Every now and then, new buzzwords appear in the world of branding. The latest phrase that we're hearing everywhere is 'brand experience', which is distinct from just 'branding' and is not the same as 'user experience'. So what exactly does it mean?
To find out, I spoke to Matt Michaluk, executive creative director (experience) and Sam Smith, executive business director (experience), who both work at the Brand Impact Award winning agency, JKR.
"At JKR, we are pioneering new thinking in this space. We’re shifting the conversation from simply thinking about Distinctive Brand Assets to also creating Distinctive Brand Experiences," explains Sam.
Article continues below"Everything we do as an agency is designed to enable brands to ‘Be Distinctive Everywhere’. The ‘everywhere’ matters because we are all consumers, and we all expect to be able to interact with a brand anytime, anywhere, on any channel. And we expect those experiences to exceed our expectations."
What is brand experience?
Matt Michaluk: Put simply, Brand Experience is any way that someone interacts with a brand. Sounds obvious, but just like the term ‘Brand’ itself, it encompasses so much, so many interpretations, so many applications, and so many uses.
It’s also helpful to think about Brand Experience in relation to our other commonly used industry terminology. If your Brand is who you are, why you exist, what you believe, who you serve, if your Visual Identity is how you show up, how you express yourself, how you are recognised, then Brand Experience is how you behave, how you interact, how you connect with people.
The understanding of the phrase Brand Experience is probably not helped by the plethora of acronyms that also exist in this field: CX (Customer Experience), EX (Employee Experience), and UX (User Experience). At JKR, we view these as essential components in a brand’s ecosystem of experience, where CX helps us to shape typically transactional experiences, EX helps us build workplace experiences, and UX helps us to define product- or interface-led experiences.
We like to view Brand Experience not as a discipline, but instead as the greatest intersection of creative disciplines – where visual, verbal, and sensory, where physical, human, and digital worlds unite in service of creating a brand’s experience.
Why is brand experience important?
Sam Smith: It’s important because a good experience is forgotten, a bad experience is remembered, and a great experience is shared. Today, with so much competition and so much consumer exposure to brands, brand experience is an essential lever for businesses to be distinctive.
A good experience is forgotten, a bad experience is remembered, and a great experience is shared
You can design the most beautiful visual identity on the planet, but if your customer experience is poor, your product’s user experience is antiquated, or your employee experience is crippling operations, then people will turn their backs on your brand.
Why are people starting to care about BX in 2026?
MM: The rise of Brand Experience and its increasing prioritisation within businesses today is because it remains one of the real untapped areas of competitive advantage for many brands. Every brand is looking for ways to earn more trust, build more advocacy, or simply expand their reach. Brand Experience is an effective weapon that can create real distinction between you and your competitors.
Everyone loves to drop the Covid reference at this point and talk about how customers are flocking back to physical experiences. I don’t believe this to be the case. Humans have, and always will be, attracted to in-person experiences. The pandemic simply reminded us all of the importance of balance across physical, human, and digital interactions. When we are limited to just one, our multi-dimensional dexterity as humans suffers.
Can you give me an example of a brand doing BX well?
MM: Not to be biased, but one of JKR’s clients, Stella Artois, sets the standard for how to approach Brand Experience. Everything they do builds from one core experience-led idea: The Perfect Serve. Whether it’s getting David Beckham to produce training videos for bartenders to pour the perfect pint, creating The Perfect Serve awards that recognise great bartenders globally, hosting Perfect Serve activations at Wimbledon where both tennis stars and guests pour pints, or launching Let’s Do Dinner, their food-led experience, every touchpoint connects back to this singular idea and the product quality. It’s a platform that the brand keeps investing in and keeps building equity into.
What about one that could do it better?
MM: It’s easy to talk about great experiences in sport, entertainment or booze. But often the most important and impactful experiences are the ones we subconsciously engage with every day.
Take the banking sector. For years, we as consumers have put up with terrible banking app user experiences, infuriating call centres, and shameful high street branches. Then brands like Monzo come along and prove what’s possible, completely resetting customer experience standards, entirely redefining the user and product experience, all dressed in a highly distinctive brand.
What tips would you give to a brand who wants to improve its brand experience?
SS: Find your focus: you can’t win on every channel, all of the time. Choose which channels will have the greatest impact for your brand, and choose the moments in culture that will matter most. Focus your time and investment here.
Assemble your advocates: Brand Experience relies on many departments and many teams to pull off the incredible. Break down silos restricting this and build a cross-functional team that shares your ambition to define great experiences for your brand.
Obsess about your audience: Understand their unmet needs, define how you want them to interact with your brand, and be clear on the emotional response you are aiming to achieve. Then make sure your response is truly distinctive to your brand and your brand only.
What are the biggest barriers to achieving a cohesive BX?
SS: Departmental silos are often the greatest barrier to progress.
Departmental silos are often the greatest barrier to progress
When marketing, digital, development, operations and product teams aren’t working together, there are always limitations on what can be achieved. But when they are, that’s when the real magic happens. That’s when brands create the benchmark experiences we all love to talk about.
How do you strike the right balance between consistency and surprise/delight when creating brand experiences?
MM: Brands don’t have to choose between surprise and delight and consistency. The best brands are consistently surprising. We work with our clients to shape every customer, user and employee journey, establishing the experience fundamentals that deliver consistency while identifying moments where the unexpected can create emotional highs.
How are emerging technologies impacting the future of brand experience design?
MM: AI is unquestionably an incredible creative tool. It’s enabling us to concept, visualise, refine at a speed we would never have imagined ten years ago.
The biggest challenge now is balancing creativity with reality
But the biggest challenge now is balancing creativity with reality.
Anyone can ask ChatGPT to visualise an awesome brand experience for them. But the hard reality hits when you question whether what it’s created is truly original, distinctive, and even capable of being built.
How can smaller brands ensure they’re considering brand experience?
SS: The belief that being a small brand is a disadvantage in this space is a fallacy. In this world, small equals agile. Small equals disruption. Try getting a multi-billion-dollar global brand to do anything fast. It’s not easy.
Small brands often have the upper hand
Small brands often have the upper hand. They can react to culture, build on trends and respond to shifting demand at a pace that fuels relevance.
How do you measure the success of brand experience?
SS: Like any brand investment, there are many ways to measure success and impact. The key is to establish which metrics really matter to your brand and your strategic goals. For some, NPS (Net Promoter Score) is essential to understanding customer satisfaction in physical retail. For others, it’s often a shift in brand perception that we map against target brand attributes.
These days, very few brands will take a punt without testing or piloting an experience first, so the margin for getting it wrong is pretty small.
How do you think BX will change over the next five-ten years?
MM: I believe Brand Experience is only going to get bigger, better and braver. The pursuit of the ‘never seen before’ or the ‘never done before’ becomes harder every year. But that pressure fuels creative thinking and pushes creative boundaries.
In ten years’ time, we’re all expected to have our own personal AI assistants. Imagine the role they’ll play as they plan, guide and accompany us through every interaction with brands.
Find out more about JKR.
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