In his book The Brand Gap, Mary Neumeier writes that a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company. That gut feeling is an emotional response to the accumulation of experiences a person has with that brand.

Defining your brand is only the initial foundation for an organization – defining the experience is that critical next step that allows your brand to come to life and to start eliciting emotional responses as your brand interacts with your audience.

In 2024, that experience is increasingly (or exclusively) digital in nature.

Digital Experience then is the accumulation of all digital touchpoints that your audience may have with your brand. It may include websites, digital advertising, social media, reviews, emails, ecommerce, and many more.

The digital realm is still relatively new. Over the last 20 years, we have all accumulated digital platforms, tactics and approaches, leading to a bloated, broken or generic digital ecosystem. To date, little strategic brand thinking has had to have been applied – we’ve been eager to grow our presence in order to increase our reach. Many digital marketers will overly focus on quantity rather than quality (of reach, traffic, results, etc.).

I believe many organizations have reached a point of inflection for their digital ecosystems. There is a growing need to drive more meaningful and connected experiences with our audiences and focus more on quality rather than purely on quantity.

The Path Forward: Digital Experience Design

Digital experience design is a holistic approach that focuses on the overall quality of the experience across digital journeys and channels. This design process focuses on your ideal audience, and builds out a connected ecosystem that satisfies their unique goals. A well designed digital experience has a foundation in a well-crafted brand, ensuring that the digital experience is the ideal outworking of who you intend to be.

By focusing on that overall digital experience, we often can realize some clear benefits, including:

• Greater efficiencies, as we focus on the channels, tactics and platforms that enable our brand and satisfy our audiences goals.
• Improved quality as we focus not only on the total reach or traffic, but on the quality of outcomes that the digital channels are able to deliver.
• More satisfaction from our customers as they see the experience as delivering value to them throughout the lifecycle.

An ideal digital experience satisfies your business goals and your audience goals by being a perfect brand expression in the online realm. This requires a really clear understanding of your audience and your brand, and once it is well defined it will yield incredible success.