The ultimate goal for brands today is to become an important part of people’s life; that’s how success is measured.

I believe it gets harder each day for brands to build strong and long-lasting relationships with their users. In 2019, brands want to move the entire world so at least one person turns their head to look at them. In the world of advertisement, everything gets trickier and complicated as years pass, mainly because users won’t consume anything just because. Brands now need to speak beyond superficiality, which is why brand experience has become such a popular term these days. This ‘brand experience’ is the circus that brands put together so we as an audience feel like they are speaking directly to us. We want to feel unique/catered to, and brands know that.

Creating a brand experience that works can be as hard as finding love for yourself when you look in the mirror, but with a lot of effort and dedication —a little bit of therapy too— you can accomplish that goal and when that happens, the result is as satisfying. The ultimate goal for brands today is to become an important part of people’s life; that’s how success is measured.

Nowadays, brands seek to attack all the factors involved in the public’s decision to consume, meaning we don’t want costumers to buy just for the sake of buying; instead, we want our customer’s decision to be more involved and driven by emotion.

Consumption is a very complex action with different characteristics and drivers: these can be emotional, sensory, social and cognitive. This is why the day-by-day of a brand experience design has become an integral job, in which every element has to be well thought and directly linked to our costumer’s psyche. Finding these links that generate attachment with the consumer and then transforming them into physical spaces is a very exciting ordeal in itself. As an industrial designer, I love the challenge of being able to capture an emotion or feeling in an environment with tangible elements that speak to each of the human being’s senses.

In this fast-paced industry, we work in, it gets complicated to dedicate quality time to each project, and experience designers could use a little more time to research and experiment with each experience before delivering a final product. Regardless, this same time constraint allows the designer to create constantly, magnifying one’s creative delivery to the max.
There is no written formula that can guarantee the success of a brand or a brand experience, but I do believe that as long as the creative process is human-centered, the emotional result in our target consumer will be the most satisfactory.

Leaving aside the numbers and quantitative objectives is hard because we’re still responding to a brand’s needs. Regardless, if we get to a point were we flow as emotional beings at the beginning of brainstorming a project, this will allow us to find solutions that have strong links to the consumer. We must lose the fear of generating ideas from an intangible feeling because it is exactly this that allows us to find the best road possible to spark an emotion in our target consumer.

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Paulina López – Copywriter at Leo Burnett

Paulina is a Mexican designer, creative, stand-up comedian, and social media extraordinaire. Her design career has had a focus on experiential marketing, working for brands like Casa Cuervo, Banco Santander, and Nespresso. You can find her on Instagram as @lapalina.