There is a huge amount of untapped potential in customer experience design, which many Finnish companies could capitalize on in their brand work. Creativity must be at the core of customer experience development.
Customer experience is an ambiguous term, and the experience is often thought of narrowly. This is why the end result of much brand work is still a brand film polished to crystal clarity and a campaign that fills digital surfaces. Another pitfall is developing the customer experience separately from the brand, which causes the potential for brand differentiation to fizzle out.
Designing the experience requires both creative solutions and creative thinking. A siloed mindset (as in any creative field) is the worst constraint on the experience. The experience requires ecosystem thinking. Instead of seeing social media merely as marketing or e-commerce as sales, these should be viewed as opportunities to elevate the experience.
Without creativity, the end result is a product, service, or experience that resembles all the others, creating no value and evoking no emotions. That's why, for the customer experience, creativity is the hardest currency. Make it or break it. Zig when others zag. This becomes concrete, at the latest, when the customer experience becomes commoditized and, at worst, turns into production-line-like execution. In the name of truth, genuinely inventive solutions are currently few and far between. So, there is plenty of work to be done.
At 358, the experience work begins by examining the entire customer journey. The most delicious part is getting to tackle the grayest and most boring touchpoints. In these moments, creativity gets to flourish; how to make this encounter memorable, delightful, strange, or special.
From a brand-building perspective, it is valuable to consider how to make every touchpoint as memorable as possible, instead of just making everything easy and fast.
In the midst of the jungle of terminology and technology, we should keep the most important thing in mind – the human being. This way, instead of individual outputs, we build an entity that resonates and is remembered. And speaking of the brand film, at its best, the end result is a brand whose advertising doesn't feel like advertising.
