Understanding Brand Experience
The easiest way to understand Brand Experience is first to understand the component parts:

Brand represents the intellectual and emotional associations that people make with a company, product or person. That is to say, brand is something that actually lies inside each of us. It is our subjective understanding of something, be it a company (Nike), a product (Corn Flakes) or even a person (Michael Jordan). While the word brand is often used more generally and in a qualitative way (“Nike is a really strong brand”), the essence of the brand lies in each of our unique, subjective interpretations, in our understanding of the brand—which is guided by cultural context, interactions we‘ve had with and about what we are evaluating, and our own personal conception of the world. The more closely aligned a company or product is with the needs and desires of customers, the more likely that company is to maintain a strong and positive mental image in their customers‘ minds, customers who can then be moved to take productive action: to buy, to engage, to recommend, or to think. The science of branding is about designing for and influencing the minds of people—in other words, building the brand.

Experience is anything that our senses perceive, the interaction between people and the world. What is valuable about experience is—like brand—it actually happens on the inside. How and why people respond to experiences is at the heart of successful design. And that is what designing for, or focusing on, experience is all about: understanding people. And the same basic principles apply whether someone is reading information or going to a trade show booth or watching a commercial or engaging a Web site. Even as the media changes, the basic human realities of evaluating and responding to experiences remain the same.

Brand Experience is the strategic approach to compelling people to take productive action through the integrated, coordinated planning and execution of every possible interaction that they have with your company or products. That means assessing business strategy through the lens of providing people with carefully designed experiences that meet their needs and desires, with the explicit intention of compelling them to take productive action on your behalf.

Brand Experience—in its totality—is a rather new discipline, and one that is incredibly complex to execute successfully. Not only does it require a sophisticated understanding of business strategy and a deep, scientific and cultural understanding of people and markets, it also demands a broad—and neutral—understanding of communications and media. It is, at once, the synthesis of business, marketing, design and technology.

And the Web is a vital component to Brand Experience.