This document provides tips on how to craft user experiences that build brand loyalty. It discusses how experiences can be used internally to develop an emotional association with a brand, rather than relying on external advertising. It encourages focusing on a single brand sentiment and personality, and emphasizing usefulness, usability and desirability in products. It also discusses simplifying brand guidelines and focusing on purpose, personality and understanding customers. Specific tactics discussed include using "branding moments" in experiences to reinforce the brand association, creating positive unexpected experiences, and cherishing every customer interaction.

1. USER EXPERIENCE BRANDINGHow to craft experiences that create loyal customers
Bill Beard
Beard Branding
#UXSCOT 11.6.2015
@writebeard
Welcome!

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?Take a minute and think of the things in your life you truly care about.
The things you love.

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It’s likely you think first about the people in your life. Your loved ones. Family.

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Friends. The people you want to hang out with.

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The people you want to be with all the time, and you would be with all the time, if you could.

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INSERT IMAGE OF
YOUR GOD HERE.
About faith and your religious community.

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The Garden of eden
prototype FAILED.
The users chose apple.
Or maybe you don’t.

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OR
Maybe you care about Politics?
Right and left, making the world a better place through policy.

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You’re here,
aren’t you?(And hopefully still listening…)
Maybe it’s work? Being passionate about what you do. That’s why you’re here, because you care about getting better at your jobs.

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Maybe you care about music, a song that stirs the soul.

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Or art, poetry, movies, sports, even.

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Maybe you care deeply about helping others. About other people living on this mortal coil, burning calories just to love and live breathe.

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We care about those things because they are THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE. Nobody makes you want to experience them, no one really makes you want to care about
them, you just want to.

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-We love those things because we love feeling. We do not live to survive, we live to feel. -All of those are grounded in emotion, nothing more human than Emotion.
How does this relate to branding and products?
Well, remember what it was like to be a teenager?

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Business in the front,
party in the back.
Like a haircut?{pictures
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Guessing we were not the popular kids.
Don’t let the good looks fool you. He was desperate to fit in, would have done anything.
As a teenager, owning the right brand

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MOM! PLEASE OH PLEASE, mOM??
would send a signal to others
as a teenager, we didn’t really know we were borrowing interest from those brands, adding it to our value
Come to think of it…

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HONEY! PLEASE OH PLEASE, HONEY??
How much are we different as an adult? Our values have changed, but we still love the way brands make us feel.
Go home and check out your house.

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My setup. Not Typical.
15 different logos from my couch. (A logo is a visual representation of a brand)
Why? Not about consumerism/commercialism.
Because we’re human. We love to care. Love to love. We love to care so much we assign emotional value to inanimate objects.

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BRAND:
How a person feels
about your product or service
That’s what a brand really is: how someone feels about your product or service.
Want to make someone feel a specific way…

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“People will forget what you said.
People will forget what you did.
But they’ll never forget
HOW YOU MADE THEM FEEL.”
-Maya Angelou
Make them feel it until they’ll never forget it. Until they don’t know what they’d do without it.

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+ =:)
We get loyalty through emotion. We create an emotional association to our brand, and over time, if carefully fed, we turn that association into an emotional attachment

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EMOTIONS DRIVE OUR DECISIONS.
Even when we think we’re being logical, we still describe our decisions using emotional words. “I’m really happy at my new job” or “I love my new car.”

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Every afternoon,
I miss my bed.
People are averse to losing out. Losing out on emotion in particular. Feelings we’ve enjoyed. When separated, we miss people, places, inanimate objects, because
we’ve tied emotions to them.

24. External:
Marketing &
Advertising
In the past, we’d begin the process of developing that emotional tie before the customer ever saw the product, through advertising. We’d create brands from the outside in. [diagram]
Nike would run an ad for Air Jordan’s, and without ever having tried the product, you’d want it because it was the coolest damn sneaker ever. It’s gotta be the shoes! This is a brand so powerful, by the way, that it still earns $1.75 billion globally annually, even though it’s been more than a decade since Jordan played.
Obviously, that advertising cost money and lots of it. If you’re building products with Lean, you’re not going to spend thousands or millions of dollars on advertising or marketing. That defeats the purpose.

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MOAR DEVELOPERS Pleze
Even if we did have those budgets, that’s not where you’d put it.

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“Uncle bill,
how did you
check EMAIL
before computers?”
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But times have changed since I was a kid. The world has changed.
The pace of information was certainly slower.
Less noise.

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ORIGINAL TWEETDECK
less of a news cycle, shouting screaming
social media was the telephone and TV was the internet
Brands could purchase our attention and tell us whatever because there was very little interference.

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Will never die
TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING
Now, things are different.
DVR HBO NOW, NETFLIX DECLINING TV, no newspapers really.
So what do we do?

29. USER EXPERIENCE BRANDING
your product
INTERNAL
You have to make someone build up that emotional association—build your brand—while they’re using your product.

30. FEATURES CAN BE
DIFFERENTIATORS UNTIL THEY’RE NOT
Features can certainly help… until they can’t. Someone else has it better, or is just bigger.

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#UXThe experiences that we create. That we do our best to craft. That’s where we use emotion to create loyalty.

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PRODUCT IS THE NEW BRAND*
*Not literally.
settle down.
Not literally. But it’s our best chance to create loyal customers.
Create experiences so powerful customer will not just want them, will NEED them.

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usableEMOTIONAL
Useful
GREAT
Experiences
HAPPEN HERE
Useful: Meets a customer need.
Useable: This is what most of you do. Make the product easy to use, understandable, etc.
What we’re missing is Emotional: Make me feel something!

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Minimum VIAble
productDESIRABLE
I believe MVPs can be good, but we tend to make them too bare-bones. MVP’s run its course. We need to do better. Desirable. Can you afford to get MEH when you
use a product?
And why don’t we treat brands like we treat products? Testing, anyone?

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Maybe then we won’t end up with a logo that looks like your choice of genitals.

36. THE CUSTOMER ULTIMATELY
CONTROLS YOUR BRAND
We can influence, but we can’t own. That’s why we should test to make sure we’re getting it right.

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The internet came up with a new tagline for them.

38. TRADITIONAL
BRAND GUIDELINES
Brand Guidelines as they stand are complex, detailed, viewed as rules, inflexible. Can’t predict how tech, marketplace, customer needs change. We need to rely on
teams to solve problems in real-time, not by referencing docs

39. FOCUS
PURPOSE
PERSONALITY
CUSTOMER
PARTS OF THE
LEAN BRAND
So let’s simplify. Lean Branding. Not a reference doc. Simpler, can be more flexible.
Must understand our brand before we can incorporate it into the experience
We don’t need detailed guidelines. Do you honestly need to be told how to use a logo in a design?

40. WHO IS OUR CUSTOMER?
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In order to craft your brand, must understand your customer.
Trying to influence these people
Demographics, Psychographics, Pain Points, Solutions

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BRAND PERSONALITY:What do we act, sound
and look like?
Think of brands as people. If I describe a person to you, you could tell me how they dress, couldn’t you? How they’d talk?

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BRAND focus: A single, UNIQUE sentiment
“When I use {product},
I feel _______.”
empowered
LOVED
TOUGH
GEEKY
SMARTER
In-the-know
SPECIAL
ENTERTAINEDUNDERSTOOD
Quick
BEAUTIFUL Calm
Handsome
SEXY
Privileged
UNIQUE
everyone can understand.
Flexible brands: Flexibility comes easier with simplification.
Let’s boil an entire brand down into a single emotion. Focus. A focus that anyone on our team can understand and work toward. So simple you can’t forget it. And make
it your own, make it exclusive to your product.

43. #2
sporting
apparel
company
market share:
Nike
UA
Adidas
46%
14%
4%
UNDER ARMOUR
How did under armour become the #2 brand?

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2nd leading apparel company in the world, did it with brand.
Must protect this house, it’s even in the name, ARMOUR.

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“When I use UNDER ARMOUR,
I feel TOUGH.”
2nd leading apparel company in the world, did it with brand.
must protect this house, it’s even in the name, ARMOUR.
Nike never went for tough.

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When I use Mailchimp,
I feel like I’m having fun!
[WHILE I SPAM EVERYONE!]
For non designers, Creating emails is a pain in the ass!
Make it fun!

47. BRAND PUPOSE
Decipher YOUR “WHY”

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“People don’t buy
what you do,
they buy why you do it.”
Brand Purpose:
-Simon Sinek

49. GOLDEN CIRCLE
WHY
HOW
WHAT
Simon Sinek, Start with
Why
Every company can tell you what they do: “We’re a car company”
How: Your unique selling proposition: “The most fuel efficient hybrid”
What: Show a shared aspiration: “Because we want to save the planet for future generations.” We’ve taken a straight sales pitch and made an emotional connection.
Think about your “why” and go from there.

50. GOLDEN
CIRCLE
WHY
HOWWHAT
Make computers
& computer
related products
Beautiful design &
superior usability
Because we believe in challenging the
status quo in everything that we do
How apple gets people to wait hours in line for a minimal iPhone upgrade. “Challenge the status quo.”
Think about your own organization. Create this chart.

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APPLE
MICROSOFT
If I can sum up everything, it would be with this slide.
A person, having an experience, talking about change, vs. a pie chart. I don’t care if one is business, are you going to tell me business isn’t emotional?

52. YOUR TURN!
BRAND PURPOSE
Simon Sinek

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Branding moments
-Any opportunity to build your
brand within your experience.
-Focused!

54. FOCUSEDIDEASESTABLISH EMOTIONAL ASSOCIATION and
VISUALLY/VERBALLY REINFORCE IT

55. LITTLE
BIG
IDEAS
IMPACTLet me be clear. I use the term moments for a reason.
These are small ideas that can have a big impact.
I’m talking about adding one card on the board that gets a low estimate.
I’m also not talking about prioritizing branding moments over making a feature function properly.
If your product does not work, no amount of branding will save you in the long run.

56. FUN☺
MAKE
FAILURE
This is a concept that’s been around for a long time, but so few products do it well.
The most famous example of it is the 404 page or the 500s. Everyone has a fun 404 page now.

58. PASSWORD
INVALID
YOUR
IS
No one likes to be wrong. We’re taught from a young age that WRONG is BAD.
I went to Catholic school, a nun would hit me with a ruler when I was wrong. That’s funny, but it’s not a joke.
Find a frequent failure and lighten the mood with some levity.

59. BE HUMAN
This isn’t even that great, but at least they made the effort.

60. UNEXPECTED
POSITIVE
CREATE THE
There are two kinds of unexpected that can happen in products or in life, really. Positive and Negative.
Good things and bad. In your UX, I encourage you to build the positive unexpected.
These are little moments that a user didn’t anticipate, but also didn’t throw them off, or interfere with their ability to complete a task.
A bad unexpected may be this. [SLIDE]

61. How can you possibly get an unbiased, positive survey from this? The only reason I’ll take that survey is to say bad things about you.
When I talk about Positive Unexpected, I’m talking about this thing.

63. CHERISH EVERY INTERACTION
Last one, it’s not a tactic as much as a mindset.
Cherish every click.
This is a simple idea, the umbrella concept behind branding moments. Whenever you’re building a new experience, think about every click the customer makes, and every possible outcome. Then ask yourself, “In the most likely outcome, is there anything I could do to make my customer feel something?”
Give yourself five minutes to think of something. As many ideas as you can. If it’s a small estimate, write the card. Take it to the team.

64. INTEGRATEDon’t Interfere
Don’t FUcK THE FLOW

65. DESIGN
STUDIO

66. 1. 3-6 ideas (3min)
2. Present
3. Bestidea+Steal(3MIN)
4. Present
5. Best group idea (3min)
6. Present

67. be better than “generic
business guy!”
YOU ARE ALL
BRAND MANAGERS
NOW

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CRAFT Experiences that create A unique
Emotional association that becomeS
AN Emotional attachment.
That’s how we EARN Loyal CUSTOMERS.
User experience Branding:

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QUESTIONS?

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Bill Beard
BeardBranding.com
@writebeard
THANK YOU SCOTLAND!