Seamless brand experience – a desire of all the customers, and of course the marketers. Call it brand experience or customer experience, it’s something that you and me, the modern customers are subconsciously expecting our brands to deliver. To put it simply, it means that I as a consumer want a rich experience when I am dealing with everything around. Be it my smartphone, apps, social media sites, newspapers, television channels, billboards, emails etc… If you notice, the world has not only gone digital but also has gone beautiful. That is the role design has played in changing our experience with brands. We have got used to seeing beautiful things around and who doesn’t want to see beautifully designed elements around. Yes, design doesn’t mean a splash of color. Design is an art. Design is balance. Design is impulsion. Design is that aspect of product or service which can influence the audience to behave in a desired way without even the audience knowing that he/she is influenced.
Everything that we see, creates a certain perception in our mind that we are generally not aware of in conscious state. The saying that First impression is the last impression holds so true especially today when we have such a little attention span. Brands spend huge amount of money for creating brand theme, logo, guidelines and then spending further to ensure that those guidelines are followed. The elements in guidelines differ from brand to brand depending on how big or small they are and how visually sensitive the audience is. A brand selling high end designer home appliances will define a guideline even for micro elements like bullet, line, drop down etc…Reason, they are dealing with the audience who are most probably interior designers or architects. This kind of audience is driven by visual appearance as they are highly visual sensitive or left brained. One dot in a wrong format has the potential to distort their attention.
Imagine a world where Coke in different locations used a different Red. Would the impact have been same? Would the perception differ? Would the loyalty remain? Maybe yes or maybe no.. Absence of design might not necessarily impact your market share or mind share in a negative way but yes, presence of same will definitely have a positive impact on perception, engagement, loyalty etc…
Design plays a very big role in shaping the personality of a brand. Be it youthful, be it elegant, be it economical. Every design defines the brand’s personality. Brands start with defining their personality and then creating design that depicts their personality. Further brand design guidelines are created so as to ensure smooth brand experience for their customers. With advent of technology the world is your market and so it is highly important that your customer in China gets the same brand experience as the customer in Netherlands.
Some key pointers to keep in mind while designing a website, an application or even a banner ad for your customers:
- Keep it as simple as possible
- Don’t clutter with information
- Use subtle colors. Bright colors don’t often work well.
- Make the design intuitive. A visitor should find it very simple to move around.
- Keep the most important information upfront.
- Be straight and to the point in your content. It’s a bad idea to make visitors think.
- Don’t make fun of your audience in your content copy.
- And, of course, whatever you design, keep your audience in mind. Don’t think if you would click on that button on top right corner of the page, think whether your visitor will click on that button or not.
To give you a simple example of a brand which did everything very aesthetically, yeah you guessed it right, it’s Apple Inc. It won’t be wrong to say that Steve Jobs and his love for simplicity brought design revolution in the tech world. In the times when we had big bulky phones, he (and John Ive) gave the world a small rectangular bar with simplest design. It meant to be extremely functional and convenient while avoiding the high-tech look- just how a common man wants.
Design and technology goes hand-in-hand. Even a great, aesthetically high brand needs the power of technology to understand their customer’s preferences first.
One thing that we marketers are blessed with in today’s date is innovative marketing technology that helps you know your customers. Powerful marketing automation tools like FirstHive enables us to broadcast SMSes, Emails, run Social Media campaigns and that too all integrated on one platform. All you need to do is create a campaign theme, adapt the design as per different platforms and mediums and there you are..ready to deliver seamless brand experience.
Do visit www.firsthive.com, login, run campaign and share with us your experience.
