How to design Brand Experiences? KEYWORDS : Touch points, brand experience design, branding Brand experience (BE) is an important concept in marketing because it can affect brand loyalty (Brakus, Schmitt, & Zarantonello, 2009), brand recall, and brand attitude (Chang & Chieng, 2006). Design serves as an important practice for creating intense, integrated brand experiences. The prior construct of this PhD research assumes that BE is delivered to by interaction with various Touchpoints (TPs) of a brand. Consumers form their brand attitude about a brand based on their BE. The existing literature tends to address the challenges of BE design from a single aspect, such as product design, service design or brand design management. While consumers experience various types of TPs as a holistic whole, little guidance can be found about how to coordinate and design these TPs to provide customers with meaningful BEs and to help companies to build a favourable brand attitude. Furthermore, only a few
Name / Surname
researches discussed how to design for a brand and translate (brand) meaning into design. Research
Sijia Bakker-Wu
directions like strategic management of product styling and translating abstract values into PSS design is suggested as research opportunities (Creusen 2011). For design managers and designers, it is important to have some guidelines to achieve an experience design
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that leads to a desired effect (e.g. favorable brand attitude). This implies that the main aim of this PhD research is to develop design knowledge. Therefore the central phenomenon that will be studied is the design of TPs for
branding, design
meaningful BE. The purpose statement of the research is: To develop design guidelines that help design managers and designers to design FOR meaningful brand experiences that will lead to a favorable brand attitude.
Supervisor Based on the central question, sub questions can be defined as:
Prof. Erik-Jan Hultink
1. How is BE designed now?
Dr. Giulia Calabretta
2. What are the design methods that can be used or adapted for BE design? 3. How to design TP’s for BE using guidelines? 4. How effective are the guidelines? In accordance with the sub questions, the research project will consist 4 phases. Figure 1 presents the outline of this PhD research.
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Bibliography
Figure 1 Brakus, J. J., Schmitt, B. H., & Zarantonello, L. (2009). Brand Experience: What Is It? How Is It Measured? Does It Affect Loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 73(3), 52-68. Chang, P. L., & Chieng, M. H. (2006, Nov). Building consumer-brand relationship: A cross-cultural experiential view. Psychology & Marketing. Creswell, J. W. (2013). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, Sage publications. Creusen, M. E. (2011). "Research Opportunities Related to Consumer Response to Product Design*." Journal of Product Innovation Management 28(3): 405-408.