How Brand Experience Builds Trust
To build, maintain and repair trust, brands are increasingly prioritizing experiences to connect with consumers. Companies across industries see that buyers want to be part of a community and to engage in something with other people through experiences that provide value, because an experience only builds trust if people want to participate. Creating the experiences that provide value requires making experience a core part of brand strategy alongside what audiences read, see and hear.
Brand Experience
What Makes Experience Work
Events and moments
In-person and participatory experiences resonate when people find them worth attending.
Content and media
What audiences read, see and hear shapes perception through how it is delivered.
Experience only builds trust when audiences choose to participate.
Memory
Experiences people seek become memories.
Belonging
Shared experiences create community.
Earned media
Organic coverage follows genuine engagement.
Why Brand Experience Shapes Trust
Experiences shape brand perception through context, interaction and across touchpoints. It’s going to events, but the experience language is also how people experience what people read, see and hear. Of the four languages that people use to communicate, experience is the language most directly connected to creating memories and a sense of belonging, both of which are essential for building trust and that result in positive purchasing decisions. When a brand builds culture through experiences, it creates earned media opportunities across traditional and social platforms with results that are unachievable with paid ads. Alternatively, when a brand manufactures experiences that people don’t want to participate in, it shows they are desperate, generates no memory or belonging and results in negative purchasing decisions.
How Experience Works as a Brand Language
Experience has two components, the first are experiential things like events, and the second is how people experience what they read, see and hear. Both aspects of the experience language only work when audiences find the experiences worth engaging with. The companies that are the most effective at using the experience language are the ones that consider both aspects of experience as soon as planning begins. When experience is a final consideration it feels tacked-on and fake. It doesn’t effectively generate organic social moments and doesn’t positively influence earned media, which combined negatively shapes how audiences remember and perceive the brand. Treating experience as a channel, rather than a foundational language will lose trust and fight for attention it can’t earn.
How Experience Builds or Breaks Brand Trust
Experience can be used to build trust or to break it. When used as a core language, experience builds trust and brand loyalty that retains customers during a crisis. However, a $1 deal during a food safety crisis is a transaction. It’s not an experience and it’s not even a transaction that people want to participate in. The memory of the deal (if there is any memory) is of a desperate corporation trying to get people in the door. But there is no belonging and no positive earned media. The work to build trust through experience requires creating something people want to be part of, and that cannot be artificially manufactured after a crisis breaks trust.
Key Takeaways on Brand Experience and Trust
- Experience is both experiential things like events and participatory moments, and also how people experience what they read, see and hear
- Experiences generate memory and belonging only when people want to participate in them
- Brands that try to manufacture experiences during a crisis instead produce transactions people don’t want to be a part of and don’t share, while generating negative earned media