Experiential Networks - The future of brands?

There’s a lot of chatter out there about designing “experiences.” But what does that actually mean? And what impact does—or should—it have on the work we produce for our clients?

Every product we create is fundamentally a tool used to build an experience.  A hammer is a device for pounding nails into wood; a pen allows one to transfer thoughts onto the page; the Golden Arches broadcast the promise of Happy Meals to children across the globe. No “thing” exists without context—objects only gain meaning through use. That use is experience.

Whether you are designing a brand, product, system or service, you are not creating in a vacuum. You are also constructing the experience that will surround each of these creations. At face value, it’s a simple concept; yet surprisingly enough it runs counter to how things are often designed.

An experience represents a system of user touchpoints—each product is a node in a larger network of interactions. This experiential network doesn’t only exist between branded objects but also between interactions over time. For a company to control its image, it has to consider every user experience across each product, system and service tied to its brand. How does each affect the rest? When producing a new concept or innovation, it is critical to consider the whole picture and, if necessary, design the entire ecosystem. 

My father-in-law is a marine biologist. When my wife was young, he brought home a broken piece of coral he’d discovered while scuba diving. They put it in their home aquarium, adding to the multitude of other marine life in the tank. Over time, one by one, fish went belly-up. Eventually the only thing left alive was a tiny overlooked urchin hidden in that piece of coral. The addition of a single element produced a poison strong enough to kill everything else in the ecosystem. Without careful consideration and thorough oversight, a singular bad experience can trash your entire brand.

The realization that products are nodes in a network makes the design of coherent, holistic, experiential systems imperative. By first understanding context, and then designing the narrative and applicable products to fit that context, we can create a flexible response to user needs.

There are great rewards for a brand that changes its worldview from product-centric to system-centric, from scalability to brand flexibility to a better organizational structure behind the scenes. It requires a cognitive and practical leap in both the traditional tools of brand and product development; but it is possible and increasingly necessary.

Experiential networks are the future of many brands, especially ones that can’t point to a singular product as a core offering. It’s a nice notion that brands can evoke living systems, and not totally far-fetched. The result of an experiential network is a brand that grows with each interaction, is flexible when it needs to be, and remains evolutionary in nature.

Next, I’ll examine the singular experience, and how we can design meaning into that as well.