Why brand experience is at the core of good brand management

Do you just see a brand… or do you live it? Stay with us. It might sound a little culty (because it kind of is), but brand experience is the secret sauce behind the world’s most beloved (and borderline fanatical) brands.

Pioneered by visionaries like Steve Jobs back in the ’90s, building a brand experience means creating something that goes way beyond a logo or tagline. It’s about crafting a world your target audience wants to enter, stay in, and maybe even evangelize.

In today’s hyper-connected landscape, brand experience isn’t just aspirational — it’s essential. So let’s break down what it means, look at some brands doing it brilliantly, and show you how to bake that same magnetic energy into your creative branding work.

Ready to create a cult? Let’s do it.

When we talk about “brand experience,” we’re talking about the complete impression consumers get when they interact with a brand’s products, advertising, and marketing, and also how they feel about the brand in the long term. 

While visual branding is essential in cultivating a successful brand experience, it’s not the only contributing factor, with one-to-one consumer interactions, thoughtful messaging, and tapping into the cultural mainstream or subcultures also playing a part in brand experience marketing.

According to Professor Nader Tavassoli of the University of London, it’s time to shift the perception of brands as visual entities to something that should be seen as:

In other words, brands that cultivate a strong brand experience for their customers must first encourage their own employees to ‘live’ the brand and become employee influencers, which goes way beyond the usual logo-and-website brand package. In some cases, the brand experience delves even deeper into the psyche of staff and customers, creating a “cult of brand” — more on that later.

When we think of brands that do brand experience marketing really well (such as Apple, Nike, Red Bull, or Netflix), there’s often something almost religion-like about the way these brands organize and present brand experience marketing. Brands that have near-fanatical customer devotion tap into what has been termed the “cult of brand.”

The cult of brand is not an entirely new concept. Steve Jobs was one of the first to recognize the power of building devotional brand loyalty through brand experience. He was so successful, in fact, that the Cult of Mac was described by an anthropologist as an “implicit religion.”

However, the concept of brand as cult has gained new traction (and elusiveness) in the age of social media. The sheer vastness of content now available to potential customers makes it difficult for brands to gain an enduring foothold in the hearts and minds of distracted viewers, so it’s important to have a clear vision in mind if you want to cultivate a brand experience that sticks. 

The secret? Closer to home than you might think. In fact, many companies that successfully practice brand experience as a marketing strategy know that cult brands are built from the inside out. To understand how to do this, marketers must understand one thing: the authenticity principle. 

Today, consumers demand authenticity from the brands they purchase from. Authentic and transparent businesses clearly communicate their values — brand, ethical, and financial — to their customer base, giving consumers a (very generous) window into how they work behind the scenes.

When things are going well, customers feel like they’re a direct part of the success story. When things go wrong, they own up, exposing their flaws and opening themselves up to critique. 

Millennial and Gen Z consumers are the least brand-loyal generations that marketers have had to win over, with a vast number of brands competing for their attention on social media. Brands that appear to be more authentic than others, and those that go beyond visuals to create a complete brand experience, have a much better chance of winning the attention — and hearts — of young consumers.

While some brands like Apple have been cultivating brand experience strategies for a long time, an increasing number of younger brands have also been making impressive efforts with brand experience marketing. Let’s look at a few of the best to give you some inspiration for the kind of approach you could take with your next creative branding campaign.

A great example of using experience marketing to build a young brand into a success story, the Australian fast-fashion brand White Fox has become incredibly popular with Gen Z consumers in the UK and US, in large part thanks to the company’s savvy brand management and an emphasis on influencer-led brand experience. 

The brand knows that young female consumers trust the opinions of their friends and keep a close eye on what celebrities are wearing. As a result, White Fox cultivates a multi-tiered influencer marketing strategy, which means the people teen girls think are cool — whether at college or on reality shows — are likely to be wearing White Fox. The brand runs a university student influencer program and dresses influencers on Love Island and Selling Sunset. At the higher tier, it invests in celebrity influencers too, with the likes of Emily Ratajkowski and Hailey Bieber wearing its attire.

In this way, White Fox’s brand experience is completely immersive, as wherever you look it’s probable that someone you aspire to be like is wearing the brand. 

Another string to the White Fox brand experience bow is its celebrity parties and glam trips, such as a mansion rented at the Coachella Festival dedicated to the brand. The events are broadcast on TikTok and Instagram, building a sense of FOMO and exclusivity around the brand… despite the fact that consumers can buy the products at fast-fashion prices.

The original brand experience expert, Apple has a decades-long track record of curating brand experiences that built a loyal following among customers.  

Steve Jobs placed a keen emphasis on brand storytelling and user experience (advising brands to start with customer experience and work backwards to the technology), and focused on transforming Apple stores into immersive, minimalist tech havens for Apple customers.

While Apple may have lost a little of its 2000s-era gleam, it still retains a strong cult following thanks to experiential marketing such as Apple Events — slick live product launches that build hype around the company’s new offerings — as well as highly-anticipated workshops and flagship events like the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The company also invests in continuous staff training, prioritizing knowledgeability and friendly customer service, so you can always speak to someone who is approachable and knows everything there is to know about the latest product ranges.

The breakout star of beauty branding over the last few years is undoubtedly Fenty Beauty. Founded by Rihanna, the company now boasts an annual revenue of $582 million. 

While the brand’s willingness to embrace diversity and develop a wide breadth of product colors is often stated as a major reason why it’s become so successful, it also provides a masterclass in modern brand experience.

The brand states that it delivers “beauty for all,” and this inclusive message underpins almost all of its marketing and brand management. While Rihanna’s celebrity status is clearly a driver for the business, it’s the brand’s down-to-earth experience content that makes it enduringly successful.

From skits with female basketball team New York Liberty to sponsoring Pride events, as well as Instagram videos that make you feel like you’re getting ready with friends, the ambassadors Fenty collaborates with are accessible, fun, and multi-faceted. No airbrushed supermodels: just naturally beautiful everyday women who love makeup, but also have a lot of other things going on. 

The brand experience Fenty Beauty taps into is to make consumers feel like they’re one of the gang, and that holds a lot of power with young audiences. It’s a perfect example of the authenticity principle.

Hiking brand Patagonia has evolved into a much-loved hipster brand, with millions of devoted Millennial and Gen Z customers worldwide. An unlikely candidate for a brand experience success story? Perhaps, but Patagonia is another prime example of how to use authenticity to create meaningful and enduringly memorable brand experiences.

Reported as the “most reputable brand in the United States” by Forbes, Patagonia places a strong emphasis on activism and sustainability, interweaving these values into its marketing communications, brand management, and products. The brand actively campaigns for environmental causes, organizes charitable events, and encourages customers to reuse and repair clothing (its ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ campaign being a great example). 

A Patagonia customer doesn’t just go into a store and buy a T-shirt — they are effectively invited into a lifestyle that is aspirationally conscientious and ethical. Wearing Patagonia signals to others that you ‘get it’, creating a cult-like aura around the brand built on shared values. 

As you can see from the examples above, a successful brand experience strategy can manifest in different ways, but in almost all cases it is underpinned by something fundamentally authentic. Whether it’s ethical sustainability or inclusive beauty, brand experiences only work if they go beyond the individual event or communication to something deeper and more value-driven.

In your own creative marketing and online brand management, it’s certainly possible to do the same. Consider these five tips as a solid starting point for making the brand experience a central aspect of your work:

Brand values are a game-changer. Successful brand experience marketing starts with referring back to a key value or set of values as a brand. Every customer experience points back to ‘x’, whether it’s sustainability, value, aspiration, or nostalgia. Don’t lose sight of that value as you grow your brand management strategy. 

The more that customers can see you are consistently referring back to ‘x’, the more authentic and genuine your brand will feel, and the more loyal they are likely to be to your brand over the long term.

When we consider what brand experience is, it can entail visual elements such as marketing campaigns and interactive billboards, but keep in mind that experience goes beyond the skin-deep. The best brand experiences are immersive and tap into all the senses, with things like community spirit and genuinely lovely customer service going much further towards building positive memorability than visual marketing alone.

Brand experience is emotional, and everyone needs to feel the feels, both within and outside the organization. So as you’re developing your visual branding, keep in mind how you want customers to feel.

Many brands look great but are somehow instantly forgettable. This is why brand experience marketing can be so valuable when you get it right. It builds customer memorability and loyalty into the brand. To nail the art of brand experience, you have to work out how to be omnipresent — without getting annoying. 

Imagine that you see your friend wearing a product, and then shortly after, you walk past a pop-up store from the same brand. Later that day, you might see the brand mentioned by an influencer on TikTok. These small brand experiences add up over time and create a pervasive but not intrusive effect. Suddenly, it seems completely natural that you’ll want to purchase from the brand as well, but you can’t always pinpoint the moment you gained awareness of it. 

It’s this gradual layering of marketing experiences that turns forgettable brands into cult brands.

Brands can sometimes be wary of brand experience marketing because it can feel experimental and even a little out of the company’s control. Perhaps your brand will start to be talked about frequently on forums, or maybe it will become popular with an audience you hadn’t thought of tapping into. 

Brand experience marketing has the power to create unexpected opportunities, so when you see something that sticks, make sure to build on the momentum by investing marketing resources into that area.

When is a cult brand no longer a cult brand? Even some of the most successful brands have their tricky moments, perhaps falling from favor or struggling to win back consumers who no longer think the brand is desirable or cool. 

This can be a significant risk for brands that specifically target young audiences who will grow up and move on to the next thing. Brand experience can help to retain long-term loyalty, even through rocky patches, by keeping audiences who might be getting the ‘ick’ onside. Some brands do this through creating nostalgic brand experiences, with examples like Miss Sixty and Juicy Couture using Y2K-styled brand experiences to find fresh audiences and generate nostalgia for the original brand.

It can be tough to resurrect a cult brand, and we’re even seeing Apple struggling to revive the popularity it enjoyed a decade or so ago. However, it is possible, and brand experience marketing makes it more likely that originally loyal customers will return to the brand in the future.

Do you want to try using brand experience marketing in your own projects? Or maybe you’d like to use these examples to improve your digital marketing and create a more holistic and wide-reaching brand campaign?

Brand experience is such an exciting and ever-changing form of brand marketing, and it can be really inspiring to see which companies succeed with new brand experience strategies. 

Start building your brand from the ground up in 9 simple steps, or start reaching out to fresh audiences with our guide to building a successful YouTube channel. Be sure to head to Envato to discover all the creative assets you need to create marketing content that fits a cult brand.