Is your brand experienced?

Whenever a rebrand falls flat, it’s inevitably described as “putting lipstick on a pig”.

It’s superficial. Redundant. Even misleading. It’s also a disservice to branding (and perhaps unfair on pigs too).

Because we know strong brands are created with purpose but ultimately defined by the experience. Only time will tell if the experience lives up to the promise of the rebrand, and that experience can make or break a brand and business. Especially a travel brand, where the experience is everything.

In other words, don’t fall into the say-do gap. For many business leaders and marketers, what I’ve outlined is simply plain-speaking logic: make sure your brand does what it says.

However, what if you want to leverage your travel brand in ways that are more distinctive, more meaningful and more memorable, in order to make it more substantive, tangible and real. It’s a key question in a world driven by customer experience. That’s a world where the focus is placed on removing meaningless friction from the experience in order to make things as quick and easy as possible.

For many travel brands, that focus is pivotal to their seamless value propositions, and their business is all the more successful for it.

That said, any business driven by an exclusive focus on customer experience runs the risk of making the experience so quick and easy that the experience itself becomes invisible to the point of being easily forgotten. What was the name of the travel agent who booked the trip? Where did I find that aggregator for cheap flights? Can you remember that website where we booked that tour? Any experience that is all too easy can also be all too easily forgotten.

That’s where your brand can be more than a badge – a logo or a tagline – and, if the customer experience is designed to remove meaningless friction from the experience, then the brand experience is there to add meaningful friction to the experience, and to make things distinctive and memorable.

Let me give you some practical examples – the first in a professional capacity through FutureBrand’s work with Air Tahiti Nui, the others are personal stories of my own travel experiences for business and leisure.

Boarding a flight is a lesson in efficiency in order to turn around those aircraft as quickly as possible. If you’re working for a destination airline like Air Tahiti Nui, the experience needs to balance that efficiency with emotion at the appropriate moments, and so it is that Air Tahiti Nui works efficiently to transport their passengers at every step – except for one, in particular.

Air Tahiti Nui takes a moment to present each and every passenger with a tiare flower when they board their flight. Its petals closed at first, the tiare flower slowly opens over the course of the journey, and offers the ultimate welcome to the Islands of Tahiti. This ritual might make the boarding process a little less efficient, but it introduces the brand in a way that makes that moment all the more meaningful and memorable.

It can be a personal moment or, as I discovered on a family holiday to the Legoland resort, it can be a unique memory. As we checked-out of the hotel and packed our bags into the back of our taxi, the bell captain asked whether we would like a final photo to remember our trip. Naturally, we said yes and he obliged. Or that’s what we thought had happened until we were scrolling through the photos on my wife’s iPhone en route to the airport only to discover that the bellhops had all assembled behind their captain and he’d snapped a selfie – so that we would remember them! That was more than ten years ago and it’s still one of the most memorable check-out moments I’ve ever had, capturing the fun essence at the heart of the world’s most playful brand. Yes, the bellhops made sure our bags were packed quick fast, but still they stopped to create a unique memory that will fade a lot more slowly.

A distinctive brand experience can be hard to forget, but what about one that’s hard to find? Consider the story of a speakeasy bar I once discovered at a hotel I used to stay in Kuala Lumpur. I only unearthed it after about the fifth trip in as many months, because the bar was purposefully hidden away, with no advertising and signage.

In recent times, I’ve heard the bar is now an open secret but it can still be tricky to find if you don’t know where to look, and so it’s lost nothing of its charm. Find the lamp masquerading as a top hat, push on the white wall, and walk on in. For a brand that may very well have broken the first rule of customer experience – put the customer first – it made for an all the more memorable brand experience and feeling in-the-know offered its own special reward.

Whether or not you choose to rebrand your business, know that your brand is only as good as the experience: find the meaningful moments that matter, and use your brand to make them memorable.