The Underappreciated Value of Brand Experience - Whitespace Opportunity for B2B Brands

As we prepare for our B2B and B2G branding course later this month we've been doing additional research and analysis of the business and government markets that is leading us to look at branding with a deeper perspective.   Branding is much talked about and little understood, even by experienced marketers because it is complex, combining both tangible and intangible elements. In the B2B environment, because there are more players on both the selling side and the buying side, this complexity becomes even more daunting. In snooping around brand paradigms we've been looking for good ways to deconstruct these challenges for the course, and while there's a lot of 'brand stuff' out there, we're focusing on the core aspects of brand-building that are executed through the marketing plan: Brand Experience, Brand Trigger and Brand Perception.

In our analysis, the secret to brand-building around an authentic brand is to value Experience as much as Trigger and Perception and to view them as holistically related. This emphasis on Brand Experience is especially important in a Web 2.0 world where your audience participates in co-creating their own Brand Experience with you. But this focus doesn't always come easily to many marketers, whose budgets are wrapped around the creation and measurement of Triggers and Perception, but it has always been the secret to powerful brand-building. In the B2B and B2G spaces particularly, Brand Experience is critically important and complex.

In our research I thought I'd come upon a great paradigm a few weeks ago on the MarketingProf's Daily Fix blog when I read Paul Williams' Think Reputation Instead of Brand post. It's a great article about how to think of brand-building as building your own or your company's reputation (and it's got a great list of resources). I read it thinking, "Wow, this is great! I agree with him!" But I kept getting hung up on his metaphor in comparing a brand with a reputation. It bugged me for over a week and I think I've finally figured out why.

If a brand was little more than a reputation, our brand fate would always be in the hands of others. But in fact, it's not in their hands, it's in ours and in their relationship with us.