Customers are valuing the personal experience they get from a brand more than ever before. Here. Tall Agency Creative Director Andy Beckwith explains what brands can learn from the likes of LEGO and SharkNinja.
A huge part of my role as creative director is ensuring I’ve fully adopted a brand.
Doing so will ensure that my strategy and creative ideation benefit from being able to execute that brand’s intentions to the audience – and deliver great brand experience.
We’re now living in an ever increasing Experience Economy, where customers are valuing the personal experience a brand can offer them more highly than ever before.
It transcends far beyond a brand’s core product or service offering.
This could mean anything from an in-store retail experience to simply receiving a confirmation email, but great brands know that these are opportunities to plant seeds with their audience that contribute to positive brand perception and, ultimately, conversion.
One great recent example I can offer here is working with The LEGO Group.
My own personal brand onboarding experience as a creative partner involved a visit to The LEGO Group’s home town of Billund, Denmark.
My expectations of studying guidelines and watching presentations couldn’t have been more wrong as I was taken to the famous LEGO House for a day building race cars, driving tiny remote diggers and even being served my lunch by minifigs and robots!
On my return I’d fully understood the assignment: Understanding the importance of PLAY!
More specifically, Learning Through Play is the key to amazing creative play experiences for kids, and The LEGO Group knows that everyone and anyone with the responsibility of representing the brand needs to embrace this.
With employees and partners all over the world, they know that they can’t onboard everyone as I experienced, so myself and the Tall Agency creative team worked with The LEGO Group design teams to produce and deliver the ‘Digital Design Principles for Kids’, the product of years of research and refinement by both internal teams as well as collaborations with external academic bodies.
This toolkit is a wonderful hybrid card deck/booklet/board game/poster set that offers guidance, information and exercises to inject more play into experiences.
They’ve not just highlighted the importance of play in their brand experiences, they’re giving people the tools and guidance for how to deliver it, with toolkits now being sent out across the world.
Make no mistake, great brand experience isn’t always an emotionally charged moment of joy or inspiration. A great experience can be something more subliminal or something overall greater than the sum of its parts.
The famous statement “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM” (whether you’d argue the point or not) is a testament to them offering these types of more subliminal brand experiences to their customers that have led to this perception of reassuring quality. People are buying into their promise of experience consistency.
One other example I’d like to share is from working with the teams at SharkNinja on a variety of digital projects. In my journey to adopting the SharkNinja brand I’ve come across the value statement they use:
“We aim to create an experience that’s at least 4.5 out of 5”
Although this concept is clearly rooted in the quality of their products, the Shark/Ninja teams are adopting this across their organisation.
They’re challenging all teams to interpret what this value means to their projects, process and deliverables.
After all, the statement is about a high quality experience, not just a product. From a digital experience perspective, this thinking has led to Tall being involved in creating a global digital design system to ensure a high level of digital experience consistency as the business grows and expands with new product ranges and into new global markets.
In both the LEGO Group and SharkNinja cases, they’ve both identified the vital importance of ensuring the people empowered to represent the brand are fully engaged in delivering on the brand’s high level intentions.
For the LEGO Group, they’re offering more structured learning and guidance in the form of a toolkit, whereas SharkNinja are encouraging their own experts to interpret and innovate brand-level thinking relevant to their fields.
For other organisations, It might be that they need the help of an agency like Tall to unlock and enhance a deeper level of brand thinking.
Do consider, however, that there might already be people within the organisation who can pull up existing brand values and challenge their own area of expertise to think or act differently on behalf of the brand’s high-level intentions.
When was the last time a sales or operations team explored the brand guidelines and asked how they’d inject more of those values into their day-to-day experience? It might be more beneficial than you think.
