Brand Experience: Definition, Examples, and Measurement
Brand experience is the sensory, emotional, intellectual, and behavioral response a brand evokes. In Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello’s research, those responses arise from brand stimuli in design, identity, packaging, communications, and environments.
The practical question is how the brand’s promise connects with what people encounter. To assess that connection, examine both the experience itself and the work that delivers it: the information presented, the product or service provided, and the person’s response. This article uses research definitions, documented activities, and established mapping methods to explain that assessment.
The four dimensions of brand experience
The research framework distinguishes four dimensions. The questions below are suggested audit prompts, rather than items from the published scale.
| Dimension | What it concerns | Audit question |
|---|---|---|
| Sensory | Responses through the senses | Which visual, sound, or tactile details stood out? |
| Affective | Feelings and emotions | What feelings accompanied the encounter? |
| Intellectual | Thinking and cognition | What prompted curiosity or thought? |
| Behavioral | Physical actions and behaviors | What did the person do during the interaction? |
Use these prompts to investigate an encounter without assuming its effects. Record the person’s account alongside the material or activity being discussed. Keep a design intention, such as creating excitement, separate from an observed response. An audit should establish what happened before judging whether it matched the intended experience.
Brand experience, customer experience, and related terms
The terms overlap, but each directs attention to a different subject. The following distinctions help select the appropriate design or research question.
| Term | Focus | Question to investigate |
|---|---|---|
| Brand identity | The name, logo, colors, typography, and other visual or symbolic elements, as defined by the American Marketing Association | What makes the brand recognizable? |
| Customer experience (CX) | Responses across the entire purchase journey, according to Lemon and Verhoef’s research review | How is the journey experienced over time? |
| User experience (UX) | Interaction with a company, its services, and its products, in Nielsen Norman Group’s definition | How does the interaction meet the user’s needs? |
| Experiential marketing | Marketing that invites participation in a branded experience, in the American Marketing Association’s definition | What participation does the activity invite? |
For a brand-experience assessment, connect those questions to the response the brand evokes. Review identity when investigating recognition, the journey when investigating transitions, and UX when investigating product or service interaction. Review an experiential campaign as one activity within that wider assessment.
Why brand experience matters
The 2009 brand-experience study reported relationships with consumer satisfaction and loyalty, including effects through brand personality associations. Those findings support studying experience alongside other brand measures. A particular redesign, campaign, or service change still requires its own evaluation before attributing commercial results to it.
For practical decisions, define the promised benefit and the evidence needed to assess delivery. Compare what a brand communicates with the product, service, or activity that follows. Treat a discrepancy as a specific research question: which claim was encountered, what was delivered, and how did the person respond? This keeps the assessment tied to observable information.
Where brand experience takes shape
Lemon and Verhoef’s customer-journey review organizes experience across prepurchase, purchase, and postpurchase stages. It identifies brand-owned, partner-owned, customer-owned, and social or external touchpoints, reflecting different levels of business control.
For an audit, organize the material to review around those stages:
- Before purchase: advertising, websites, product information, store environments, and external reviews.
- During purchase: product selection, payment, packaging, and the information accompanying the transaction.
- After purchase: product use, instructions, service interactions, and exchanges with other customers.
Use the actual journey to determine which encounters belong in the audit. Identify who owns or influences each one. Keep external reviews and customer activity visible in the record while distinguishing them from the materials and processes the business controls.
Two documented brand-experience examples
Apple: learning through product use
In its 2017 Today at Apple announcement, Apple described free educational sessions covering photography, video, music, coding, art, and design. The program included practical activities such as Photo Walks and coding sessions, with instruction ranging from introductory lessons to advanced creative work.
Viewed through the brand-experience framework, this is an example of connecting a retail environment with learning and participation in product use. That is an interpretation of the documented activity; the announcement does not establish how participants felt or how attendance affected sales or loyalty.
LEGO House: building, testing, and collaborating
LEGO House’s Experience Zones describe four areas organized around creative building, problem-solving, emotional play, and collaboration. The Blue Zone includes designing and testing a car, while Story Lab in the Green Zone offers collaborative stop-motion filmmaking.
These activities illustrate participation in a brand’s products and environment through making and experimentation. LEGO House’s zone categories describe its learning-through-play approach; they are separate from the four research dimensions above. Use the example to examine the activity offered, without assuming that it produces the same response in every visitor.
How to connect the promise with delivery
The following audit applies journey mapping and service blueprinting to brand experience. It is a practical way to organize evidence and improvement decisions.
Define the benefit to examine
The American Marketing Association’s account of brand positioning connects positioning with communicating a brand’s value and benefits. Start the audit with a specific benefit already communicated in public materials. Record the exact claim, where it appears, and any stated conditions.
Then define what evidence would demonstrate delivery. Specify the product feature, service action, or information that needs to be examined. Avoid assigning a desired emotional response as though it were already observed. Keep the promised benefit and the person’s interpretation as separate entries until research connects them.
Map the encounters using evidence
A journey map visualizes the process of pursuing a goal and includes actions, thoughts, and emotions. Nielsen Norman Group recommends a clear viewpoint and data-grounded actions. Apply that approach to one goal and one observed path through the brand’s encounters.
Use the following fields to organize the audit:
| Field | What to record |
|---|---|
| Touchpoint | The actual page, location, product interaction, or service contact |
| Expectation | What the person understood would happen |
| Delivery | What the interaction provided |
| Response | What was reported or observed |
| Evidence | The research account, material, or operational record supporting the entry |
| Ownership | The person or function able to change the relevant material or process |
Mark missing evidence as unknown. Keep customer statements attached to the encounter they describe. Use the completed record to identify which claim, interaction, or transition needs closer investigation.
Connect visible interactions to operational work
A service blueprint links customer touchpoints with visible employee actions, backstage work, and supporting processes. This provides a way to trace the work behind delivery.
For each discrepancy, identify the action the customer encountered, the information or resources it depended on, and the process responsible for providing them. Assign the proposed change to that process’s owner. State whether the change concerns the promise, the delivery, or both, and define what evidence will be collected afterward.
How to measure brand experience
The original research validated a scale across the four dimensions and distinguished it from measures including brand evaluations and attachment. For formal measurement, consult the published instrument and its validation evidence.
For an operational assessment, choose methods according to the question. Nielsen Norman Group’s research-methods guide distinguishes reported attitudes from observed behavior, and qualitative explanations from quantitative measurements. Apply those distinctions as follows:
- Perception: use surveys or interviews to investigate stated feelings, interpretations, and associations.
- Interaction: use observation or usability research to examine what people do with the product or service.
- Extent: use quantitative measures to assess how often a defined issue or response occurs.
Keep the experience being assessed clear: a particular interaction, a journey, or a broader response to the brand. Identify the population and research period alongside the findings. When comparing results over time, keep the question and method consistent enough to interpret the comparison.
Lemon and Verhoef’s measurement review notes that simple feedback metrics capture specific aspects of experience. Use satisfaction or recommendation measures for their stated purpose, alongside evidence about the encounter under investigation.
Finish the audit with a defined change and a repeat assessment of the relevant encounter. Compare delivery and reported or observed responses, document what remains uncertain, and use the findings to decide whether to retain or revise the change. This makes the connection between the brand’s promise and its delivery reviewable.