My take on Brand Experience & User Experience
By: Mubashir Ul Haq
Tags: Experience, Strategy, Brands, User Experience, UX

The digital world today has to offer many experiences. These experiences aren’t limited to any specific industry.

Brands and companies today have their existence online where they campaign their products and services through various strategies and platforms.

Many online adversaries cater for their community in different mediums which are a part of an ecosystem. These mediums are managed by magicians who use magic potions to improve ways of consumer engagement.

This ecosystem is usually referred to as a ‘Brand Experience’.

Brand experience is all about engaging the user in a strategic way that the user can relate to the brand.

This relativeness makes the user loyal to the brand and makes him come back for more!

Pretty cool, huh?

However, it may be subjective as every individual experiences different sensations and associations that are induced by the brand.

This is often confused with the term ‘brand elements’ when some random chain smoker uses the word “branding”.

A brand has its logo, fonts, colours and icons that are recognised as its elements. These components are important for a brand to cast out spells but they are only one-fourth of the entire brand!

Coca-Cola is a great example, its entire brand experience is geared towards emotions and happiness. They never sell Coke, in fact, they make their consumers feel how valuable their happiness is.

This emotional attraction towards Coca-Cola makes the Coke fridges in the supermarkets go empty in no time!

Tesla is another example, even though their magicians don’t utilise digital mediums mainly for awareness, they focus on innovation. If one buys a Tesla, it spontaneously makes him believe that he has adapted the innovation of the future.

Tesla owners know that after their purchase, their next drive will be a part of something great.

In a nutshell, brand experience allows one to deep dive into the purpose of a brand.

User experience, on the other hand, is a part of the Brand Experience.

As the name itself hints, user experience focuses on delivering a functional yet pleasant experience at the consumer end.

The main elements of a User Experience include ease of usability, security, functionality and minor tweaks within the product.

See how brands actually care about your comfort?

When it’s about user experience, all characteristics of the user interaction are brought under the spotlight of the brand, its services and its products.

Oftentimes, companies make sure to look after their loyal users by improving their interactions through beta variants of the product(s) with its exciting insights, and baking them a cake! This improves the overall Brand Experience.

In essence, user experience is the personal but internal experience consumers go through when using a product’s front end.

Amazon is a good example of an e-commerce website, the users find what they need with just a simple search, the right product description and the ease of one-click purchase.

This user experience is a good one.

But if the search results weren’t relevant, included wrong products and the purchase button was nowhere to be found, it would have been a bad user experience!

In short, the if buying experience was complex and complicated, then the UX would have been a bad one.