Clear brand delivery is the ‘sweet spot’ that enables brands to stand out and succeed in a crowded marketplace. It’s built on three pillars: product, services and culture. Today, we talk about product.
How does product shape brand experience? How can a brand’s product experience create a meaningful connection to its customers?
Enhance Brand Experience With a Diverse Product Offering
A brand’s output of physical, digital and service-based product experience is usually segmented into these three categories:
Origin product
Bespoke and collaborative
Enhanced lifestyle offering
Product experience sweet spot (Graphic: Ales Kernjak)
What is an Origin Product?
The foundation of any brand – its origin product – is the reason the brand exists. The miraculous light-bulb moments that sparked the creation of iconic brands and products, like Microsoft, Amazon or Mattel, were all created in a garage. Starbucks was born while its founder was watching the theatre of Milanese coffee bars. Guccio Gucci founded a luggage business after working as a bell-boy at London’s Savoy hotel. Origin products are born of a moment, an opportunity spotted, a need yet to be catered for.
Companies such as Gucci, Microsoft and Mattel have stayed close to their original purpose, with diversification serving only to compliment the origin product. When brands move too far from their core offering, they can lose that intuitive connection with their customers. Famously, Kodak’s detour into pharmaceuticals only lasted a short six years, and the range of yoghurts created by Cosmopolitan magazine is best left forgotten.
So, how can brands build choice into their product range and stay true to their origin?
A Bespoke Product Experience
Today, customers expect a huge level of personalisation. It’s connective, personal and it demands loyalty. Choosing the colour of one’s car exterior and interior no longer feels special or bespoke – that much has become an expectation, a basic consumer right.
Bespoke product experience at Aston Martin (Photo: Aston Martin)
The idea of bespoke or personalised products is nothing new. After all, Louis Vuitton have enabled travellers to stamp their initials on their luggage since the age of steam trains. By today, however, the demand for high levels of personalisation has crept into every area of consumerism.
Luxury perfume houses like Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent offer the ability to inscribe names or personalised messages onto fragrance bottles. Even mass-market retailers like Primark and Topshop offer in-store embroidery and printing services on everyday items such as beach towels or t-shirts.
Collaborative Products
While collaboration, particularly celebrity associations are a relatively newer addition to the origin product offer it still seeps across the marketplace. Countless celebrity clothing and perfume collaborations come to mind. But few, if any, match the mega-brand collaboration between Nike and Michael Jordan, which generated a staggering 3.1 billion US Dollars in 2018 alone.
This has given rise to connected brand associations. Vuitton answered their much-publicised copyright spat with Supreme by inviting them to collaborate on a product release. This generated much fanfare and saw products emblazoned with both brand logos, garnering huge publicity not only via the products themselves but also by the queues outside boutiques around the world ahead of the launch.
Product collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Supreme (Photos: Imgbin)
Social media has transformed the very idea of celebrity collaboration through the power of influencers, social users with a large follower base offering a curated insight into the products they love and use. We no longer connect to a distant celebrity advertising a product we know they don’t really use. Consumers trust influencers because they build a personal connection and it’s here that brands are leveraging power via collaborating with influencers. Indeed influencers like Kylie Jenner and Huda Kattan have gone on to launch eponymous brands both valued at over a billion dollars.
One might argue that, in brand experience, the role of product is to curate the lifestyle offer?
Enhanced Lifestyle Offering
The power of consumer choice has galvanised today’s consumer to want more, seek more, demand more – preferably from a brand that speaks with authenticity. Bringing consumers closer with a brand’s lifestyle offering, new and innovative demands are born. This level of enhanced lifestyle offering is not based on goods for sale alone. The consumer demands to be a part of the lifestyle.
Armani answers this need with diverse product offerings including hotels, boats, apartment buildings and soft furnishings. Ferrari now create footwear and apparel, while global members club and hotel destination Soho House and hotel chain Marriot offer the chance to ‘buy everything you see’ via dedicated online services. Changing the very idea of product and ownership.
Anthropologie and Target provide a curated lifestyle offering, from books and make-up to sofas and house-plants. It’s stores like these that create a modern-day department store-like experience.
Source: Le Journal des Femmes
Changing the very idea of product, and ownership.
Sports giants like PUMA have maximised the desire to bring the brand to the consumer through initiatives like its container stores that travel the world and pop-up at events like the Volvo Ocean Race or on the side-lines of the Olympics. We see UNIQLO and H&M bring the brand to the consumer wherever they see their customer play, through visually exciting pop-ups. UNIQLO with their CUBE store and H&M with its playful ‘just delivered’ Beach/Festival pop up, engaging the customer with product presentations that speak to the core of consumer experience. Brands are increasingly selling ‘where we like to hang out’ experiences. By creating rich immersive experiences away from the traditional bricks & mortar space, the pop-up has become king.
Through our see it, have it expectation brands are being forced to present and package products that speak to us in ways never seen on such a scale. The idea of making our lives easier, better, fuller is nothing new; from washing machines to toasters, our households are littered with appliances proffering to do just that. The tsunami of companies talking about how they make our world an easier place to live in is however undeniable.
This digital convenience means we no longer see product as something tangible, something physical that we keep – we see it within the landscape of our lives. Does it make my life easier? Does it enhance my being? Do I want it cluttering up my house after I have ‘loved’ it?
The very notion of ‘ownership’ has shifted, iTunes, Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle have changed the way we buy and store music and books – the ideas they package are nothing new, but the wrap of storytelling and convenience packaged as they are in a wider sphere of offer that makes their allure undeniable.
This has led in turn to a shift even in the ownership of physical fashion items, Renttherunway.com has created a business model based on a subscription service to rent the latest must-have items and was valued in 2019 at over a billion dollars. With the automobile also moving towards an automated, rental future this tsunami of change is radically overhauling, not only the way we purchase product and experience brands but the very fundamentals of how we live our lives.
(Photo: BGR)
Nothing has revolutionised the way we buy and even define ‘product’, as much as the smartphone. But how does this impact overall brand experience and what can we learn from it?
Through the rise of ride-sharing and delivery firms like UBER, ViaVan and Lyft, the power of product is literally at consumer’s finger-tips. Brand experience has to work ever harder to catch our attention, to maximise product experience and to generate the power of WOW.
By putting an ergonomic aesthetic at the forefront of design, mastering enhanced lifestyle offerings has become a forte of Apple. From ensuring phones are designed around the reach of your thumb, through to magnetic charging cords that unplug removing a tripping hazard, Apple have built the intuitive into the everyday.
Apple’s product experience in a Timeline (Graphic: Wired via Labnol)
Product Experience in Summary
The desire for beautiful, simple products built for us, around us, by us, now drives brand experience. Consumers seek products that stay true to this purpose, from brands with an authentic core-offering. Products that complement their lifestyle, presented with compelling stories and an array of options for personalisation.
Intuitive and agile, always listening but most of all ready to adapt to the changing needs of our times. Putting the power of the consumer at the very centre of brand delivery and experience.
In ‘Let’s Talk About…’ Ales Kernjak shares invaluable insight, tips and tricks that draw from his extensive experience in retail as well as predictions for its future. Upcoming articles cover all aspects of today’s retail landscape, from product experience to culture, visual merchandising to store design and much more. Follow the series on Brand Experts.