Why Branding Is an Experience: Proof from 86% of Customers

Why Branding Is an Experience: Proof from 86% of Customers

I see it every week. A bright-eyed entrepreneur, buzzing with excitement, shows me their new logo. 

They’ve spent weeks, sometimes months, and often thousands of pounds getting it right. The colour palette is perfect, the typography is sublime. It’s a work of art.

And I have to ask the question they don't want to hear: “What's it like to be your customer?”

The confident smile falters. Because they know the truth, their website takes seven seconds to load. Their customer service email has an auto-reply from three years ago. 

Their product is shipped in a generic box that looks like it's been kicked down a flight of stairs.

They haven't built a brand. They've just bought a costly coat of paint for a shed with a leaky roof.

Let's get one thing straight. Branding is an experience. It's the total, cumulative gut feeling a person has after every interaction with your business. 

Your logo is just the tiny, symbolic shortcut for that feeling. If the feeling is bad, the logo is worthless.

What Most People Get Wrong About “Branding”

The biggest mistake in business is confusing the wrapping paper with the present. Too many founders are obsessed with the wrapping paper.

This obsession is “The Logo Fetish.” It's the misguided belief that a beautiful visual identity can fix a flawed business. It cannot. A logo is a promise, and if your business operations don't keep that promise, your logo becomes a symbol of your failure to deliver.

It’s the most expensive lie in marketing.

Brand Identity vs. Brand Experience: A Crucial Distinction

To understand this, you must separate Brand Identity and Brand Experience.

Brand Identity is your collection of sensory assets. It's your logo, colour schemes, typography, photo style, and packaging design. It's the uniform your brand wears. It’s what you control.

Brand Experience is the actual event. It's what happens when a customer interacts with any part of your business. It's the quality of the product, the speed of your website, the tone of your emails, the helpfulness of your staff, and the ease of your returns process. It’s what your customer feels.

Think of it like a restaurant. The brand identity is the sign outside, the menu's design, and the staff's uniforms. The brand experience is the host's welcome, the chair's comfort, the chef's skill, the server's attentiveness, and the bathroom's cleanliness.

You can have the most beautiful menu in the world. If the food is cold and the server is rude, that's your brand.

The Experience Blueprint: Your Brand is the Sum of Every Touchpoint

Your brand isn't built in a design studio. It's built at hundreds of different points of contact, or “touchpoints.”

A touchpoint is any point of interaction between a customer and your company. The goal isn’t to make every single one a mind-blowing, firework-filled spectacle. The goal is to make them intentional, consistent, and frictionless.

Mapping the Customer Journey (Without the Corporate Fluff)

Forget complex software and expensive consultants. You can do this right now with a pen and paper. This is the first step to seeing your business as an experience.

Draw five columns: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Service, and Loyalty.

Now, list how a customer might interact with you in each stage. Don't censor yourself.

• Awareness: A social media ad, a Google search result, a mention in a podcast, a friend's recommendation.
• Consideration: Your homepage, a blog post, a product page, reviews, and a video demo.
• Purchase: Your product options, the shopping cart, the checkout process, the payment confirmation page, and the confirmation email.
• Service: The shipping notification, the box arriving, the unboxing, the product itself, instructions, and a customer support query.
• Loyalty: A follow-up email, a request for a review, your newsletter, a special offer for repeat customers.

That list is your brand. Each one of those items is a chance to build up or tear down the customer's perception of you.

The Mundane Touchpoints That Matter Most

Here’s where most businesses drop the ball. They focus on the “sexy” touchpoints like a Super Bowl ad or a viral video, but completely ignore the boring ones. This is a massive mistake.

Your brand is defined more by your invoice design than your Instagram feed.

Think about the most powerful and valuable brands in the world. Amazon’s brand isn't built on witty TV ads but on the predictable, frictionless experience of one-click ordering, fast shipping, and no-questions-asked returns. That's an experience built on mastering the mundane.

What does your 404 error page say? Is it a generic server message or a helpful, on-brand note guiding the user back? What does your email signature look like? Is your return policy written in confusing legal jargon or simple, helpful language?

These aren't details. They are the brand.

The Anatomy of a Brand Experience: Key Pillars to Build On

A great brand experience isn't an accident. It's designed. It’s a cohesive system where every part reinforces the others. We can break it down into four key pillars.

The Digital Experience: Your Website is Your Digital Handshake

Your website is not an online brochure. It is a functional tool. Its primary job is not to be beautiful; it's to be effective.

Is it fast? A study by Google found that 53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. A slow website is the digital equivalent of a shopkeeper turning their back on you as you walk in. It signals that you don’t respect the customer's time.

Is it clear? Can a first-time visitor understand what you do and how to buy it within five seconds? Or is it cluttered with vague marketing slogans and confusing navigation?

Clarity is kindness. Friction is disrespect. Getting this right is non-negotiable. A professional brand identity design process considers the user's digital journey as a foundation for the visual style.

The Human Experience: Every Employee is Your Brand Manager

You can spend a million pounds on a branding campaign, and one surly employee can destroy it all in a 30-second phone call.

The online shoe retailer Zappos famously built their entire brand on this pillar. They understood that their customer service line wasn't a cost centre; it was their most powerful marketing channel. Their reps are legendary for being helpful, empowered, and human. That is the Zappos brand. The logo just reminds you of it.

Contrast that with the experience of calling your bank or utility provider. The long hold times, the robotic scripts, the feeling that you're an inconvenience. That is also a brand experience—a powerful, and powerfully negative, one.

The tone of your support emails, the way you answer the phone, the language you use in live chat—these human interactions create far more potent memories than any colour palette.

The Product Experience: The Promise Your Logo Makes, Fulfilled

This is the moment of truth. Does the thing you sold do what you said it would? Is it as good as you claimed?

The experience begins the moment the package arrives—the unboxing. Apple are the undisputed master of this. Opening a new iPhone is a tactile, satisfying ritual. The box is dense and sturdy. The lid lifts off with a whisper of air pressure. The device is presented perfectly. Every tab and wrapper is designed for a seamless reveal.

This isn't an accident. It's a meticulously designed experience to reinforce their brand promise of simplicity, elegance, and quality before you've even turned the device on.

Now think about your product. Does the quality of your packaging match the price you charge? Does the product itself feel solid and well-made? A product that feels cheap or breaks after two uses is the most definitive brand statement you can make.

The Sensory Experience: Beyond the Screen

Branding is not just about what we see. It’s about what we hear, touch, and even smell.

Walk into a Lush cosmetics shop. You smell it from 20 feet away. That powerful, unique scent is a core part of their brand experience. It’s instantly recognisable and creates a strong memory.

Trader Joe's, the American grocery chain, crafts a unique in-store experience. The hand-drawn chalkboard signs, the friendly staff in Hawaiian shirts, the quirky product selection—it feels like a local market, not a corporate chain. That feeling is their brand, and people are fanatically loyal to it.

You can think about this even if you're purely an e-commerce business. What does your packing slip feel like? Is it printed on the thinnest, cheapest paper possible, or something with a bit of weight? Please include a thank-you note. Could you use branded tissue paper?

These sensory details create texture and reality around your brand, making it more memorable and tangible.

Case Studies in Total Brand Experience: Lessons from the Masters (and the Amateurs)

Theory is one thing. Reality is another. Let's look at how this plays out.

The Gold Standard: How Apple Makes You Feel Genius

Apple doesn't sell computers; it sells a feeling of creative empowerment. The entire brand experience is engineered to deliver this.

It starts with an ad showing creative people doing extraordinary things. You go to their website, which is clean, minimalist, and focuses on beautiful imagery of the product in action.

You enter an Apple Store, which feels more like a modern art gallery than a shop. Staff are knowledgeable and don't work on commission, so they feel like guides, not salespeople. You buy the product, and the unboxing is a sensory delight. You turn on the device, and the setup process is famously simple.

Every single touchpoint tells the same story: “This is simple. This is powerful. This is elegant.” The experience is so seamless that the high price feels justified.

The Human Standard: How Trader Joe's Sells Happiness

Trader Joe's could easily install self-checkout machines to cut costs. They don't. Why? Because forcing a human interaction with their famously cheerful staff is a core part of their brand experience.

They reject the soul-crushing efficiency of a typical supermarket for a deliberately quirky, human-centred experience. The product names are playful. The “Fearless Flyer” newsletter is written in a fun, distinctive voice. The entire business is optimised for employee happiness, directly translating into customer happiness.

Their brand isn't about low prices or massive selection. It's about the feeling of pleasant discovery and friendly interaction.

The Relatable Example: “The Corner Café”

You don't need a billion-dollar budget to do this. Consider two hypothetical coffee shops on the same street.

Café A: “The Designer Drip” They spent £10,000 on branding. They have a gorgeous, minimalist logo, custom-printed cups with clever sayings, and a stunningly designed interior perfect for Instagram. But the Wi-Fi is constantly dropping, the barista seems annoyed you exist, the music is too loud, and the tables are never quite clean. The brand promises “premium quality,” but the experience screams “we don't care.”

Café B: “Susan's Place” Their logo is simple, maybe even a bit dated. They use standard brown cups. But Susan, the owner, knows half the customers by name. The coffee is consistently excellent. The place is spotless. There's a little corkboard with photos of customers' dogs. The experience is warm, reliable, and welcoming.

Which café earns true loyalty? Which one becomes a beloved local institution? It's not the one with the better logo. It's the one with the better experience.

How to Start Building a Better Brand Experience (Today, with No Budget)

You don't need to hire a team of consultants. You can make a tangible difference to your brand experience for free.

Step 1: Become Your Customer

This is the most important and most overlooked exercise in business. Go through your entire process as if you were a brand-new customer.

• Google your product category and see how you show up.
• Navigate your website. Try to find a specific piece of information.
• Purchase your product. Use a different name and address.
• Sign up for your newsletter.
• Call your support number or send an email to your support address.

Be brutally honest. Document every single moment of friction, confusion, or annoyance. Where did you get stuck? What felt clunky? What made you roll your eyes?

Step 2: Fix the “Broken Windows”

In urban planning, the “broken window theory” suggests that visible signs of disorder (like a broken window) encourage more disorder and crime. The same applies to your brand.

Your self-audit will reveal your “broken windows.” A typo in your confirmation email. A dead link on your about page. A confusing step in the checkout process.

Fix these first. They might seem small, but they are constant, tiny signals to your customers that you lack attention to detail. Polishing these rough edges is the fastest way to improve your brand experience.

Step 3: Define Your “One Thing”

You can't be everything to everyone. You can't be the fastest, cheapest, and highest-quality. Trying to be will make you mediocre at everything.

Instead, decide on the one thing you want your brand experience to be known for.

• Are you the most helpful? Then your support needs to be world-class.
• Are you the fastest? Then your shipping and site speed must be flawless.
• Are you the most fun? Then your brand voice and packaging should be playful.
• Are you the most reliable? Then your product quality and consistency must be your obsession.

Pick one. Then, focus 80% of your experiential efforts on proving that one thing is undeniably true at every touchpoint.

When a New Visual Identity Does Make Sense

After all this, I'm not against investing in design. I'm not. I'm against investing in it for the wrong reasons at the wrong time.

A new visual identity isn't a starting point. It's a capstone.

You don't design a flag for a country with no constitution, laws, or people. You first establish what the nation stands for—its values, principles, and promises to its citizens. Then, you design a flag to symbolise all of that.

Your brand identity is your flag. It only has meaning once you've done the hard work of defining and building the experience it represents. When your visual identity is an authentic reflection of a great customer experience, it becomes incredibly powerful. It becomes a beacon for your customers and a badge of honour they are proud to associate with.

If you've done the hard work defining your brand experience and need a visual identity to match that substance, that's the right time to request a quote and talk to a professional.

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Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your website. It's the story your customers tell their friends after they've dealt with you. It's the feeling they're left with. It's the sum of a thousand small promises, kept.

Stop asking, “Do I like my logo?”

Start asking, “What is it like to be my customer?”

The answer to that question is your brand.

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Branding is an Experience FAQs

Your brand is being built or eroded with every email you send and every customer you speak to. If you’ve focused on creating an exceptional experience and are ready for a visual identity representing that substance, explore our Brand Identity services. To see how we’ve helped others, check out more real-world advice on our blog.