The experience ecosystem – how to get people to give a shit about your brand

Josh Hunt, managing director at Brand Potential Consulting, details the benefits of crafting coherent experience brands.

We live in an age where the creation of content is easy. Readers will be well aware that AI, digital tools and the rise of content creators have massively increased the volume of material a brand can produce. But is it really helping brands stand out, build memory structures in people’s minds and tell stories that feel genuinely their own?

I’ve always liked Seth Godin’s definition of a brand as “the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”  Brand as a set of experiences, memories and expectations makes intuitive sense, and suggests that our role as brand practitioners is not just to communicate, but to actively shape those experiences in the lives of the real people we serve.

I reckon it’s also worth expanding that definition beyond consumers and beyond the moment of choice. Brands are experienced by B2B customers, distributors employees and investors just as much as end users – and often long before and long after any transaction takes place. That has two important implications: we need to understand how brands are actually experienced in the real world, and we need to ensure that brand innovation is joined up rather than siloed.

It’s becoming all too easy to get trapped in an AI-generated echo chamber: testing comms with synthetic personas, planning activations that land perfectly on paper for imagined audiences, and finding evidence of success in ever more abstract metrics. In reality, in addition to using the ever-increasing AI toolbox, we need to roll up our sleeves and spend time with real people to understand how brands are encountered (or ignored) in everyday life. It’s surprisingly easy to overstate the importance of any brand when, in truth, it’s competing with hundreds of others for a sliver of attention.

At the same time, proliferation brings the risk of disjunction. Add multiple channels, increasing personalisation and ever-expanding reach into the mix, and the result can be a fragmented experience – where the sum of the parts is weaker, and more forgettable, than the whole.

So how do we navigate this shift from content volume to meaningful brand experience? Because ultimately, people don’t care about what brands say: they care about what they experience. Three things matter more than ever:

Truthful: rooting brands in deep human insight, not surface-level data
Noticeable: turning up in unexpected, distinctive ways
Memorable: creating a coherent, connected experience across every touchpoint – digital, retail, product, service and beyond

In our recent work reshaping brands like St Austell Brewery, Arcera and Gallagher Prem, our focus has been on using these principles to create participation across audiences and build memory structures that last beyond individual transactions.

For St Austell Brewery, this meant building on their 175 years of heritage, and aligning different audiences of pub guests, supermarket beer shoppers, wholesale customers and employees around a narrative of ‘Brewing great experiences for the generations to come’.  We’ve helped Arcera inject life into life sciences, with a brand narrative designed to unite three global legacy companies, and shape a brand world that feels human, unifying and built for the future. And we’ve helped the Gallagher Prem bring rugby to new audiences by amplifying the visceral truth of the game – its physicality, drama and its personalities – and transforming how matches are experienced across all channels.

The future belongs to coherent experience brands. It’s time to move beyond thinking like content creators and start acting like experience architects.