Your brand is more than just a logo, a color palette, or a website—it’s the entire experience customers have when they interact with your company. Explore why brand experience design (BXD) matters and how to create an experience that not only looks great but also feels intuitive, trustworthy, and compelling.
What is Brand Experience Design?
Brand experience design (BXD) is the entire scope of a brand’s identity — anything associated with a brand that the user can see, read, feel, smell or hear. This means it’s critical to approach BXD from a holistic angle and not just consider digital or visual experiences. Branding is not just the digital environment—it’s everything. A strong brand experience ensures that every touchpoint across every touchpoint (including in-person at trade shows, sales meetings, etc.) reflects a company's identity, values, and unique differentiators.
Some key elements of your brand experience include:
- Visual identity: Visual foundation that sets the overall tone for your brand and visually represents messaging, values and mission through logo development, color stories, imagery and illustrative design elements and iconography
- Messaging and brand positioning: Writing style, mission statement, taglines, website copy, ads, case studies, blogs, social media posts and email marketing
- Interface and functionality: Website navigation, forms, microinteractions and responsive design
- Service interactions: Sales presentations, tradeshows, proposals, demos and consultations
- Engagement
- Customer support: Helpdesk, self-service resources, chatbots and surveys
- Consistency: Standardized experiences across channels
- Corporate ethics and community engagement
- And many more!
In other words, brand experience design encompasses multiple disciplines, including graphic design, UX design, data visualization, visual storytelling and customer experience.
So, how can brands ensure they’re producing content that allows them to be memorable and relatable?
Why Brand Experience Design Matters
We’ve noticed that BXD most often comes up in discussions about the SaaS industry and app development, but there isn’t any industry out there that shouldn’t pay attention to brand experience design.
No matter what kind of company you are, strong BXD can give you:
- Strong market differentiation
- Better memorability
- High trust, credibility and loyalty
- Better engagement and retention
- Stronger conversion rates
How to Design a Brand Experience That Speaks to B2B User Needs
It’s easiest to think of brand experience in a B2C context; even if you work in B2B (like us), you’re likely saturated in B2C brand experiences. While many tips and tricks from the B2C world will also work for B2B, there are some key elements to keep in mind that are distinct in the B2B market:
- Longer sales cycles: Customer touchpoints are more critical than in B2C; you may need more of these to carry a customer through the entire buying process.
- Multiple stakeholders at different stages: Your customer may change through the sales process, making consistency and clarity more important.
- Larger stakes and longer timelines: You may need to demonstrate value over the long term, especially for high-value services and products; use case studies that take a long-term view of success.
- Subject matter expertise: Having an established thought leadership presence can help prove your credibility in professional markets.
Account-based marketing (ABM) strategies: You may need to target large groups of individuals using a personalized experience that is still consistent and representative of your brand.
Know the Basics: 3 Pillars of Brand Experience
A well-designed brand experience incorporates three fundamental elements:
- Cognitive (Rational Appeal) – Clear, concise information that aids decision-making.
- Affective (Emotional Appeal) – Messaging and visuals that foster connection and trust.
- Behavioral (Interactive Appeal) – A frictionless user experience that encourages action.
Assemble Your Team
Whether you’re refining your brand experience with in-house talent, an outsourced agency or a combination of both, ensure you build a BXD team that can draw from multiple areas of expertise.
Your design team will play a major role in setting visual style and guiding BXD, but you’ll also need writers, developers, video editors, salespeople, service reps and leadership to ensure customers’ entire experience of your brand is consistent and aligned with your identity and goals.
Plan and Execute Your BXD Deliverables
While you can make the argument that anything and everything you produce as a company falls under the purview of brand experience, there are some core resources and templates you should create when creating or refining your brand experience.
Messaging
Writers should work with leadership and key stakeholders (such as salespeople) to craft the language for your brand. This can include:
- Messaging audit, often an analysis that compares your current messaging to competitors
- Mission statement
- Value proposition
- Positioning statements about your benefits and differentiators
- Elevator pitch
- Style guide
These foundational elements can inform new content assets and sales conversations, but if you’re in the process of refining your brand, it may be useful to create a plan for updating older assets to ensure they’re aligned with your new messaging. This can include blogs, social posts, webpages, help articles, sales resources—essentially anything that your customer might read during their research and buying process.
And this is worth it. We’ve helped clients identify and update old assets that emphasized offerings that were no longer part of their business model; imagine how a customer’s experience might be impacted if they read you offer rapid prototyping or same-day delivery only to find out much later in the sales process that they were reading outdated information. This issue can be particularly hairy in a B2B environment because you can easily have multiple stakeholders at a single company reading different resources and communicating based on mismatched impressions of your brand.
User Experience
UX experts on your team should work with your sales and customer success teams to create:
- User journey maps
- Empathy maps
- Personas
- User stories
- Problem, hypothesis and goal statements
- Competitor experience audits
- User workflow guidelines
While it’s best practice to have assets like this from the beginning, many existing companies don’t have a solid UX resource library. Defining and formalizing what you know about your audience can have a huge impact on your messaging, visual identity and customer interactions.
Visual Identity
Designers should establish (or formalize) key visual elements to ensure consistency across channels and a clear, recognizable identity for your brand. Core assets include:
- Logo
- Typography
- Color palette
- Imagery guidelines
- Overall design elements such as illustrations and/or patterns
- Iconography
- Physical and digital media guidelines
These visual identity elements are essential, foundational parts of your branding strategy, but remember that they also need to be able to grow and adapt to your market. An experienced designer can help you strike a balance between strong identity and flexibility.
Customer Interactions
Building on messaging, UX and visual assets, sales and service teams can help maintain consistency across all customer interactions. Key resources include:
- Sales scripts & guides
- Proposal templates
- Email and outreach sequences
- Website design
- Customer support playbooks
- Onboarding guides & tutorials
By integrating BXD into every sales conversation, service call, and customer interaction, you create a brand that customers not only recognize—but also trust and value.
Measure Your Success
Branding success is often difficult to quantify, often because it’s hard to isolate BXD from other performance metrics. But successful brand experience design still plays a major role in shaping your success. Good BXD impacts a range of key metrics, including:
- Website visit duration
- Social media interactions
- Email open rates
- Lead conversions
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer reviews
- Site traffic
- Media mentions
Keep track of how you score on engagement, conversion and customer satisfaction metrics to help build a picture of your branding success.
Keep Scalability in Mind
Whether you grow, evolve, expand into new markets or branch out into different mediums and channels, your brand experience needs to stay consistent and move with you. As you design your brand experience, try to build elements so that they can be flexible or adaptable while maintaining a core identity.
Emerging Trends: The Role of AI in Brand Experience Design
AI is a big topic in almost every area now, so it’s worth addressing: what role can AI play in your brand experience design? Here’s what our team thinks.
AI Can Be a Good Assistant for Brand Messaging
AI shines at aggregating and retrieving information, which can be valuable if you train it on your existing content assets (think messaging documents, mission statements, positioning statements, etc.). But it’s critical to work on the original assets with human input so that your branding doesn’t borrow too heavily from other companies or sound generic. Once trained, AI can help you pull up pieces of information quickly or get you started with a first draft—a great assistant, but not a replacement for writers.
For Now, AI Is Only Good for the Most Basic Brand Design Tasks
Image and video generation produced by AI models is impressive but nowhere near ready to be used at scale in professional settings. An experienced designer or animator will produce higher quality work every time. Where AI can help out with small tasks like removing backgrounds, recoloring, light animation tasks and creating the foundations for icons. This might have taken a designer hours in the past.
Brands Need to Balance AI Adoption with Quality Standards
AI is emerging as a pillar of corporate positioning—not just a tool for brand design but an element of a brand’s identity. Brands want to demonstrate innovation by proving AI adoption, but we think this should be done carefully; after all, in order for your audience to register that you’re using AI, something about your content or designs needs to look slightly off. Putting out professional, polished work will always be better than showing off something cutting-edge but lackluster.
See Brand Experience Design in Action
Strategic branding is a complex puzzle, but great execution can yield great results. Explore our work with VirtualHealth to see how a branding refresh can contribute to better conversions: see the VirtualHealth case study.
