User experience and digital strategy is about the entire online/offline brand experience. User experience does more than enable your website to communicate certain messages to an audience and help them feel a particular way about your product or website when they’re online – it helps the audience also think about you when they’re offline. Similarly, a digital strategy achieves your goals with online strategies that translate to your offline business. For start-up fashion label the-affair, user experience and digital strategy is driving the business for the better. My first contact with the-affair was through Lost At E Minor. The-affair was just starting out and, like many other start-up and established labels, posted us some tees for review. Great guys with a quality product, and we told them as much. Since then, they’ve checked in with us and other trendspotting/pop culture sites for collaboration on design choices, typically using simple web-based forms to collate feedback. Quick, easy, and an effective means of pooling collective guidance from the web’s leading trendspotting publications. Digital strategy doesn’t have to be sophisticated – using this simple idea, the-affair receives ongoing direction and collaboration from the online publications they respect. The-affair also taps into their customer base to allow customers to shape the future of the brand. As they say;
Unlike every other survey you’ve ever done online, we’re actually listening and affecting change as a result. We want to grow alongside you and we want you to get involved in the brand. After all the-affair is your brand as much as it is ours.
Awesome. The brand becomes an experience for customers, a strategy that certainly ties in with the user experience of the-affair’s website – which features simple yet realistic modelling. As a testament to the brilliance of such an online experience, the-affair’s website was awarded a FWA. As the guys said at the time;
“It’s a real honour – especially as we don’t quite have the same budget as a global car brand.”
This is a perfect example of how user experience and digital strategy can be used – on a small budget – to launch and extend the reach of a brand, and build a base of loyal customers who become a part of the brand. Have you thought about doing this with your brand? If you thought it would be too expensive, well, it doesn’t have to be. The choice is yours. There are countless other examples of extending the reach of a user experience design and digital strategy to shape a businesses and involve customers in a brand. This is just my story on how I’ve been involved in a particularly good execution. What’s your story? If you’d like to create your own stories for consumers, get in touch.
{ 2 trackbacks }