A lot of us treat “brand” and “experience” as completely separate things. Especially when we talk about “experience”, a lot of us tend to instantly jump to the User Experience of an app or a website. This is in no small part due to UX becoming a buzzword lately and everyone selling courses on “UI/UX”.

However, after the quality of the product itself, the experience of the customer at your touchpoints is what ultimately determines your brand. Whether it’s a delivery rider showing up late, an onboarding email, product packaging, or a support agent’s tone, everything shapes the meaning of the brand.

For example, a brand that markets itself as “premium” but delivers:

• Slow support
• Cheap packaging
• Inconsistent messaging
• Confusing delivery
• Poor retail experience

…is no longer premium.

Modern consumers build their perception of a brand through accumulated micro-experiences. This is why companies like Apple, Dyson, Monzo, Patagonia, and Muji obsess over every detail. Not for aesthetics, but for coherence.

In 2025, strong brands are not built by messaging, they are lived through experiences.

 

Experience Is Now the Primary Driver of Brand Strength

PwC’s customer experience research found that experience is one of the most important factors influencing purchase decisions, often tied directly to trust and loyalty.

Bain & Company’s work on customer experience leadership shows that companies who master experience design grow revenues significantly faster than their peers, not because of marketing, but because of reduced friction, stronger loyalty, and a greater alignment between promise and delivery.

Brand equity is increasingly built through experience, not advertising.

 

Experience Is More Than UX

Experience design in popular conversations often gets reduced to digital screens. App flows, web interfaces, microcopy, buttons, and conversions. But that is barely 10% of the real picture.

Experience happens in how a package opens, how a store smells, how a chair feels, how a support agent greets us, how the lighting shapes our mood, how messaging feels in our inbox, how the product behaves, how long it takes to resolve an issue, and even the texture of materials we touch.

A brand’s identity today is not what it looks like, it’s how it behaves.

 

Apple: Coherence at Every Physical and Sensory Touchpoint

Let’s get the most obvious and well known out of the way. Walk into any Apple Store anywhere in the world and you will get an identical experience. The lighting, the ambience, you can see it from far. In fact a lot of interior trends, especially in retail outlets have been described as “looking like an apple store”. It is clearly a differentiating factor and it is not a coincidence.

This same experience of minimal luxury is seen in the other touchpoints of the brand as well. Think about the physical products, the unboxing experience, the quality of materials used in the packaging, the websites. Everything speaks the same language. Apple.

 

Nike: Turning Stores Into Movement Experiences

Nike has transformed its stores into places where you don’t just shop, you move. A Nike flagship feels more like a training environment than a retail space. There are treadmills, mini courts and testing zones that invite you to try things instead of just looking at them. The staff act like athlete guides rather than salespeople and the whole space pushes you to feel more confident and energetic. It is a physical version of the brand promise that anyone with a body is an athlete.

Nike also brings personalization into the experience in simple and meaningful ways. Tools like Nike Fit and Nike By You let you test, tweak and customize products on the spot. The displays show real stories, materials you can touch and moments from athletes that shaped the brand. Everything works together to tell you what Nike stands for without ever saying it outright. It is experiential design that feels natural, memorable and human.

 

Red Bull: Building a Brand Through Events, Culture, and Physical Energy

Red Bull is one of the greatest examples of a brand where experience is the strategy. Red Bull does not sell a drink. Red Bull sells adrenaline, momentum, and possibility. Instead of investing heavily in traditional advertising, Red Bull built an ecosystem of branded experiences:

• Extreme sports events
• Music festivals
• The Red Bull Racing F1 team
• The Stratos space jump
• Cultural programs for creators and athletes
• Video content that feels like a lifestyle documentary

Every encounter, whether it’s a cliff diving competition, a racing car, a music studio session, or a can being handed to you at a night event, reinforces the same feeling: “Red Bull gives you wings.”

You don’t understand Red Bull from the can. You understand it from the world they’ve built. This is one of the clearest demonstrations of how brand and experience are inseparable.

 

When Brand and Experience Are Separated, Companies Break

Inside many organizations, brand still sits within marketing, while experience sits within operations, customer support, retail management, and product.

This separation creates inconsistencies customers feel immediately:

• A beautiful identity paired with cheap, flimsy packaging.
• An inspiring brand film followed by terrible customer service.
• A “premium” brand delivered through chaotic retail environments.
• A friendly tone on social media contradicted by generic, automated emails.
• A superstar campaign that falls apart when the product arrives damaged or late.

A brand cannot be premium if the experience is average. It cannot be friendly if the support team sounds cold. It cannot be luxurious if the environment feels rushed. It cannot be innovative if the operations are slow.

A brand is not what they say they are internally but how the custom perceives them externally.

 

The Future: Brand Experience as a Unified Discipline

The most forward-thinking companies are collapsing the boundaries between brand, design, and experience. They start with a single question: “What should our brand feel like?”. Not visually, emotionally.

Then they translate that desired emotion across every touchpoint. Not through guidelines, but through systems:

• Staff behavior principles
• Spatial design standards
• Sensory cues (sound, scent, texture, lighting)
• Packaging expression
• Retail choreography
• Communication tone
• Service rituals
• Operational fluency
• Post-purchase experience
• Community experiences
• Events and owned environments

This is how brands like Apple, Red Bull, Disney, Ritz-Carlton, Muji, Patagonia, and Nike create a consistent emotional signature across every encounter. They don’t design logos, they design worlds.