By Lionell Schuring VP of creative, Mobiquity

What are your values as a company and how are these being communicated through customer experiences? Is your brand experience aligning with your promise to customers?

Traditionally, the number of interactions with a brand was relatively low and streamlined for customers. For example, experiences could be focused around traditional advertising touchpoints, such as TV commercials or billboard advertising.

Today, interactions between customers and brands have soared as digitisation has increased the number of touchpoints for users, from social media to mobile applications. This is both an opportunity and a challenge for brands. In each and every one of these interactions, businesses can achieve their promise to customers by delivering a positive brand experience - which will in turn help to retain and grow customers. At the same time, brands that fail to deliver on their brand promise risk losing brand equity, and losing customers.

Removing business frictions by aligning brand promise with brand experience

Evidence shows that there is a direct link between brand loyalty and customer retention. According to Gartner, customer experience drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming factors such as price. Therefore, it is a corporate priority for companies to close the gap between brand promise and brand experience to remove business frictions in the customer sales journey.

To ensure the alignment between brand promise and experience is successful, brands need to gain ‘buy in' from customers across all user touchpoints; branding needs to fit seamlessly in each user interaction, in both the physical and digital customer journey - meeting customer expectations based on the company's promise to them. In addition, this will help to make a brand more recognisable and connected to its customer base, enabling businesses to deliver a brand experience that goes beyond just the products and services on offer.

The benchmark for companies connecting their brand promise with brand experience are companies like Peloton. Peloton has built a brand and developed an experience that goes beyond the bike, delivering a seamless and connected experience fostering an inclusive community among its customers.

Remaining agile in brand experience through dynamic branding

Dynamic branding and listening to customer demands and market trends constantly is an effective way of closing the gap between the brand's promise and its experience. For example, companies using dynamic branding operate as a ‘living brand', retaining the core brand at its foundation while taking a sector agnostic approach to customer experiences of new products and services.

Dynamic branding also helps businesses to remain agile across all stages of a digital transformation journey - evolving brand experience in response to feedback from the market.

Overall, branding is more than just making better features and developing technology for technology's sake. Brand experience must fit into the wider brand promise of a company, and through dynamic branding businesses can ensure that a potential disconnect is eradicated - reaping the benefits of enhanced customer loyalty and profitability.