Your brand is your logo, values, and promise–how you perceive yourself and your strategy to create that perception.
Your customer experience (CX) is how you deliver on those perceptions through interactions.
Traditionally, companies practice brand and CX across two different departments–with little overlap. But why are these two areas often siloed when they depend so much on one another?
Brands that deliver high-value customer experiences are far more likely to gain greater customer loyalty, according to Gartner. And cross-departmental collaboration on CX is becoming increasingly important for marketers as CX outcomes are proven to diminish when brands take a siloed approach. Integrating brand and CX creates meaningful and memorable experiences, helping you gain and maintain loyal customers.
So why aren’t more brands challenging the rules around brand and CX?
Rethinking branding in the age of experience
The number of outlets where people can interact with your brand is infinite. Brands are gaining visibility and scaling thanks to the seemingly limitless influencer, social media, and gaming marketing opportunities.
Identifying individual touchpoints throughout the customer journey helps build a tailor-made and memorable experience. However, as these touchpoints are more diffused across various influencers, advocates, and platforms, it is much harder to control them.
These touchpoints are where a strong brand experience becomes crucial.
Brands must do more than copy and paste their brand strategy across all platforms, expecting it to make the same impact. There is a growing desire for “realness” from brands rooted in trust and authenticity. Therefore, brands that do not offer a consistent experience that delivers on their promise with every interaction will fall short.
Digging deep into your brand purpose and allowing it to guide the customer experience gently lends itself naturally to a memorable connection with your customers.
Building an experience rooted in brand promise
Every interaction that consumers have with your brand shapes the way they think about, perceive and behave toward it. To build a brand and experience that connects to consumers, you need to genuinely understand your audience and ensure they genuinely understand your brand.
The interactions a customer has with your brand should offer a memorable experience that evokes positive emotions and alleviates the challenges they face. Even small improvements have the potential to make your customers’ lives easier.
A strong CX comes from looking at your brand through your customer’s eyes, recognizing their needs and pain points, and addressing those with each interaction. Delivering a CX that practically connects to your brand’s core purpose eliminates any discrepancy between expectation and reality and provides the consistency that will earn customer trust. The more customers trust your brand, the more likely they will return.
When executed correctly, the customer experience should be the practical application of the principles and values of your brand coming to life. Market research can also inform the purpose and values of your brand based on what your customers need. Still, you shouldn’t sacrifice your brand identity but let it shine through every interaction.
Brand and CX: time to break down the silos
Communicating purpose and values through messaging is more important than ever. However, reinforcing these values through every interaction creates a consistent experience that leads to customers developing a deep emotional connection to your brand. This combination, rather than each piece individually, drives brand loyalty and advocacy.
A combined approach to brand and CX will help your brand stand out and build a memorable connection with consumers that keeps them coming back.
It will ensure you establish and communicate your brand values and remain consistent as your brand grows, especially in the age of influencers, creators, and digital worlds, when audience trust and engagement are paramount.
A strong brand identity aligned with a seamless and engaging CX reinforces both.
Combining brand + CX for JET’s first global campaign
DEPT® partnered with Just Eat Takeaway (JET) to build and execute its first-ever global campaign following the company merger in 2022. Together, we defined core elements of the brand’s identity and built experiential touchpoints that embodied the JET brand and solidified a loyal customer base. Our team of top minds in strategy, creative, tech, and data worked to help JET expand online and develop its social presence, translating and extending the brand’s innate “feeling of joy” throughout the customer journey.
We built upon the fantastical world created in the Katy Perry TV commercial to help the brand spread joy across 17 markets in 21 different languages and solidify its famous “Did somebody say…” tagline as a ubiquitous slogan worldwide.
We defined three core pillars of strategy for the campaign:
The what – delivering joy. We built a strategy that would synonymize the JET brand with the joy and excitement of ordering take out.
The how – we aimed to find a global solution to local challenges, we built platform-first creative that was unmistakingly JET to ensure the core of the brand didn’t get lost as they multiplied and expanded on an international level.
The who – JET is a brand for everyone. We created universally-relevant content to drive positive brand sentiment, awareness and spread joy.
Throughout each phase of the campaign, we integrated the core brand elements – putting Katy Perry front and center, the power of the track for ‘sound on’ environments, dialing up the ‘Did somebody say…’ sonic and situating everything into the entertaining and ownable world that is distinctive to JET – into every interaction. Recognizing that the audience is savvy and instantly knows if they are being sold, we dialed into distinctiveness and consistency of creative and production elements.
With brand identity guiding the execution of the entire campaign, every interaction produced the satisfying feeling of ordering food and the excitement of awaiting its arrival, both of which are the core of the JET brand. We increased top-of-mind awareness, drove 1.2 billion global impressions, and predominantly positive sentiment.
The impact of overlap
Brand and CX ideally should work hand-in-hand, influencing each other as you continue to research, learn and develop. Even when they belong to separate departments, a transition towards integrating them should be a priority.
In the Venn diagram of brand and customer experience, DEPT® lives in the overlap between the two. And our work focuses on expanding that space. We approach branding and CX simultaneously to help you strike a balance between organizing and amplifying marketing efforts as your brand grows in today’s market.
Questions?
Head of Strategy