Brand and User Experience: The Rule of One

I’ve been attending an inspiring event held at fork unstable media in Hamburg recently. Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane) and Josh Clark (@globalmoxie) have been talking about content strategy and mobile development. The following paragraphs are a wrap-up of what they said, what I think they said, and what I took away from those two hours. I won’t go into the details of what they said and will jump directly to what I think is the essence: the (brand and user) experience.

Josh approached that conclusion from a developer’s perspective, defying seven myths about mobile. What stuck in my head were the false assumption that mobile is always somewhat “less” than the desktop experience. Just because companies and marketers don’t know how to take the brand experience to mobile, doesn’t mean that consumers are satisfied with a lesser experience. They expect one brand experience created by content (in a wide sense) delivered through all touch points (be it desktop, mobile, instore, etc.).

That thought somehow is congruent with Karen’s idea of how content should be. Coming more from a publisher’s perspective, she argued that the seemingly huge challenge of all those new touchpoints (devices, channels, etc.) basically ask for a really simple solution: well-structured content, enriched with metadata filled into a CMS in order to let APIs pull the content and push it to customers – on whatever device or channel they want to consume the content.

What I took away from that night was the astonishingly simple “rule of one”: There is one brand experience that should be delivered through all touchpoints. Customers’ expectation of a brand should be always satisfied, no matter which device a customer is using. And all of that applies not only to mobile or publishing.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.