Experience mapping: the new frontier in brand leadership

Experience: The alpha and omega

A brand leaves a trail in the mind of the stakeholder based on a particular lived and remembered experience. This experience manifests as brand perception and ultimately brand equity.

As believers in the value of brand equity, brand strategists and leaders should see themselves as designers of the brand experience. In the spirit of design thinking this design should be revisited constantly to ensure currency and potency.

Consider the most successful brand leaders of today

It is no coincidence that Apple, Google and Facebook are topping the leading global brand valuation charts as all three of them possess leaders who are maniacally focused on the brand experience. Jobs, Zuckerberg and Page personally design and deploy (or have a heavy hand in designing and deploying) every detail of the brand experience.

They also all lead systems that offer continuous, live and actionable brand experience feedback that enables responsive brand leadership. We are talking about a new generation of companies that have a CXO (chief experience officer as coined by Joe Pine) instead of a CEO.

Other notable 'CXO's' who put brand experience at the top of the board meeting agenda are Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tony Hsieh of Zappos and Andrew Mason of Groupon. Combined these companies have created over a thousand billion dollars in shareholder revenue whilst catering less to shareholder and more to the experience of primary stakeholder/users of their brands.

How can I 'experience map' my brand

An example of stages of experience mapping which you could workshop at your organisation would be the following:

• Do a team immersion into the brand experience - using auto-ethnography, ethnography, interviews etc. (How much consideration went into planning the immersion? Which stakeholders were engaged? What methodology was used? How is it going to be measured?)
  
• A documentation of the brand experience (is it diverse, rich, graphic, detailed, accurate, sensitive?)
  
• Identification of key nodes of the experience - where should things meet hygiene standards and where should the experience peak?
  
• Produce an ideal experience map and/or specific 'nodal' solutions to the investigated map.

Get visual early

A key principal in experience mapping is to get the participants to depict brand experiences, whether ideal or lived, as graphically as possible. The idea is not to produce a perfect visual experience map but rather a working prototype that can be used as a 'better-than-rough-text-based' guide to the experience.

Online resources:

http://thexperiencedesigner.com/

http://authenticitybook.com/book/

http://www.strategichorizons.com/

http://www.vimeo.com/21568668

http://dschool.stanford.edu/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM.