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In this podcast, Susan Hamilton and Ethan Beute discuss brand psychology and how your breakfast cereal makes you feel about yourself. 

Much like having a relationship with another human, a lot of it is about how that other party makes you feel about yourself. Or how you are able to see yourself via that other party.’

You know, I think the customer experience is very much about the relationship that you are building with your customer. In fact, I often define the brand as the actual relationship, and the experience is an important part of that. And the relationship can be on many platforms, and many formats, but it’s that feeling that you have when you’re connecting to the brand, the product, to the people that are involved, and I think that’s the most important thing about your company and your brand, is that relationship that you’re building. 

So, I think it’s really interesting and truly goes beyond what we, as humans, traditionally think of as relationship between person and person, and I think what really drew me into branding actually, coming out of a pure strategy background, was seeing how people had these really intimate personal relationships with brands where they didn’t have connections with people. You know, it wasn’t  a retail situation it was cornflakes! Right? It was a product where they had never met any of the people that worked for that company, personally interacted with any of those people, but they had an actual relationship with that product that made them feel a certain way, that made them loyal to that product, that made them, you know when social media became more vibrant, that made them want to engage with that product, and I remember thinking in the early days of Facebook, how poetic it was that people were friending brands on Facebook. And I thought that was such a nice metaphor for that relationship that people have between themselves and those products, before you even get to the people in customer service, or the retail environment.

Points of discussion include:

• The relationship between brand and customer experience
• What people are really afraid of about creativity
• The pervasive contempt of design as a waste of time

Listen to the full podcast, From Cornflakes to Customer Experience, It’s All About Brand, on CustomerExperience.com.