How to Create a Branded Experience for Your Company

The service industry has a unique opportunity on its hands. One that can catapult a small business into a well known brand. An opportunity that while other industries can contribute to, the service industry needs to own. What is it and how can you adapt it to your service-based business? Designing and implementing an experience for your clients in a way that hooks them on the brand and keeps them coming back for more. Too conceptual for you? Let's break it down into three different parts and go into more detail on each.

1. Design the experience to fit the brand: This is critical to the success of your experience. To help illustrate this concept, think of your business as a theme-park. When you arrive at any theme-park, it is quite obvious. The colorful signs, the characters welcoming you into the park, everything is branded and focused on getting you inside. Once you are inside, the park is designed to create a particular experience. Notice that they are very few exits, and in order to get to the exits, you must go through a majority of the park. This was not done on accident. It is a designed experience. If you talk to family and friends who have visited Disneyland or Disney World, I bet you will notice that they all have similar experiences while at the park. Again, this is not on accident.

If you take this concept of the theme park and apply it to your business, how would it look and feel? What is the overall experience you are trying to create?

2. Create memorable moments within the "experience" that will act as hooks to bring clientele back repeatedly: This can be a hard concept to grasp. What would you define as a memorable moment? One example of this is Apple and the experiences they have designed into the packaging of their products. Unique, simple packaging stands out from all the rest of packaged goods for sale. On top of that, Apple's packaging is designed in a way in which the end user must untuck, slide, open flaps, etc. to get to the product. This enhances the experience of the product because it is a memorable moment. Every time I open a product of Apple's, I am always excited to see how they packaged it and designed it in a clean and simple way.

Think of the services you provide your clients. Think about the interactions you have with them. How can you take one of those interactions and turn it into a branded, memorable moment? Combined with the design of the office and all of the details that make up a brand, you could create something quite powerful and special at the same time. While not necessarily easy to implement right away, a company that works to add this value is sure to stand out from among its competitors.

3. Survey past, present, and future clients based on measurable objectives: While this tip in designing an experience seems a little too obvious, the key part is measurable objectives. It is always important to survey your target market to see how you stack up as far as a business and against your direct competitors. It is just as important, if not more, to survey your clients and figure out just what they are looking for. If you can over deliver in what they are looking for and provide an experience that makes them want to come back , you have hit the nail on the head. When putting together surveys, be sure to think in terms of objectives that are measurable. Too many times surveys are subjective in nature which yields little results as far as how to improve.