We've been talking a lot about brand experience these days. In an economy of attention more & more complicated, brands aim to focus again on consumers' journey, starting from research, buying behavior & finally ending on the diverse usages / consumption of the product or service over time.
A necessary long-time approach as in our liquid & "liquifying" economy, new usages or needs postpone the death of a product life cycle. Movie industry is good example: you go to the theater, you watch a DVD or VOD, you sell & buy goodies. Or you can even implement products' placement (thanks Thien for sharing the link). A Disney experience has proved for a long time the multiplying possibilities of a single idea. Mobile phones are now social browers, and that's also interesting: any OS update is a new opportunity to get new services or start again certain usages; things you could not imagine while you were in the conception phase.
In a SWOT approach (strengths, weaknesses, oppportunities, threats), we most of time go too fast on opportunities, letting them dependent on brand assets, instead of focusing on the real context. Good consultants generally do a deep work in order to understand what the core competences are. But they obviously leave interns & juniors working on PESTEL (or environment) analysis. They normally keep too little time to go back to these insights. The problem is that if you remain too focused on brand experience, so to say on the product at the early stage, you destroy huge potentialities, prospectives, which can occur or just appear thanks to a new context.
In our pervasive environment, we should therefore invest time in a new practice: brand inexperience.
The devil is in the details; we could challenge ourselves:
- in which ecosystem the brand should be present but seems invisible?
- in which tribes can we find the brand that is used in very original ways, that were not anticipated by the "brand experience administrator", so to say the brand value chain?
- to which level do the user understand and use the brand? Is there a pool of users who drive the brand down or at perfectly immature stage? (think about Palm 10 years ago and compare it to iPhone today: we're still smartphones' teenagers. All.)