HBC Experience

Brand Experience Design

Creating experiences that convey your brand’s story, values, and spirit. Brand Experience Design is the art of knowing your brand through sight, sound, touch, and smell. Identity and culture are abstract concepts. They need to be translated into tangible, experiential encounters for people to understand and recognise them. Crafting abstract ideas into perceivable experiences gives others the opportunity to connect with your brand.

How can customer experiences be transformed into brand experiences?

Unique experiences must be created for every medium and touchpoint, all echoing an instantly recognisable identity. How is this identity set apart from the noise of competitors? Recognising and defining the characteristics an audience searches for, and delivering them in a unique way, is what distinguishes both new and aged brands.

But brand experience isn’t static. A good brand is always responding and adapting as culture shifts, technology develops, and goal posts move in an ever-changing world. The one thing that stays consistent should be the brand promise, which is made through the statements of a brand experience and trickles down into every action and performance, taking conviction in each facet of the company.

We produce tangible, testable prototypes through the lens of a new aesthetic that intuitively frames expectations to move audience perceptions. Through Brand Experience Design, we harness complex brand characteristics to create order, legibility, usability, and usefulness in experiences that resonate with the right people in the right places, at the right times.

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Finding the right visual expression of a brand is at the same time a journey into the unknown as well as an analytical, deductive craft. Through deep strategic understanding and creative experimentation, we find adaptive visual systems that master the balance act: standing out from everyone else with a distinct set of recognisable visual patterns, and blending in by clearly seeking familiarity with aesthetics that evoke exactly the right associations in the viewer’s mind. By breathing life into these systems using the power of motion behaviour and sound design, we create audiovisual worlds that are both iconic as well as easy to handle.

A strategy without execution is just an idea. And ideas are hard to grasp and difficult to discuss because they take different forms in the minds of different people. In order to be able to fully understand and judge the validity of an abstract strategic course, we translate it into tangible experiences. By following the course into a speculative future, we find possible, plausible, and desirable outcomes, which we then turn into quick testable prototypes or elaborate future-state film productions. This facilitates a strategic discussion and greatly increases stakeholder buy-in, internally as well as externally.

Humans like to think of themselves as rational, left-brained logic-pursuers. But when it comes to truly getting people to build lasting preference towards your brand, addressing their rational understanding isn’t enough. For any initiative or strategic project to generate real commitment, the way to people’s actions is through their hearts. People don’t execute on goals they don’t agree with. This is why we follow a human-compatible way of communication, telling stories that move people. First we find the words that are worth a hundred pictures, and then turn our stories into pictures that are worth a hundred words each.

Customer centricity is powerful, but bares the risk of resulting in indifference because every company aims to fulfill the same customer needs. Being simpler, faster, and cheaper are key disciplines today but if everyone aims to do the same, where will your brand be different? Good brands create experiences that are relevant to the customers, different from the competition, and characteristic for the company. Pure-play CX often only looks at bad and good experiences, and completely ignores what is unique about the company that creates them. But we use the methodology of human-centred service design and combine it with a deep understanding of the uniqueness of your company, in order to systematically scan your customer experiences for sweet spots to leave a lasting impression, and not just to simply satisfy your customers’ requirements.

  • Motion Design

  • Audio Branding

  • Product Design

  • POS Design

  • Speculative Design

INSIGHTS

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