Introduction
Humans experience love and hate for brands for a definitive reason. Consumer behavior and decision-making are entangled with emotions and expectations. This complexity builds relationships with brands and businesses. Broadly, marketers wish to build an emotional chord by creating better brand experiences and value.
In today’s digital age, emotional marketing and behavior change is the foundation for a brand to improve its visibility and hook consumers. Dynamics in ever-changing consumer landscape enforces brands to be aligned with consumer trends and competition. In this new age and in the near future, brands need to shift to ‘experiences’ with a reimagined consumer decision-making journey. This journey will carve brand experiences with fundamentals built on consumer behavior. The relation from humans to brands leading to decision-making is narrated in a step-wise manner.
The paper demonstrates that businesses and brands would benefit utilizing a behavioral design framework called ‘Consumer Behavior Canvas’ (CBC). CBC will aid in modeling brand experiences by building a story canvas, thus effectively utilizing the principles of Behavioral design.
The paper users Humans and Consumers as interchangeable words. Brand experience involves different channels and environments; the scope of the paper points towards digital channels (viz. web platforms). CBC is scalable and transformable to other forms and channels too. The scope of the paper is also limited to evolve strategic experience guides and does not involve details around tactical design decisions. This whitepaper also demonstrates that brands and humans are related to emotions.
Human and brands
Brands, over the years, have become complex and messy, both to creators and consumers, rightly addressed by Heidi Cohen through thirty-odd branding definitions1 . Unsurprisingly, the evolution of branding is as old as human civilization.
Brands from all periods in history displayed two immutable characteristics, namely ‘Information as origin’ and ‘Information as quality’. 2 These characteristics of ancient “proto-brands” additionally hold the transformational image of status, power, value and personality. A brand is aptly coined as a ‘complex symbol’ and an ‘intangible sum of products attributes’ by advertising guru, David Ogilvy. The attributes of packaging, name, price and history help humans as symbolic reference. Ogilvy states that “brand is also defined by consumers’ impression of the people who use it, as well as their own experience” (Ogilvy 1955). Thus, the impression of a brand is undoubtedly not formed in ether and encircles to a point of ‘humans’ mind and hearts’ as an imagery
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