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Brand Experience
October 20, 2026 Brand experience is the sensations, feelings, thoughts and actions a person has when they come into contact with anything that carries a brand’s signs: packaging, stores, ads, the website, staff. It measures what people actually go through, not what the brand wants them to think.
What is brand experience?
The most cited definition comes from a study by Brakus, Schmitt and Zarantonello in the Journal of Marketing in 2009. The authors define brand experience as sensory, emotional, cognitive and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli such as design, identity, packaging, communications and environments (Journal of Marketing, 2009, abstract in the Bocconi repository). From that, they built a four-dimension scale:
- Sensory: does the brand leave an impression through sight, sound, smell or texture?
- Affective: does contact with the brand stir any emotion?
- Intellectual: does the brand make people curious or get them thinking?
- Behavioral: does the brand get people to do something, or try something new?
Across six studies, the authors showed that this scale is distinct from nearby measures such as brand attachment and brand personality, and that brand experience affects customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Why experience matters more than the message
Brand identity is what you design. The brand image in a customer’s head is built from a chain of real experiences. A beautiful ad cannot save a dented parcel, an ignored message or a curt reply from staff.
There are two kinds of touchpoints. Some the brand controls: the website, stores, packaging, ads, livestream scripts. Others it does not: marketplace ratings, comments, review videos made by users. A brand cannot write the second kind. It can only influence them through the product and the service.
When chatbots replace staff in support, the experience can get worse if customers struggle to reach a real person. Survey data on this is in the customer service entry.
A real example: Today at Apple
In April 2017, Apple announced Today at Apple: free sessions on photography, video, music, coding and drawing, offered at all 495 Apple stores starting in May 2017. Sessions are led by trained staff, with artists and photographers joining in some cities. There are also Photo Walks that take participants out to shoot on the street. Apple described the goal as turning its stores into a “modern-day town square” (Apple Newsroom, April 2017).
Map it to the four dimensions. The sessions hit the intellectual one, Photo Walks hit the behavioral one, and the purpose-built space and display screens hit the sensory one. The idea is that people come to the store to learn, not only to buy.
Brand experience vs. CX and UX
| Brand experience | Customer experience (CX) | User experience (UX) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | Every contact with the brand, including people who have not bought yet | The buying and usage process, customer service included | A specific digital product: an app, a website |
| Examples | Seeing an ad, walking past a store, reading a review | Ordering, receiving the order, returns | Finding a product, checking out in the app |
| Main owner | Brand, marketing | Operations, customer service, sales | Product and design teams |
FAQ
How do you measure brand experience?
You can survey customers with the four-dimension questionnaire from Brakus and colleagues, then read reviews and comments touchpoint by touchpoint. Measure each touchpoint separately instead of rolling everything into one score.
How do you build brand experience without a physical store?
Look at the online touchpoints: the box when it is opened, the order confirmation message, the livestream, the how-to video for the product. For brands selling on marketplaces, unboxing is often the first time the customer holds the product.
If you want to review your touchpoints from the first ad to the moment the customer receives the order, Adtek’s Creative Strategy team can go through them with you. Get in touch on the contact page.
