gained)

4. Transformational (a change occurs)

Your goal, as a brand, is to facilitate the experience of levels 2, 3, and 4 for your market and customers.

Notice how one builds on the other. For example, from Ordinary to Memorable, you go from no emotion to evoking emotion.

Then that emotion carries into level 3. How can you have meaningful insight without feeling something?

And how can you have transformation without the insight gained from level 3?

The standard for business has been to get to level 2—evoking some kind of emotion from either a marketing (pre-purchase), product (purchase), or customer experience (post-purchase).

Levels 3 and 4 have become the realm of the legendary, achieved by unicorns and well-known brands—consistently.

The challenge? It doesn’t take long for the “memorable” of today to become the “ordinary” for tomorrow. Customer expectations evolve when fringe brands break the old standard and establish a new baseline for interaction and experience.

Designing experiences

Providing extraordinary experiences doesn’t necessarily require a massive budget. What it does require is an understanding of your customers, a little bit of imagination, and a focus on how you can make their interaction with your brand extraordinary.

Here's how to leverage each type of experience:

From Ordinary to Memorable:

1. Personalized Interactions: Could you use customer data to personalize communications? This could be as simple as personalized product recommendations based on browsing and purchasing history.

2. Excellent Customer Service: Could you offer quicker response times, and offer more friendly, helpful service so every transaction stands out a bit more?

3. Unique Packaging: Could you design your packaging to surprise and delight? Maybe add a personalized note, or even a free sample can make receiving an order feel special.

4. User-Friendly Website: Could you make sure your site easier to navigate, more visually appealing, or faster? How could you make the shopping experience more memorable?

From Memorable to Meaningful:

Share Your Story: Could you share the story behind your brand, your mission, and the people behind your products? Have you told the story of your business to someone else? What was their reaction?

Impactful Buying: Could you show customers how their purchase makes a difference, whether it's supporting small businesses, fair-trade, or a donation to a good cause?

Educational Content: Could you offer valuable content that helps customers make better choices or use your products more effectively?

Create Community: Could you create a sense of community among through social media, forums, or customer clubs? What would they rally around?

Customer Appreciation: How could you show some more appreciation for customers? What would make for a memorable loyalty program? What special offers could you give to repeat customers?

From Meaningful to Transformational:

Goal-Oriented Programs: Could you offer a program that helps customers achieve their goals? Could be a fitness program for a sports apparel store, or skincare routines for a beauty store, or maybe DIY project guides for a craft store.

Personal Coaching or Support: Does your market need more personalized advice? Then offer 1:1 consultations to help customers make meaningful progress towards their goals.

Comprehensive Learning Opportunities: What skills could you teach through an online course or live webinar?

Challenges or Contests: Could you create a challenge or contest related to your product?

Community Support: Could you facilitate an ongoing community where customers can share their challenges, progress, and successes?

Could you do some of these things without a huge budget? Yes. But here’s the key: how well do you understand your customers?

In next week’s issue, we’ll dive into this a bit more.

Sameness kills brands. Copycatting and fast-following isn’t a sustainable strategy. Designing unique experiences for your market and customers creates separation—and more loyalty.

The questions are simple:

• How are you designing emotional experiences?

• How will you help others gain more insight?

• How are you helping people to change, not just buy more stuff?

Creating unique experiences around your product and brand is more than just looks. It’s comes from your identity, your unique purpose, and what you value.

When you come from a place of authentic identity, good things happen.

Marketing Experience

How will Google’s AI Generative Search play out for eCommerce?

A good piece on generative search. Some highlights:

• Snippets replaced by AI generated Snapshots

• Sites shown in the AI Snapshot carousel are not the same links as shown in the classic search results

• How do you rank within the Snapshot carousel?

• High intent searches for products produce the most aggressive results, showing rows of products — but what’s the criteria?

• It will take time to fine-tune the results. How do you “SEO” AI generated search results?

Get ready for a wild ride.

User Experience

Shoppers want a better eCommerce search experience

Speaking of search, Constructor asked 462 people what they thought of shopping for products on their favorite eCommerce sites—excluding Amazon.

Six out of 10 (60%) said the search function is due for an upgrade.

Nearly half (46%) say they want results that better reflect what they’re looking for. On top of that:

• 41% want better filtering

• Personalized results — 1 in 5 shoppers (20%) say their experiences with that retailer are not personalized at all

• And, surprisingly, the ability to “type full sentences into a search bar and have it actually understand” (hello conversational search)

For 1 out of 3 shoppers, it takes 3 minutes to find what they’re looking for. That seems pretty good for me. What do you think?

People really want personalization, even if it’s driven by AI

Shoppers want more personalization (65%), ChatGPT (29%) or some other AI that can tailor results based on shopper preferences (25%).

Let’s talk about AI and CX more in the next section.

Customer Experience

Immersive Experiences

According to Zendesk’s CX Trends 2023, people crave more immersive experiences. What does that mean? According to them:

Is this a mind-blowing insight for you? Maybe. Maybe not. But these trends are shaping the future of CX:

It’s clear that AI is resetting customer expectations. The tech to make these experiences possible is not just feasible for your average brand, but affordable.

Despite AI trending up, people still have their reservations. Concerns about privacy, human displacement, “hallucinations”, etc. will still lurk until they don’t. But that’s to be expected with any new technology. As AI improves, some of these concerns will dwindle, and perhaps others will exacerbate. We’ll see.

The top 5 ways orgs use AI in the US right now

The 24/7 always on service, the instant answers to FAQs, and to take some of the burden from live humans is a big win for most businesses.

Employee Experience

Yelp embraces WFH because of record net revenue for 6 quarters straight

Carmen Whitney Orr, Yelp’s chief people officer, cited Yelp’s most recent earnings as evidence that a remote-first approach is working for the company.

The company reported record net revenue of $312 million for the sixth quarter in a row this March, beating analysts’ estimates by 2.19%, though it also recorded a loss of almost $1.2 million in the first quarter.

Guess WFH isn’t all bad 🤔

Read the story here.

Data Experience

The Brand Reputation Rankings, visualized

It probably won’t surprise you to see who’s at the top of the heap of meaningful brands—and who’s holding on for dear life on the tail end.