When developing a ‘digital brand experience’, much of our learning on branding and behaviour still goes out the window in a quest for something seamless, frictionless, easy - something, in short, that is not an effective brand experience at all. The context of COVID-19 has made choosing the right quirks or moments of friction that a brand can own more important than ever.
Why it matters
The fundamentals of brand experience don’t change even in digital contexts, and marketers should not be too zealous in the effort to make everything seamless, frictionless and easy.
Maybe it’s building in a moment that is unexpected, a pause where speed usually rules, a silence in the noise, a checkout that is different from all the others out there: something that sets the brand apart and that is capable of linking back to it.
Takeaways
- We’ve tended to put digital experiences in the ‘rational’ box which has meant two things: a race to the easiest, fastest and most seamless or a game of incremental changes.
- Marketers should begin with identifying the rough edges, the idiosyncrasies and the contradictions of their brand, and letting the right ones sing.
- Selected and used well, a brand’s seams are a weapon in creating digital experiences that deliver on being unique, distinctive and, crucially, memorable.
The Big Idea
If Silicon Valley and the world of entrepreneurship gave us the Minimum Viable Product, and UX gave us the Minimum Lovable Product, the next step for brand experiences, digital and beyond, might be the Minimum Memorable Product.
Read more in WARC's new Spotlight Australia series: Designing digital brand experiences
Sourced from WARC
