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Home ›› Business Value and ROI ›› 6 Key Questions to Guide International UX Research ›› Creating a Customer Ecosystem Using Brand Experience Metaphors

Creating a Customer Ecosystem Using Brand Experience Metaphors

by Tom Schneider
3 min read
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Choosing a metaphor that helps us identify a brand’s character can provide a launching point for creating an effective customer journey.

Brand experience metaphors are based on real world interactions and help bring a brand’s nature, character, and function to life. Discovering a brand experience metaphor facilitates effective brand planning based on accurate user ecosystems and can lead to designing effective customer journeys that yield measurable results when planning campaigns and user touch points across channels (online, print, mobile, in-store, app, etc.).

So what exactly are brand experience metaphors? They are real world experience metaphors that show a brand’s identity and role in customers’ lives. Brands today are expected to be much more than simply purveyors of passive products, they must strive to be active participants in customer lives. Brands are expected to be interactive elements that add value and meaning. An experience metaphor attempts to capture the most meaningful brand interaction in order to bring to life the relevance and meaning that a brand delivers to a customer.

What do Brand Experience Metaphors Look Like?

For examples of a couple of competing brand experience metaphors, let’s look briefly at the soda marketplace. Keeping in mind slogans like “have a Coke and smile,” “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” and “Open happiness,” we may choose taking a walk while holding hands as Coke’s brand metaphor. When looking at Mountain Dew—a brand more often associated with extreme sports—we may turn to something more active, such as riding a skateboard or mountain biking.

Brands can be defined by the actions contained within their brand experience metaphors

The metaphor we choose allows us to identify the brand character and provides a launching point for further exercises that will eventually allow us to build an effective customer journey. With that we can align meaningful brand touch points that drive engagement and reinforce the brand’s value.

Turning Metaphors into Ecosystems

Once we choose or discover an accurate brand experience metaphor we can utilize it to take the next steps toward creating a brand and user ecosystem. Let’s walk through the process looking at a completely different brand. If we take the example of Brand X, a product used to combat overactive bladder in women (a syndrome that can be exasperated by drinking too much soda) we may choose watching a kids’ soccer game far from a restroom as the brand experience metaphor. Using that metaphor, we then place it at the center of a diagram to start making an affinity map.

affinity map

Figure 1: Brand Experience Metaphor Affinity Map

As we create the affinity map we want to add similar experiences and think about possible brand touch points that compliment or add value for the customer. We should seek to include experiences from multiple channels within the map.

In the affinity map we can see related experiences that begin to set up opportunities for designing branded touch points that both aid the customer’s experience and reinforce the brand’s value and character. Resulting touch points are then rooted in the user and brand ecosystem and embedded with relevance and meaning.

Metaphor to Marketing Continuum

The next step is to align these touch points across the basic marketing continuum of awareness, engagement, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. Doing this, we begin outlining possible customer journeys. In the theoretical customer journey, we then can lay out the existing brand assets in the marketplace that can be leveraged to drive a truly effective program architecture.

The end result should be a program architecture that is rooted in the brand’s nature as elicited through the brand experience metaphor. The subsequent brand planning then becomes an integrated and meaningful customer engagement strategy that avoids the pitfalls of merely throwing disconnected tactics against the wall and checking the box on the most popular channels.

customer journey

Figure 2: Program Architecture with Customer Journey

Conclusion

There’s a growing recognition that we’re moving away from B2C and B2B relationships toward simply H2H (Human to Human) relationships. In a world where brands become personifications, brand experience metaphors will become as useful in user experience and brand planning fields as personas have been over the past couple of decades. It’s been said that a man is defined by his actions; and in the same way, brands may be defined by the actions contained within their brand experience metaphors.

 

Image of skateboarder courtesy homydesign/Shutterstock

post authorTom Schneider

Tom Schneider
Tom Schneider is a former VP of The Usability Professionals Association (Philadelphia) and the UX Partner of UX&ART (www.uxandart.com). He is the creator of UserXman; the user experience super-hero, and is currently working on a new book, UX Alchemy: Transformational UX Design. Tom studied philosophy and painting before he was hired at Boeing as an artist. There he was tasked with designing Boeing's first corporate intranet. He helped establish some of the first information architecture best practices used in Web design and continued as a Art Director, Web Designer, and user experience advocate. He has spent the past 12-plus years in the advertising industry serving clients in aerospace, transportation, hospitality, B2B, healthcare, and consumer products. While at Rosetta he helped standardize the practice of Program Architecture and experience design while focusing on personalized experiences and designing experience programs to drive users through the marketing continuum of awareness, engagement, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. Tom spent a year in Moscow where he wrote the first of several screenplays and recently has undertaken songwriting much to the dismay of his kids; Mack, Ava, and Lydia.

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