The Fleeting Illusion of Brand Experience
Traditional brand marketing is an effort to build perception around a desired business outcome (usually shareholder value). But the audience isn’t that interested in whether or not you make your numbers this quarter. In fact, every dollar spent on creating perception is a dollar that could have been spent improving the lives of your customers.
It’s the quality of the products, services, interactions with an organization that builds an authentic brand character. If this sounds radical, or if you’re still using marketing to try and manipulate perception, you are walking on thin ice. For your consumers and observers, there is no such thing as a “brand experience,” only a human experience which may be associated with a brand. The meaning of the interactions themselves must be addressed.
Take, for example, the notorious private security firm Blackwater Worldwide. Their stated mission is “empowering a talented collection of seasoned professionals from a wide range of disciplines, directing them to develop cost efficient and operationally effective solutions for the US Government and other clientele.” But after employees were accused of using excessive force resulting in the deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians, the company lost their U.S. government contract to operate in Iraq. The response? Blackwater rebranded itself under the new moniker Xe, an identity that Wired’s Noah Shachtman aptly calls “inscrutable and opaque.” Yet the lawsuits continue – families of seven more Iraqi civilians have filed suit against the company just this week.
Curated perception has long been a free-for-all land grab aimed squarely at focusing the attention of a market. Because information is now instantly and freely shared, those brands with the largest gaps between fabricated perception (traditional marketing) and the authentic character of their actions (products, services, human interactions) will be the quickest to sputter and implode. This is true no matter what new platforms are employed to manipulate awareness, or what tools we use to examine them. Brand experience is an illusion, human experience is real. The problem is not perception, but rather the consequences of human behavior. The solution is found through trying to change perception, but through creating more constructive human interactions and positive, authentic experiences.
Shakespeare’s message is more true today than ever – “the truth will out.”
