Strategy: Brand Strategy

Ensuring the compatibility of your user experience and your brand’s potential users is the key to accessing and dominating a targeted market successfully. Historically, despite their having a strong brand image, bad user experiences have ruined several renowned businesses. Two examples of poorly done branding and marketing practices can provide better clarity.

The goal of Snapchat’s redesign in 2018 was to attract a wider audience and, thus, satisfy advertisers. But the design merged friend’s stories with publisher’s content, leading to user confusion and frustration. The backlash was so intense that over 1.2 million users petitioned the company to restore the old design, forcing Snapchat to revert some of its design changes as its platform growth stagnated. Read More

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”—Carl Jung

“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”—H. G. Wells

With so many choices as to how we can spend our time in the digital age, attention is becoming the most important currency. In today’s splintered media environment, new digital products and services must compete with everything under the sun, making differentiation key to developing an audience that cares, invests, and ultimately drives value.

What makes a person want to use one particular digital product or service over its competitor? What makes one user experience more engaging, interesting, or compelling than another? An often overlooked, under-appreciated, and rarely measured component of user experience is playfulness. The digital space is conducive to play—exploration, imagination, and learning. And many successful digital products are built for play or incorporate play into their interaction design. No matter how important our jobs, serious our responsibilities, or stiff our personalities, all people need to play—whether we admit it or not. Is the boss looking? Read More

With companies moving business online, the Internet has become a source of profit for them. We all know how this works. You establish an online presence, sell your brand well—and you make money. Let’s rewind. We are selling our brands online, but doing it well is the challenge. To do it well, keep the following in mind:

• Customer research is an important factor in generating business revenues, so it must be done right—that is, at the right place and at the right time.
• The online medium should not be the only way of gathering customer information.
• Recognizing emerging trends—behavioral, demographic and emotional—helps companies move forward strategically.

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