When you think about a brand, you often visualise an object, campaign or symbol in your mind – perhaps the shape of a bag, a shoe, a place, or even a taste. These elements play a significant role in brand association.
Businesses that align their brand and customer experience (CX) deliver on their vision and truly understand their customer’s journey to find the moments to delight them.
A key part of brand association, which contributes to loyalty is how the brand makes customers feel, and the experience associated with that feeling. Your brand is the experience customers have with it. It’s how the brand is embodied through your products, spaces, channels and people, as well as how distinct the delivery across those components is that generates your branded experience.
The experience should be unique and recognisable as your brand across your customer touchpoints, to reinforce who you are and what you stand for.
The moments across a customer’s journey where you stand out, recognised by customers as a delivery that is unique only to your brand, is what we at Engine call ‘signature experiences’.
These signature experiences have the ability to build an emotional connection with customers and can strengthen brand loyalty, making you stand out from the competition.
The importance of an effective branded signature experience
If your signature experience is going to enhance your customer experience, it needs to be memorable and impactful. Here are some of the characteristics that can help build a signature experience:
Consistency – build trust and reassurance with your customers. It’s important to be consistent across all touchpoints, on and offline. The experience should feel seamless, with the same tone, design and service quality.
Branded delivery – the signature experience should reflect what the brand stands for and its personality, and the service delivery should embody the qualities of how the brand should feel.
Take Emirate Airlines as an example. How a crew member engages with customers on a flight is very different to how another airline might engage. Emirates are sophisticated, elegant and luxurious to reflect their brand personality of professionalism. That delivery will also make customers feel a certain way.
Emotional connection – an experience that makes your customers feel something positive can turn a one-time transaction into a lifelong relationship.
Think about any brand that you’ve had a relationship with for many years. What is it about that brand that keeps you with them?
The answer is most likely to come down to – it's easy, the staff are great, the space is welcoming, and you get value for money. Most likely it’s all of these combined, but one stands out, which tips your decision to engage with that brand and become a loyal customer.
Often, it’s the way they do something and how that makes you feel that other brands don’t get right for you, for your needs and expectations.
The power of differentiation
Standing out in today’s competitive market requires more than just good products or services – it demands differentiation. This differentiation needs to be unique to your brand, instantly recognisable, and resonate deeply with your customers. It’s not just about being different, it’s about being relevant in a way competitors can’t replicate.
At Engine, we believe that forging strong emotional connections between your brand and your customers is the cornerstone of success. To achieve this, we partner with our clients to uncover what their customers truly need – both functionally and emotionally – and how their brand can meet these needs at every touchpoint.
Unite Students, the UK’s leading student accommodation provider, faced the challenge of many of their prospective students coming from abroad and needing guidance and reassurance when making the important decision of where to live. This wasn’t just a practical decision – it was a deeply emotional one, that for many, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So, finding the right home is critical to feeling secure and excited about their journey.
Recognising this, we collaborated with Unite Students to create Student Ambassadors, a new role that would bridge the gap between the brand and potential residents. Who better to represent the student experience than students themselves?
This immediately created a personal connection. The way the Student Ambassadors delivered tours and information to potential students abroad was done in a unique style to Unite Students’ brand. The Ambassadors became a signature experience of the Unite Students brand – one that differentiates them from other student residences and local private landlords.
Elevating the experience
Creating differentiation isn’t limited to any one industry – it’s about embedding your brand’s personality into every aspect of the customer journey. When Virgin Hotels approached us, their goal was clear: to find new ways to inject their brand personality into their hotel business that offered guests a unique experience to keep them coming back.
We developed a customer experience vision and a set of signature experiences unique to the hotel to address the findings around what guests really hated about staying in hotels.
We also developed innovative ways to address these issues – creating differentiation for guests through a set of signature experiences delivered in a way that was unique to Virgin’s brand that included integrating technology to encourage customers to interact with their hotel via their smartphone and an in-room personal assistant.
It’s important to remember that your brand should reinforce and enhance your CX. Any company in any sector can create signature experiences that elevate their customers’ experiences, connect with customers emotionally, increase brand association and engagement, and create that differentiation in the market to set their experience apart.
Are you looking to reimagine your customer experience and create a signature experience, so you can stand out from the competition? Get in touch with one of our CX experts.
