Brand experience is vital for companies to build strong brands and foster favourable consumer outcomes. Although prior research has explored its conceptualisation and consequences, knowledge on how to manage and design brand experience remains limited. We address this gap by providing empirical insights into how brands craft compelling brand experiences, focusing on the visual aspect. Using a multiple-case study, we propose a framework for developing brand experience. It consists of specific challenges and the desired outcomes, along with corresponding creation and coordination practices, contributing to synchronised ideation across a broader range of different types of touchpoints. Lastly, this study offers brand managers and designers guidance to accelerate and structure brand experience design projects.

Since the introduction of the experience economy, brand experience has gained significant interest from both research scholars and practitioners, and it is recognised as the new era of marketing in many industries. However, past research has primarily focused on the conceptualisation and consequences of it from a brand management and consumer perspective, but not on the design of brand experience. This research investigates the design of the visual appearance of touchpoints that form consumers’ brand experiences. It builds on theories from different fields, including product design and innovation, service design, design research, brand management and integrated marketing communication. The results reveal specific tension fields, desired outcomes for different complexity levels of brand experience design, and a set of creation and coordination practices. Furthermore, the results show that inspiration examples can lead to touchpoint concepts with higher qualities. This research provides a broader understanding of how brand experience can be purposefully designed and effectively managed in line with an organisation’s brand management. More specifically, the results can enhance the communication of a brand identity to a design team, facilitate the design of various types of touchpoints, and support brand renewal. Moreover, the criteria for assessing the quality of touchpoint concepts and for generating inspiration examples can support the creative design process. Lastly, this research offers different routes of how designers and managers can apply the findings in practice.

Inspiration is vital for designers. This study builds on findings on inspiration examples for problem-solving tasks and extends those to styling tasks by exploring the influence of examples on styling criteria. The generation of inspiration examples in this study is grounded in design literature and practice. This study identifies primary styling criteria (i.e., personality coherence, visual coherence, and originality) to evaluate the design outcome. The results indicate that designers who received near-field examples that communicated an intended meaning compared to designers who did not receive any examples generated concepts with a higher personality coherence yet with a similar level of originality. Also, near-field visual examples increased visual coherence. Thus, different design criteria need specific examples.

Brand experience is an important concept in marketing because it can affect brand loyalty, brand recall, and brand attitude. Brand experience design is therefore an important practice for companies to create favourable and meaningful experiences, through the design of various touchpoints that are in line with the brand values. This paper presents a multiple-case study of brand experience design in practice. Our results suggest similarities and differences between product design and brand experience design processes. Furthermore, we suggest that reciprocal influences may exist between the brand and touchpoint design. We also provide insights for managers and designers to not only use logical reasoning but also other capabilities to design for brand experiences. Finally, we identified the limitations of our study and interesting areas for future research.