How can you use creative brainstorming to develop a brand experience that delights customers?

Create a visual representation of the customer journey or brand experience. Storyboarding helps in understanding the flow and identifying touchpoints where creative elements can be introduced to enhance the overall experience.

Brainstorming works great to bring the team into the vision and experience. It helps to clear ideas and to raise also ones we never thought would be heard. Focus, focus... Time to play and time to focus on the ideas

To succeed in today's competitive business landscape, it's not enough to simply provide a product or service - you must craft a brand experience that delights customers. By gaining a deep understanding of your target audience, using creative brainstorming techniques, and incorporating unexpected elements that go above and beyond customer expectations, you can create a brand experience that leaves a lasting impression. Foster a supportive and collaborative environment that encourages diversity of thought and incorporates storytelling techniques to create a narrative around your brand experience. Continuously test and iterate on your ideas to enhance the delight factor and create a deeper connection between customers and your brand.

In my experience, you need to make sure you have the right mix of voices at the table. The marketing team cannot usually, in isolation, create a brand experience that delights. They need to talk to front-end team members at all levels, and they need to talk to clients. We aren't always working in businesses or industries where we are the audience. Don't go off gut instinct to try to impress people you don't know all that well. Get to know them.

Setting clear objectives is a critical first step in using creative brainstorming effectively for developing a brand experience. It’s essential to understand and define the overarching goals, vision, mission, and values of your brand. Knowing your target audience, competitors, and potential partners helps in tailoring the brainstorming to address specific needs and market gaps. Identifying the key messages and emotions that your brand aims to convey and evoke is vital. This clarity in objectives shapes the direction and focus of the brainstorming session, ensuring that the ideas generated are aligned with the brand's unique positioning and aspirations.

In addition to customer feedback and research, it is really important to document the experience that people already have with your brand so that you can see what is working well, and where there are overlaps and gaps. Documenting the customer journey and/or the user journey, the partner journey/experience, the community experience, and the employee journey/experience is critical to helping you see the holistic brand experience. After documenting and analyzing those, you can have very productive brainstorming sessions centered on identifying new triggers, key moments to introduce or improve emotional connections, creating environmental cues, and ways to raise the observability for the brand or create behavioral residue.

Firstly, do a thorough analysis of how your brand is currently perceived. What do your audience already know / feel about you and what do you want them to feel after this brand experience. Explore a diverse range of sources, including industry trends, competitor strategies, and customer feedback - be authentic about it. Engage with the LinkedIn community to gain insights and perspectives from a wide array of professionals and thought leaders. Look beyond your industry or similar industries for innovative ideas that can be adapted to enhance your brand experience.

To organize our inspirations, I have many ways, and always depends on the target. Sometimes, collages and mood boards can help. Sometimes market trends or case studies or simply listening to clients to better understand to achieve their inspirations

When you think of creating a new brand you are creating a new identity, and you need to ensure that you have different people from departments who collaborate to build a narrative towards the perception you want to build. Understand the customer's current usage of the current products and the way they would enjoy using it more with feedback. Create a problem statement for the team. Building a customer experience is always uphill task it starts from the customer touch points: website to a social post to an e-mail, to the way a Rep speaks to them, how they are addressed and communicated during the entire conversation. Now it's the job of the team to figure out how do we improve these touch points and give them a better delightful experience.

After setting your objectives, gathering diverse sources of inspiration is key for developing a brand experience. This can involve delving into market research, analyzing customer feedback, observing current trends, and studying best practices and case studies. Looking at successful examples from other industries can also provide fresh perspectives. Tools like mood boards, collages, and mind maps are effective for visually organizing and synthesizing this information. Online platforms can also be valuable resources for collating a wide range of ideas. The purpose of this stage is to fuel creativity and open up new possibilities for your brand experience, allowing you to approach the brainstorming session with a rich and varied perspective.

Make sure to involve your copywriters in all ideations. If your brand has a voice, no points for guessing who has the words. Try and keep the space as open as possible to have an engaging discussion. The larger the dataset you analyse before the ideation, the more information you have to think and solve for. Involve people who are direct stakeholders for the brand like the account manager, the writer, the designer - ask for inputs, and generate ideas thereon.

The best way to brainstorm is individual brainstorming, in a group setting. First, participants write down their ideas. No talking allowed. You then go through everyone's ideas and do a second-round to build-up, enrich... That way you avoid dominant voices, cancelling out ideas too early and allowing those who like to think first before talking to contribute. Extremely productive.

One time at work, we were brainstorming ideas for a campaign and a young intern on the team kept outright cancelling out ideas before they were even put on the board. The best way to run efficient brainstorming sessions is to not write out any ideas you may be considering, no matter how small and stupid they may sound sometimes.

With your inspiration at hand, it’s time to dive into idea generation for your brand experience. Employ various techniques like traditional brainstorming, brainwriting, mind mapping, SCAMPER, or even reverse brainstorming to foster a flow of creative thoughts. This stage is about quantity, not quality; avoid immediate judgment or filtration of ideas. Involving a diverse group in this process, including team members, customers, or industry experts, can significantly enrich the pool of ideas with varied and fresh perspectives. The aim is to accumulate a broad spectrum of concepts, which can later be narrowed down and refined. This phase is crucial for unlocking innovative approaches and possibilities for your brand experience.

The best ideas are organic and seldom takes birth under pressure or closed-mindedness. Often I have found that in this stage of pooling ideas, people hesitate to collaborate or simply discuss with others. Inclusive brainstorming, no matter if the other is part of your creative team or not, is the key to being abreast with fresh perspectives. Collaborative thinking can bring genius ideas to the fore.

Criteria to evaluate the brand experience depends on what we want to prioritize. I think that every way such impact or originality can added value and get close to the goal

Once a diverse array of ideas is generated, the next step is to critically evaluate and select the most suitable ones for enhancing your brand experience. Establish criteria such as feasibility, relevance to your brand, originality, potential impact, and alignment with your defined objectives. Tools like evaluation matrices, voting systems, or dotmocracy can aid in objectively comparing and prioritizing the ideas. This process helps in filtering out the ideas that are most promising and viable for your brand. The goal here is to refine the pool of creative concepts down to those that are not only innovative but also practical and in line with your brand’s strategic goals.

The next crucial phase involves bringing the selected ideas to life through prototyping and testing. Depending on the nature of the idea, this can range from simple sketches and wireframes to more detailed storyboards or prototypes. The objective is to create tangible representations of your ideas, whether they are low-fidelity or high-fidelity. Once these prototypes are developed, gathering feedback is key. Utilize tools like surveys, interviews, focus groups, or usability tests to collect input from customers, stakeholders, or experts. This stage is vital for validating the effectiveness of your ideas in real-world scenarios and ensuring they align with your objectives.

One time at work, in my experience, I found it extremely helpful to create quick, low-cost prototypes of our brand experience ideas. We used simple materials like cardboard, paper, or even digital mock-ups to visualize our concepts. Then, we conducted small-scale tests or simulations within the team or among a limited group of customers. These tests provided immediate feedback and insights into what worked and what needed improvement. Starting small with prototypes helped me refine my ideas early in the process, saving time and resources before implementing larger-scale changes to the brand experience.

Si vas a hacer un brainstorming con tu equipo, te recomiendo que le recuerdes unos 3 días antes la fecha de la reunión. En ese email deja claro cuál es el objetivo del brainstorming: ¿Una campaña orientada a ventas? ¿Campaña de branding? ¿El lanzamiento de un nuevo producto? Es importante para que vayan generando ideas que no les haga perder foco. En ese email yo incluiría también el funnel del proyecto/campaña para ir generando ideas según la etapa del funnel u micro-objetivo. Pídeles que revisen campañas de otros años, ejemplos de otras empresas, que busquen en blogs, redes sociales e incluso pregunten a Chat GPT. De esta forma la reunión de brainstorming irá enfocada y por lo tanto, será más efectiva.

Intégrer vos clients dans vos séances de brainstorming Ne vous limitez pas uniquement à le faire en interne avec vos équipes, faites participer également vos clients à la phase d'idéation.