Opinion: Strategy (alone) isn't enough

21.08.2024

When you purchase a new Apple product, you immediately encounter their brand vision through its packaging. The sleek, minimal box effortlessly glides open, revealing a shiny piece of tech cradled gently inside, accessories carefully hidden to avoid visual distraction.This unboxing experience is a microcosm of the brand's ethos: effortless, highly considered, and functional. It just works.

We believe in strategy's vital role in shaping successful brands and businesses. But as the scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski states, “The map is not the territory.” A successful strategy isn’t just about having a compelling purpose statement or understanding competitive advantages. It’s about integrating these elements into tangible offerings and experiences.

Our experience philosophy model, developed and refined in studio, bridges this gap between thinking and doing. It grounds strategic thought in practice, transforming the abstract notion of brand into impactful expressions. It codifies strategic thinking and decision-making, ensuring each touchpoint a customer or consumer interacts with supports and reinforces a brand’s essential qualities.

Our framework addresses the challenge of transforming a brand's esoteric emotional connection into experiences that people can touch, smell, and feel. It outlines ways to integrate new behaviours into a business’s culture and guides the creation of products and services where the brand is most strongly felt.

An effective experience philosophy integrates the brand into every aspect of a business’s practices. This deliberate brand-building approach creates positive, memorable customer experiences that will ultimately drive business outcomes.

This means breaking down the brand into a wide range of constituent parts and defining how to deliver it through customer engagement, marketing, service design, physical environment, products and more.

Recently, we applied this framework to Josh and Helen Emett’s fine-dining institution, Onslow, in New Zealand. In this case, we identified their desire to become as renowned for their drinks as they are for their food. To achieve this, we helped them to identify the moments within their customer journey where they could most effectively create signature brand experiences or expressions to elevate their drinks service.

For example, they had designed their existing bar to deliver drinks to the restaurant floor. To raise the profile of their drink offering, we knew we needed to increase customers’ dwell time at the bar.

At a staff level, transitioning from a production-focused role – primarily making drinks – to that of a mixologist who engages with customers at the bar requires a different service mindset. Even the content of their conversations becomes part of the larger brand narrative. We want the staff to have a point of view on the drinks they serve, where the ingredients come from, why they’re on the menu and other relevant considerations at both a wider brand and individual customer level.

There’s a practicality in this specificity that influences consumers’ impression of an experience and ultimately helps define their understanding of a brand. By creating a collection of interlinked but distinct moments, your brand will stand out and stand for something, ensuring customers remember and choose you.

This is a scalable exercise that works across industries. While we've used it to define service and experience for restaurants, hotels and civil and cultural spaces – we've seen equal success in applying it to enterprise-level businesses like Queensland Investment Corporation, which manages more than $22 billion worth of retail assets, or to specialty butcher Vic’s, who recently launched their first branded stores.

In a retail environment like Vic’s, our experience philosophy considered the curation of complementary product mix, how we could shape the space to create visual ‘hero’ moments for signature meat cuts, the tone and style of service and how staff members could help shoppers become more confident and creative in the kitchen. 

As a generative exercise, an experience philosophy is ideal for creating customer-focused expressions that resonate emotionally. And brands we connect with on an emotional level are the ones most likely to thrive commercially. Brand doesn’t just shape who you are, it also defines what you are: brand is a business strategy.

Ultimately, if you’re shaping or steering a brand, each day you’ll need to make hundreds of micro and macro decisions. These choices will impact how customers perceive and think about your brand. An experience philosophy charts a course to ensure those decisions are considered, effective and grounded in strategic thinking.

So, will the choices you make shape a brand so emotionally resonant customers will keep your packaging for years, or will they simply throw it away?