While discussing earlier about the concept of branding and how to define it I just found a very nice blog post on the matter which I’ll quote here:
When you have a great (or bad) experience with a restaurant/ airline/ hospital/ website, what do you tell your friends about? Do you echo the messaging from their advertising? Do you say, “Hey, try them, because they had the coolest logo”?
The brand is the customer experience.
And that’s all it is. It’s not primarily a story, or a logo, or a style, or even a value proposition. Primarily the brand is just what customers tell each other about: their experience.
So if you want to create a good brand, the best – perhaps the only – investment to make is in the customer experience. This means learning from customers through direct observation, and crafting a strategy built from that customer input
Once the customer experience is set, the other elements – aesthetic style, consistent messaging, value proposition, iPod-ness, Coke-ality, all of those wonderful ideas will take care of themselves.