The Connection Between Successful Branding & Customer's Experience
“Most often, a customer chooses first a brand, and then a product of the brand (Kapferer, Jean-Noël, 2010).” Much can be said about the evolution of modern branding from starting off as a label on products and ending up as icons of meaning. A brand can be defined as a value cluster that enables a promise to be made about a unique and welcomed experience.
Successful branding is one that evolves over time by combining its functional values that would be non sustainable on its own with the emotional values as the brand management process becomes more sophisticated. It’s about providing its customers with not only a product that satisfies their basic need, for eg.: red Bull- energy drink, but by giving them a memorable and impressionable experience that stays with them for a long time- “It gives you wings.” In this dynamic economic atmosphere, it has become imperative that branding embrace more than mere economic values.
People tend to gravitate towards those brands that they see as an extension to their personality. Through marketing efforts, consumers could easily attribute human personality traits to inanimate subjects such as brands (Arora and Stoner, 2009, Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003). For example, consumers considered the brand personality of Oil of Olay as “gentle” and “down-to-earth,” while Holiday Inn's brand personality has been described as “friendly,” “practical,” and “reliable” (Aaker, 1997, Parker, 2009, Plummer, 2000).
Brands have now shifted from being just product driven to being more consumers driven. There has been a significant emergence of social media and digital platforms in the past 10 years, with the number of internet users worldwide in 2018 being 4.021 billion, up 7 percent year-on-year and the number of social media users worldwide in 2018 being 3.196 billion, up 13 percent year-on-year. In today’s “system” era, a brand’s meaning stems not just from how a company positions the brand, but also from how consumers experience it.
In other words, the brand becomes the customer experience and the customer experience becomes the brand. This is especially true for brands in the luxury sector. In the luxury sector, social media seem to play a key role in a brand's success (Phan et al., 2011). If a brand wants to change its image in the mind of its consumers, they first try to implement it on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
The value of a brand significantly grows when they te up with “social influencers” as can be seen in the collaboration with luxury house “Coach” and the most followed on Instagram “Selena Gomez.” What Coach did was banking on the equity that she got with her 126 milion follower that has grown by 22 million now. In the most recent quarter, Coach grew its follower count by almost 50% relative to a year before -- the pre-Selena era. It also doubled the average number of comments per photo and grew its average number of “likes” by 81%, according to a Piper Jaffray analysis. Coach also saw a significant increase in its share price.
Customers feel more confident selecting brands to reflect their self-identity (Escalas and Bettman, 2005) as well as facilitating membership of particular social groups (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001). Take for example Harley Davidson. Sharon Schembri argues that personal experience of Harley–Davidson is embedded in a collective social act (the Australian Harley Owners' Group, or HOGs) and has become a spectacular (postmodern) symbol of freedom. As this ethnographic description of the experiential meaning of Harley–Davidson demonstrates, the consumers emulate and enjoy the rebel image in consuming the bike and the brand.
