THE BRAND EXPERIENCE DISCONNECT
What it is, and why it matters.
In its most simple form, brand experience is how a customer feels throughout their interaction with your brand. It’s about how they feel before, during, and after making a purchase, or investing in a service.
Much like many other things in branding, brand experience is something that can go consciously unnoticed, but subconsciously it has a huge impact on a customer’s likelihood to rave about you, or to leave feeling ‘meh’.
The golden key with brand experience, is that you want the way your business looks to be perfectly aligned with the way the customer feels. So, if your branding and website looks very casual, laidback, and friendly, then when a customer comes in-store, you wouldn’t have your staff wearing suits.
I had an experience with a (not-to-be-named) pilates studio recently that sums this up perfectly.
Here’s how it felt at each stage of the experience:
Before:
For starters, their logo and branding is really minimal and elevated. I don’t want to name names, so I’m not going to show you their logo, but it feels very of-the-moment, with a minimal cream & charcoal colour palette. While scrolling on their Instagram I was seeing images of a studio with beautiful sheer curtains, a backlit mirror, and a polished concrete floor, surrounded by white walls and some plants in the corner. An absolutely beautiful space, that looked super stunning, sleek, and profesh.
To book in, obviously I took their pricing into account, and they were noticeably pricing themselves on the upper end of the market. No problem. I was keen to try this studio and it looked super beautiful, so I was happy to pay it.
The point is, before getting to the class, the brand experience had been built up to feel elevated and premium.
During:
So I get to the studio, walk in, took off my shoes and put my stuff down in the waiting area. I walked into the mat room to see everyone else going to grab their mat from the corner. Immediately this felt a bit off. Since the mats are supplied my gut reaction was ‘Why don’t they have the mats already set up?’.
Because, having the mats already set up would mean that a) the customers don’t have to set up their mats themselves, and b) the mats would be perfectly spaced out in even rows. This studio didn’t even have marks on the floor to guide the placement of the mat, it was quite literally a free for all. Although the rows turned out fairly even, they weren’t perfect, again taking away from that premium customer experience that had been established in the before.
All of that left my mind very quickly once the class started. No biggie. But when the class was in session, I couldn’t help but notice a couple more things too.
Firstly, the instructor was using her phone as a timer. And she wasn’t just using it as a timer next to the mat, that would’ve at least been a bit better. She was actually holding it while she walked around the class giving prompts and cues. I could even see the timer screen on her phone. Numbers, orange button and all. Which, again, because I expected quite an elevated experience, this felt a bit off. As my expectations had been built, I would’ve instead expected to see a discreet handheld or waistband sports timer in place of this. The phone waving around was also quite distracting. And if you’ve learnt a thing or two about public speaking, you’ll understand how much of a difference it makes when you hold your phone in your hand, vs putting it out of sight.
By now, that customer experience is really cracking. But, I was too focussed on my glutes burning like crazy to care that much. I locked these thoughts away knowing I’d use them for a blog post later. We push on.
This one really set it for me. The instructor then began changing the music on the iPad that was up the front. Wouldn’t an elevated experience call for a pre-planned class playlist to match the length and intensity of the workout? I would’ve thought so.
After:
The whole before experience built me up to expect a really premium, professional and elevated experience, but that’s not how I felt while I was there. That’s the disconnect. The crack in the brand experience where the feeling starts to fall apart.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not me having a whinge about having to go and grab my own mat. I really couldn’t care less about that. But being someone who works in branding every day, what I care about is the brand experience. And for a brand that had so strongly built up this feeling in the before, it was such a surprise for that brand experience to feel very unaligned with my expectations.
Since everything from their website to their Instagram feed felt quite boujee, the whole experience also needed to feel the same way. Down to every tiny detail.
