Creating Strategic Experiences

Developing a powerful brand identity to create a consistent experience for the target group

After this week’s class of Design Leadership and working with its learnings on our group project, I came across this quote by the marketing expert Seth Godin:

People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic. Seth Godin

This quote summarizes in a good way how to engage people with your brand – by making them emotionally involved. This week we started to work on the topic of creating experiences which is for me a way to develop a relationship with the customer. In contrast to the quote, we did not limit it to companies producing goods or offering services, but also included any kind of campaign, including social campaigns as our ocean project.

According to Leslie, a strategically designed experience equals the brand identity that informs all kind of touchpoints with the customer or target group across all media. Like this, a consistent, distinctive and authentic experiences for the target group can be created. Eventually this leads to attention, recognition and enthusiasm for your brand, an increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and sales of goods and services. In case of a social campaign, it will through attention and recognition trigger a greater awareness about the topic as well as a greater impact through participation.

In order to create this strategically designed experience, there are some major aspects to define:

Approach to strategic experiences based on Crombie (2019) (Image by Hinger, 2019)

• Purpose Why do you want to exist? This equals the overall vision for the brand.

• Target Group Who do you want to attract? This is done by selecting one or more customer segments. In order to understand them well, consumer personas can be created. They can support the innovation process by informing design briefs or be a source of inspiration.

• Design Experience What is the brand equity? This includes the performance promise, emotional promise and aesthetic promise. . Performance promise: features and quality of the product, service or any kind of innovation . Emotional promise: catering to deeper needs or desires of the customer . Aesthetic promise: memorable design of the offer

Defining these basic conditions should support that all future actions taken by various persons in the organisation or team are consistent. The actions can include product or service design, advertisement and campaigns, packaging, events or special design, and they should all aim at the same purpose and target group and create a memorable experience with the brand.

For our project, we have now defined the purpose and target group as well as setting up four personas from within our target group.

Our project’s purpose is to raise awareness about the harm of plastic to the ocean and reduce the amount of single-use plastic carrier bags, which are disposed on average after 20 minutes (Earth Day Network, 2018). With this project we are targetting Millennials, born between 1981 and 1999 as they are one of the largest consumer groups of the plastic packaging industries (Caliendo, 2016).

The choice of a target group required intensive research. By diving into the ocean plastic problem and the consumer groups that have the greatest impact, be decided to define Millennials as target. We considered primary research in order to understand their habits and attitudes towards plastic bags. But we found a lot of secondary data catering to our needs. For example there is one survey by Edge Research (2017) on how to engage Millennials in ocean conservation.

In the next step in order to decide on the design experience and define the performance promise, emotional promise and aesthetic promise, we continue research about our target group and trends that influence them as well as find out more about our competitors, which is in our case other campaigns with a similar purpose.

Reference List:

Caliendo, H. (2016) 'The Role Demographics Play in Plastic Packaging', Plastic Technology. Available at: https://www.ptonline.com/blog/post/the-role-demographics-play-in-plastic-packaging- (Accessed: 29 January 2019).

Earth Day Network (2018) Kicking the Plastic Bag Addiction: A Plan for Response to Plastic Pollution. Available at: https://www.earthday.org/2018/04/20/kicking-the-plastic-bag-addiction-a-plan-for-response-to-plastic-pollution/ (Accessed: 01 February 2019).

Edge Research (2017) Millennial Ocean Plastic Research. Available at: https://www.packard.org/insights/resource/millennial-ocean-plastics-research-plastics-gateway-engaging-next-generation-ocean-conservationists/ (Accessed: 02 February 2019).