Is BX BS?
We all love an acronym don’t we? Well those of us in technology and marketing must do given the plethora that exist - UI, CMS, PIM, ERP, CRM, UX, UAT... the list goes on, interminably. And the ‘X’ ones aren’t right are they? ‘X’ stands for experience, which doesn’t even start with an X, but it’s become the accepted format - UX stands for User Experience, CX stands for Customer Experience and BX stands for, well if you haven’t heard of that one before, it’s ‘Brand Experience’.
That’s cleared that up then, but what actually is brand experience? Matt Michaluk creative director at branding agency JKR defines it like this:
“Put simply, Brand Experience is any way that someone interacts with a brand. Sounds obvious, but just like the term ‘Brand’ itself, it encompasses so much, so many interpretations, so many applications, and so many uses.
It’s also helpful to think about Brand Experience in relation to our other commonly used industry terminology. If your Brand is who you are, why you exist, what you believe, who you serve, if your Visual Identity is how you show up, how you express yourself, how you are recognised, then Brand Experience is how you behave, how you interact, how you connect with people.
We like to view Brand Experience not as a discipline, but instead as the greatest intersection of creative disciplines – where visual, verbal, and sensory, where physical, human, and digital worlds unite in service of creating a brand’s experience.”
Why is BX important?
It boils down to this:
A good experience is forgotten.
A bad experience is remembered.
A great experience is shared.
All businesses are looking for ways to make their brand stand out in an ever-more competitive marketplace. Brands need to be distinctive, but even the most beautiful visual identity will be undermined by a poor customer experience because this destroys trust. Dining out is one of the easiest examples to relate to; the restaurant looks great but the service was slow and the food poor, so we’re not going back. If it was really bad we might even take the time to give our opinion in a 1 star review.
Trust is the single most important factor in the brand experience because it takes the risk out of a transaction. We know they will deliver on their promises because they always do, at a price we’ve always accepted - even if we think it’s expensive, which is key. My own example would be Apple. I know they’re dearer than their competition for phones, tablets and computers, but I’ve been buying Apple products since the late 80s [yes, I do know that make me very old] but I’ve only ever had one hardware failure from literally hundreds of products bought over a 40 year plus period.
Clients are like balloons. Every time you deliver, you add another string to the balloon. If you do something exceptional you may add a few strings at once. The more strings you add the stronger the relationship. But whenever there’s a problem, be it quality, delay, faults, poor communication or even just an underwhelming experience, it’s like a pair of scissors comes along and cuts a load of the strings all at once. Sometimes it’s all of them and the client just floats away. At best, the relationship is left hanging by a thread but at least there’s a chance you can rescue things and start to add strings again. It can even be an opportunity, because a really good ‘above and beyond’ resolution can even add more strings.
The more strings there are, the less likely the balloon is to fly away and the more resilient the relationship becomes. In my Apple example, I was let down when the screen of a laptop failed, however they’d added lots of strings already and then they sorted it out really quickly so they added even more strings. It wouldn’t cross my mind to buy a phone, laptop or tablet that isn’t from Apple. But this is primarily a product example, what does this mean for business to business services? Or ‘B2B’ for those who prefer their acronyms.
The principles of BX still apply in B2B but the emphasis is different and it’s shifting. Doing a good job is just the baseline. It’s the bare minimum a client expects and that’s across all aspects from project delivery through to communications, the client relationship, presentation, the quality of work - the whole experience. It’s shifting because an already competitive marketplace is being reshaped by AI which can carry out much of the basic stuff perfectly well and very cheaply. This means that service providers have to become indispensable in the areas AI can’t. Most importantly this includes trust, which is built on a very strong client relationship [the strings] which is, in turn, founded on knowledge.
That knowledge has to be a deep and intimate understanding of the client’s business and the market it operates within. By building deep knowledge and then leveraging it within a strong client relationship, it allows you to be strategic and pro-active. You can pre-empt, shape their thinking and their decision making. This is of course needs a significant investment in time and resources so needs to be very focused and carefully determined on a per client basis, but where this adds value and tangible results, you will be delivering the ultimate brand experience.