Bring your brand alive!

As discussed in the section of the Emotion Lab, moving your brand into physical spaces means making it comes alive in an Emotional and 3-D way.

Let your audiences experience it in a sensory way (see, feel, smell, hear, touch and even a taste?). As Prof. Bernd Schmitt discusses in one of his first books (Marketing Aesthetics, the Strategic Management of Brands, Identity and Image) brands are decoded in spatial environments wheather you want it or not. This means that your offices are being experienced and decoded, with or without an orchestrated brand expression present. In our understanding, missing opportunities to communicate the right messages are to be considered as lost business.

Does your brand live in your offices?

A brand depends on its people. First step of bringing your brand alive involves turning your offices and internal spaces into brand experiences. Companies have increasingly begun to rethink the role of the workspace to help employees truly live the brand. Work environments can have a significant impact on how well employees or associates understand a brand, and how they translate its promise to customers. Branding a space is more than just displaying a company’s logo in the lobby. It means using the entire environment to communicate about the brand. It means thinking about the office environment as a living theater for important messages. These can range from insights into the customer audience to meaningful expressions of the company’s values. In some cases, it simply consists of injecting the brand’s voice into common places — like meeting rooms, lobbies, and call centers — to remind associates how the brand should be staged and communicated to customers. Companies that live their brand this way tend to have more engaged employees, and are in a better position to recruit and retain the best talent

Are you missing out on your external opportunities?

The sum of encounters will deliver the message. Next step involves all other external brand exposures. You might consider letting your brand expressions involve everything from delivery trucks to retail spaces. Branded spatial environments let people touch, tour and interact with your brand in physical spaces – making it experiential. Components of a branded environment can include choices of display and fitting finish materials, environmental graphics, way-finding devices and signage and identity systems. The latest trend is POP-UP stores. These ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ shops allow brands to avoid expensive long- term shop rents. And allows staging of the brand in opportune places or places that allows testing new permanent shop fixtures and concepts before implementing large scale. And they can test new markets before potentially opening up a proper bricks and mortar outlet.

Let us assist you and your organization to be living your brand, by weaving brand building as a discipline throughout your entire organization, incorporating it into business strategy, product design, customer service – even the office environment.