Authentic personal branding: Most buying decisions are based on trust, confidence, and emotions people have related to a product, service, or person. Branding is more important than marketing and sales. Branding is influencing, by creating a brand identity that associates certain perceptions and feelings with that identity.

Everyone has a Personal Brand but most people are not aware of this and do not manage this strategically, consistently, and effectively. You should take control of your brand and the message it sends and affect how others perceive you. This will help you to actively grow and distinguish yourself as an exceptional professional.

Most traditional personal branding concepts focus mainly on personal marketing, image building, selling, packaging, outward appearances, promoting yourself, and becoming famous, which can turn into an ego trip and let you be perceived as egocentric and selfish. They define personal branding from a personal marketing (selling) point of view. Personal branding is more than just marketing and promoting yourself.

Personal branding is the new holy grail of marketing. Whereas superior skills, great resources and inside knowledge at one time gave you a competitive advantage, now they are merely prerequisites if you even hope to compete in today’s competitive marketplace.

To the chagrin of the purists out there, skills, resources and knowledge have become mere commodities. Because your personal brand is uniquely about you, it will never become a commodity. Personal branding is also critically important because statistics overwhelming show people buy personalities and ideas long before they buy products/services. The trend is unmistakable. Those with the best personal brands win.

Personal branding is also not an option. Everyone has one; your current personal brand is either positive, negative or neutral. The challenge for most professionals is that they lack the discipline necessary to define their personal brands. As a result, their peers select it for them. Unfortunately, the personal brand others select for you will not always be the personal brand you would have selected for yourself.

Love is an important element in this Personal Branding equation. It is about loving yourself (self-love), loving others, and loving what you do. You should love yourself in at least equal measure to others or things. This can be found in most religions: to love others as you love yourself. Without knowing who you are (self-knowledge), it’s very difficult to love yourself and others. You need to make a positive emotional connection with yourself and find yourself interesting first, otherwise others you will not make a positive emotional connection with you and will not find you interesting. With an authentic Personal Brand, your strongest characteristics, attributes, and values can separate you from the crowd. Without this, you look just like everyone else.

It’s a way of clarifying and communicating what makes you different and special and using those qualities to separate from yourself from your peers so that you can greatly expand your success. Personal branding is the strategy behind the world’s most successful people. It is the difference between an ordinary career or business and an exceptional one.

You learn how to apply the principles of personal branding to your own practice so that you stand out among the ever-increasing number of coaches and career management professionals. This enables you differentiate your practice and greatly expand your success.

Branding isn’t just for products, services, and companies any more. There is a new trend called personal branding. Personal branding is essential to career development and is an effective career tool because it helps define who you are, what do you stand for, and what makes you unique, special, and different. Personal branding is also essential to business development. People want to do business with people they know or with whom they feel some sort of connection. If you are a familiar and consistent presence, they will have the sense that they know you and are more receptive to doing business with you.

Traditional personal branding works in the same way as company branding; communicating values, personality, and ability to its audience to produce a positive emotional response. You can shape the market’s perception of your personal brand simply by defining your unique strengths, values, and personality, sharing it with others in an exciting, persuasive manner, and cultivating your brand continuously. It’s something that you can develop and manage, which is essential for future employability and success.

Everyone should take the responsibility to learn, improve, build up their skills and be a strong brand. It’s time to make an effort to discover your genius and authentic dream, imagining and developing yourself as a powerful, consistent, and memorable personal brand. It was branding guru Tom Peters who launched the personal branding movement with an essay published in Fast Company in 1997 under the title “The Brand Called You”.

Your image reflects on your company, friends, and family. You, however, need to be accountable to yourself first. If you’re dancing on the tables at the bar, and worried about getting caught, either you have something personally wrong, or you need to find a different job that accepts your lack of inhibition. If your Facebook photos might get you in trouble, take them down, or decide you want to work at a place where they don’t care about that sort of thing.

Your personal brand is a critical asset in today’s online, virtual, and individual age. Having a good professional reputation is the key to success. Personal branding is becoming increasingly essential to personal success. It’s therefore important to be your own brand in order to be successful in life.

The image of your brand is a perception held in someone else’s mind. Successful personal branding also entails managing this perception effectively. Your personal brand is the expectations, image, and perceptions it creates in the minds of others, when they see or hear your name.

If you ignore this law, you will create mixed signals, and confusion, and all your efforts at branding will go to waste. Because the message you’re actually sending might not be the one you designed, but the one that the public picks up on in your tone and in your attitude and in your actions.

The authentic personal branding concept is durable and less cosmetic than current methods. It places more emphasis on personal development, growth in life and empowerment, and focuses on the human side of branding. Traditional personal branding approaches can turn into an ego trip.

A product is a blend of multiple features which is positioned and distinguished by way of some special offering to establish it as a brand. And, if a customer is loyal towards a particular brand, it means a product has fulfilled all the requirements of a customer and satisfying a customer translates the brand into a pivotal product to lend the organization the leading edge over its competitors. The brand loyalists have the power to make or break the image of a brand by word of mouth publicity.

Any brand in the market thrives or survives based on its effective usage by the customer. Since the advertising for a brand has taken off new dimensions with online advertising tools as one of the potent mediums, the end user has evolved with time immemorial and hence it has become rather difficult to prevent the customer from brand switching.

The brands that have been continuously nurtured and innovated over a period of time has been the insistent choice of a consumer. And, so apart from this what other constituents hold the customer’s loyalty towards a brand is an important question? How to retain the existing customer is the key concern of every organization? What mechanism should be used for each customer?

In Toto, there are 4 types of brand users who reflect the following tendencies which has been highlighted by the marketing legend, Philip Kotler.

The Hard Core loyalists: Who is keen to buy one single brand every time.
Soft Core loyalists: A consumer is loyal to 2-4 brands at a time.
Shifting loyalists: Although a consumer is loyal towards a brand, but may keep shifting from one brand to another and keep coming back to the first brand towards which he was loyal.
Switchers: Who always are on the lookout for a new brand. Perhaps here the consumer tries to experiment with new brands each time and also he may switch over because of pricing or some other reasons.

Here are the main Key constituents on the Brand Loyalty:
Customer™s set of logical and emotional conditioning: Even though a brand may not be doing well in the market and might be having few customers, a brand occupies a place in the customer’s mind by continuous advertising using all the available mediums existing today. Today, a lot of viral marketing techniques have been utilized in order to create brand awareness and maintain brand loyalty.
Good Relationship with the customer: Once the brand has been used by the customer, the organization focuses on establishing and maintaining a cordial relationship with the customer by the use of emails, direct mails or telephone. And the essence of this relationship is brand loyalty.

Leveraging a brand by offering brand extensions : Either the brand extensions or the line extensions are introduced in order to keep up with the customer loyalty. For example, a detergent like Rin was expanded by extensions to its brand name, like Rin Advanced and Rin washing powder.

Rebranding by offering a different marketing mix: The brand may often be delivered into a new packaging form. For example, under the category of fast food, Maggi was offered in a new packaging form. Earlier it was available in a single packing form, later was reintroduced in the market in a double packing form. Often the price may be reduced by offering the brand through a scheme which would entail the brand being packaged in a set of 3-4 and deducting the overall price. For e.g. most of the soaps are today being offered in a pack of 2-3 or 4.

Brands supporting a good cause: There are consumers who would like to remain attached to a brand which supports social cause or any other good cause for the betterment of the general public. For example, the Kingfisher Airlines floated by Vijay Mallya swayed the Indians by sponsoring the cricket T20 match.

Now, the important thing to note is in what situations, a customer is not brand loyal.

Here are some of the vicarious situations under which a customer is unlikely to purchase one single brand all the time:

Non-availability of a product: At times, a customer may switch over to a different brand because of locational constraints like the non-availability of a product in certain locations due to which a customer may buy another brand.

Non-conformity with the latest fad/trend: Apple has launched 3G iphones to budge or transform the customer from the earlier mobile phone applications to the latest introduction which is sure to appeal the customer. So, the companies which innovate ad infinitum are sure to remain there is the market for a long time as well as retain their existing customers. At the same time also build up new customers.

The congregation of options available to a consumer: The customer may be price conscious and whenever he is offered the least priced brand, he is lured towards it. A customer may get a host of benefits from the new brand launched in the market as much as the brand which he was using so may try to experiment with the new one.

No doubt that, a brand always faces a tiff competition from the other brands in the market and suffers from the perils of downslide, so a marketer should keep an eye on his competitors’ brands. And, a marketer should capitalize on his brand by offering a unique set of propositions to maintain his brand loyalists.

“People spend money when and where they feel good.””
- Walt Disney

Most brands & products are now interchangeable. This sad statement emanates from one of the fathers of marketing, Philip Kotler.

For a brand to be identified, recognized and understood in its values is the core of every strategy, the nagging issue of every marketing manager.

However, in a competitive environment where the usage & functional value of a brand (a product or a service) can be easily copied or duplicated, what is left to stand out from the crowd? How can the customer’s preference be triggered to ensure their loyalty? How can the tie that will closely link your brand to the consumer and put you ahead of the competition be built, retained or strengthened?

These are questions to which sensorial branding answers: use senses (and their impact on the consumers’ perceptions) to enrich the brand experience and build up its uniqueness and personality, while ultimately paving the way to the consumers’ affection, preference and loyalty.

Sensorial branding (and sensorial marketing) fills the gap left by traditional marketing theories when it comes to answering today’s consumer mindset. This new kind of thinking finds its origins in the ‘90s, with the shift from the rational mindset that formerly prevailed in the consumer’s decision-making process to the emotional and hedonist quest that now drives their desires and consumption acts.

In reaction to an increasingly virtual and pressurized industrial world, people have started seeking a way to reconnect to reality in their private sphere, for a pathway to re-enchant their world. The individual values of pleasure, well-being and hedonism rose along with a true new concept of consumption that exposed the limits of traditional marketing theories.

Consumption today is a form of “being”. Just like any leisure activity, it becomes a place to express a piece of your personality, where you share common values with a small group of other individuals (a tribe). And maybe more than anything else, consumption acts must be analyzed as “felt” acts, as experiences capable of providing emotions, sensations and pleasure.

Purchasing acts are driven by this desire for sensational experiences that re-ignite senses and drive emotions. No matter how effective a product may be, it is its hedonist and emotional added-value, as well as the distinctive experience it offers, that lead consumers to buy it and ensure its loyalty.

What does it mean from a branding point of view?

First, it means that price and functionality are now taken for granted (or, in other words, not sufficiently differentiating). It is now the intangible, irrational and subjective attributes of the brand offering that are the new factors of success.

Second, it highlights the fact that sensations, new experiences and emotions must be part and parcel of the brand experience. It is through these 3 channels that the brand can create greater differentiation, influence consumer’s preference and secure their affection.

In summary, focusing the brand strategy on rational arguments regarding its functional value is no longer sufficient to ensure success. What is clear is that empowered brands are the ones managing to deliver hedonist and emotional attributes throughout the brand experience. This is where brands can add meaning and, therefore, value and sense to products and services, transforming them from interchangeable commodities into powerful brands.

This is where sensorial branding is competent: exploring and unveiling how brands can connect with people in a more sensitive way, at this true level of senses and emotions. To put it more clearly, it focuses on exploring, expressing, and empowering the brand’s hedonist and emotional potentials.

In this theory, sensations prevail because they are a direct link to consumers’ affections. Senses are directly affected by the limbic part of the brain, the area responsible for emotion, pleasure and memory. In a way, it is no big surprise. This is all about going back to basics, to what actually appeals to a human being on an everyday basis. Sense is a vital part of our human experience. Almost our entire understanding and perception of the world is experienced through our senses. A growing number of research shows that the more senses your product appeals to, the greater the brand experience.

While communication & visual identity focus mainly on sight and sound, an accurate poly-sensorial identity integrating touch, smell (and taste when applicable), sends a more powerful emotional message to consumers, multiplying the connections or touch points through which the consumers can be attracted, convinced and touched by the brand. It enables and encourages consumers to “feel” and “experience” the brand (product or service) with their “emotional brain”.

As Martin Lindstrom, author of best-selling book Brand Sense states, success lies in mastering a true sensory synergy between the brand and its message.

The first brand to intuitively implement the sensorial branding theory was Singapore Airlines. Like any other airline company, Singapore Airlines’ communication and promotions primarily focused on cabin comfort, design, food and price. The breakthrough was made when they decided to incorporate the emotional experience of air travel. The brand platform they implemented aimed at one simple, but rather revolutionary, objective: to present Singapore Airlines as an entertainment company. From that moment onward, every detail of the Singapore Airlines travel experience was scrutinized and a new set of branding tools were implemented: from the finest silk and colours chosen for the staff uniform, to the make up of the flight attendants that had to match Singapore Airline’s brand colour scheme; from the drastic selection of the flight attendants that had to be representative of the “Asian beauty archetype”, to the way they should speak to passengers and serve food in the cabin. Everything had to convey smoothness and relaxation to transform the Singapore Airlines travel experience into a true sensorial journey. Right after turning the Singapore Airlines flight attendant into an iconic and emblematic figure of the brand (the famous “Singapore Girl”), they broke through the barriers of marketing again by introducing a new dimension to the brand: a signature scent. They specifically designed a signature scent, called Stefan Floridian Waters. This olfactory signature was used by the crew, blended into the hot towels served to passengers, and it soon permeated the entire fleet of planes. Described as smooth, exotic and feminine, it was the perfect reflection of the brand and achieved instant recognition of Singapore Airlines upon stepping into the aircraft. It soon became a unique and distinctive trademark of Singapore Airlines, capable of conveying a set of memories all linked to comfort, sophistication and sensuality.

Another example given by Martin Lindstrom is Rolls Royce. To recapture the feeling of older “rollers” and maintain the luxurious aura surrounding the brand, Rolls Royce analysed and recreated the unique smell made by materials like mahogany wood, leather and oil that permeated the interior of the 1965 Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce. Now every Rolls Royce leaving the factory is equipped with a diffuser in the underside of the car’s seat to convey this unique identity of the brand.

What we learn here is that only when all the sensory touch points between the brand and consumer are integrated, evaluated and leveraged can true enrichment of your brand identity be achieved. In the future, it can become the most cutting-edge tool to stand out from the crowd, boosting the brand experience and eventually influencing consumer loyalty.

Few brands today are truly integrating sensorial branding in their strategy, while forward thinking companies are already implementing it with success. Adding a sensorial dimension to the brand experience is surely about to become the next competitive asset.

In the future, brand building for marketers may lie in one simple question: what does my brand feel like?

Brand Management

Types of Brand: Part 1

There are, in fact, many different types of brands each with its own recognisable features. The following characterises the essential features:

A Premium Brand – Compared with other products in the same category, the price is pitched at a premium. The age group that is identified more than any other with premium brands is that of the 30-65 grouping. Furthermore, this age sector continues to increase in its receptiveness.

An Economy Brand – This is a brand that is targeted, which means that it is focusing on a specific market rather than following the marketing strategy of mass marketing, to a high price elasticity market segment. The price elasticity of demand is a measure of how the quantity demanded is affected by changes in price. It is measured as elasticity. Water is an example of a product that has inelastic demand in that people will pay anything for it. Conversely, sugar is very elastic since, as the price of sugar increases, people will turn to other products, such as saccharin, which are treated as sugar substitutes.

A Fighting Brand – It is a brand that is created specifically to act as a challenge against the threat from a competitive product. A typical example is a low-priced manufacturer’s brand sold with the minimum amount of advertising. This brand is designed to compete with the dealers’ brands.

Corporate Branding – This refers to a company that uses its own name as the designated name to be used on a product brand. This means that the product and the company name become the brand name. An excellent example is the drink Coca Cola.

Family Branding – It involves selling a number of products, which are related to each other in some way, under one brand name. It differs from individual branding whereby each product is given an individual brand name. Product quality is an important facet. Should one product within the range prove unsatisfactory, it could reduce sales of all the others. This feature figures prominently in Family Branding.

Individual Branding – When all a company’s products are given their own individual brand names. Each product has its own image and identity, and it is this that constitutes the added value. A case in point is that of Coca-Cola and Bacardi Mixers. They both have their own brand name, and so can be identified individually, but are owned and marketed by the Coca-Cola Co.

Brand Leveraging – A company can use the brand equity inherent in an existing brand name in order to introduce a new product or product line. Hence, consider the case of an existing range of products. Should another product be added and it was found that this was of better quality than the other products in the range. This would be characterised as trading up or brand leveraging.

Co-Branding – This involves at least two brands working in association with each other in order to market their products. Ingredient co-branding is a particular form of co-branding. Examples include:

Betty Crocker’s brownie mix contains Hershey’s chocolate syrup

Dell Computers are built with Intel Processors

Pillsbury Brownies are made with Nestle Chocolate

Branding – How To Succeed

Peter Radford writes Articles with Websites on a wide range of subjects. Branding Articles cover Brand Types, Brand Management, Basis of a Brand Name.

His Website contains a total of 69 Branding Articles, written by others and carefully selected.

View his Website at: branding-how-to-succeed.com

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With the advent of Internet the marketing communications environment has changed profoundly and there is a recognised need of continuous conceptual addition to the existing branding theory. Some authors pronounced the advent of the “experience economy” and the “experience marketing”, while others have taken more extreme postmodern stance and have denied the validity of the traditional branding inferences. Encompassing all these perspectives and drawing on the traditional branding concepts from customer- based perspective this paper will concentrate on the construct of the online brand experience (OBE) as a central part of the contemporary branding strategy. In particular, building on the existing ideas, gathering insights from observation of contemporary online branding campaigns and conducting qualitative study among consumers, I am intending to explore the phenomenon of OBE. Central points in a future theoretical framework will be the notion of the brand as experience, the dimensions around which brand experiences are built online and the very
technology of OBE process.

The central theme of a future research is the challenges faced by companies in their decision-making about branding in online environment. The focal point of the research would be the creation of brand experience as the most important element of the firm’s online branding strategy. The first sub-question evolves around the definition of brand experience; to what extent is the notion of brand identical to experience and are there any grounds to believe that we are entering experience economy? The second sub-question refers to the main dimensions of the online brand experience. The last objective of the paper could be to create a theoretical model of the online brand experience in accordance with the above findings. The paper’s focus on the notion of online brand experience would be based on the view of the brand as “a cluster of functional and emotional values which promise a particular experience” (de Chernatony and Segal-Horn, 2003). The importance of the issue is underscored by the view of the brand not as an identifier, but as an experience (Schmitt, 1999). Since this shift of definition and focus of branding is triggered namely by the incessant technological and communication change, the importance of building a theoretical reference to brands as online experiences is exigent.

In view of the new communications environment there is a need of rebranding and more
importantly rethinking of the traditional branding concepts. A number of authors (Ibeh et al., 2005; Christodoulides and de Chernatony, 2004; Bergstrom, 2000) propose addition to the existing branding theory instead of replacement with the warning that Internet is not just another distribution and communications channel, but rather a branding tool with new unique features. The central in this paper notion of online brand experience is discussed from different perspectives by several authors. Ibeh et al. (2005) describe the “high-impact customer online experience” as “a key source of added value in the internet
economy”. Going even further, Pine II and Gilmore (1998, 2000) define the experience as the “fourth economic offering” in the “progression of economic value” after commodities, goods and services. Drawing on their ideas, Schmitt (1999) classifies five different types of experiences. For Cova (1996) the consumer is not only a target for, but also “a producer of experiences”. Furthermore, various authors discuss the importance of issues affecting brands online such as interactivity, connectivity, creativity, vividness, customisation, community, relevance, engagement (Cova et al., 2007; Coyle and Thorson, 2001; Christodoulites and De Chernatony, 2004). However, there is a need of systematising the primary dimensions of the OBE as perceived by the consumer. Hence, one of the primary tasks of the future paper is to reveal the most important dimensions around which brand equity is built online. The notion of online brand experience will be reviewed from the following perspectives: traditional branding theory from customer-based perspective (Keller,1993; Aaker, 1996), experiential marketing (Pine and Gilmore, 1998, 2000), and postmodern marketing (Brown, 1993; Firat and Venkatesh, 1993). The rationale behind this decision is the need of theoretical anchor in the research (traditional line), the focus on the experience (experiential perspective) and the need of an updated view of the contemporary consumer behaviour (postmodern marketing). The principal aim of a research paper would be to build an integrated conceptual model for the notion of online brand experience. In attempt to systematise the findings about the OBE and provide further theoretical clarity for branding managers and researchers the following objectives have been set:

– To explore the nature of the experience as a new notion for brand;
– To explore in detail the dimensions around which online brand experiences are built;
– To propose a theoretical model of online brand experience based on the above findings.

The exploration of the online brand experience and its main dimensions would be also the main object of the qualitative study to be undertaken as part of the future research. In accordance with the complexity of the explored area I am considering to employ the method of laddering interview. This qualitative technique has proven useful in allowing “the evaluation of ongoing experience” (Orsingher and Marzocchi, 2003) and “in uncovering insights related to the source and the nature of a brand equity” (Wansink, 2003). Furthermore, I have decided to use laddering since it allows in-depth research of the reasons for expressing certain attitudes. Unlike the factor analysis where the focus is more on the generalisation of gathered items as factors, successful laddering permits the discovery of the underlying values behind consumer behaviour. In order to thoroughly address the object of the study, a convenience sample of 20 respondents will be selected. One should keep in mind, that the purpose of the laddering method is not to be “representative of the population”, but rather to focus on the technique’s purpose – “to show how they [the respondents' answers] can be used to understand a brand’s equity” and to “find the root reasons for the consumer’s purchase” (Wansink, 2003).
The main question of the interview will refer to the dimensions around which online brand experiences should be built. In order to uncover the dimensions, the interviewers will probe according to the criteria recommended by Reynolds and Gutman (1988). Respondents will be asked to specify no more and no less than four dimensions. If fewer than four dimensions are given, questions such as “What other dimensions can you think of?” will be used for probing. Then, the respondents will be asked to state three reasons for each of the four dimensions. The result of this technique, known as hard laddering, will be 4 x 3 matrix of idiographic responses. During the hard laddering “[r]espondents are forced to fill a grid of predetermined dimensionality” (Orsingher and Marzocchi, 2003; Bagozzi and Edwards, 1998) and in this case each respondent will indicate up to 12 superordinate reasons and 6 linkages. After the content analysis of the results, these will be input in “Decision Explorer” and the formal output will be twenty individual causal maps. Additionally, a number of websites of renowned brands will be observed and a list of experience messages/promises will be compiled. In such a manner, the other side of the relation consumer-marketer will also be represented. As a result, dimensions and characteristics of the online brand experience will be gathered from three angles: literature review, consumer testimonials and observation of online branding campaigns.

A number of limitations would apply to such a research. One practical limitation of the hard laddering technique “is the forced directionality of the probing process: starting form the first level of stated attributes respondents cannot be probed downward (asking ‘what’) in addition to be probed upward (asking ‘why’)” (Orsingher and Marzocchi, 2003). Further obstacle to the generalisation of the qualitative results is the nature of the sample which could not be representative for the population. However, considering the purpose and the domain of the research it is unlikely that a statistically representative/reliable quantitative technique could be meaningfully used. Additionally, it is always possible that the respondents find it difficult to express their attitudes and feelings towards an issue.
Hence, unveiling the underlying values might prove a hard task. Another impediment is the different level of Internet awareness and usage among demographic groups. In other words, not everyone could be tagged as “Internet savvy”. Nevertheless, considering the fact that the awareness of Internet is higher among younger consumers, we may easily predict that the importance of the World Wide Web as marketing branding tool and communication channel will be even more significant in the future. In accordance with the set objectives I will select respondents who access Internet on a regular basis.

A potential conceptual obstacle could be the lack of agreed upon theoretical base for the notion of experience in the context of branding. Further impediment may be the fact that “the literature on internet branding ? is currently in a formative stage” (Simmons, 2007).
Another problem is the tendency of “[m]arketing communications in the e-business context” to go “beyond the traditional boundaries of marketing communications and marketing departments” (Rowley, 2004). In particular, we should bear in mind that the process of conveying brands as experiences is an anthropological phenomenon as much as it is a
technological one. Consequently, much broader view and an approach that accounts for the social, ethical, moral and philosophical shift in the contemporary western societies are required for the appraisal of the role of experience branding.

With regard to the ethical aspect of the research, I do not envisage any implicit pitfalls for the respondents participating in the survey. Nevertheless, the exploration of the notion of brand experience could entangle the issues of hedonism, narcissism, etc. and one should be careful during elicitation and translation of the results. The respondents will be informed about the purpose of the study and their responses will be anonomised so their identity is not revealed. I am aware of the political nature of the observed organisations and I will attempt to be unbiased and seek robust conclusions by the use of triangulation of data sources. In such a manner it will be more difficult for respondents to influence the results by inconsistent statements.

One of my first immediate actions will be a review of the major ideas in the field from all the aforementioned perspectives (traditional, experiential and postmodern). I will look for common threads which might help in achieving the objectives of the paper. I will also immediately begin the compilation of a list with URLs of major brands in several industries. Simultaneously with the compilation I will commence observation of the websites of the selected brands with the goal of eliciting and grouping messages/promises of particular experiences which are currently used in branding campaigns. These initial steps, along with the qualitative study, will aim at analysing the phenomenon of experience branding as: a new firm offering (the emotional core of the offer); a new notion for brand (reinforcing the brand effects beyond name and symbol); and a new process (executed online). The context of the exploration will be further defined by two general considerations: the possible substitution of the widely proclaimed marketing goal “to add value” (in order to win the customer) with a new one, i.e. “to deliver experience”; and the future role of the marketer – a screenwriter who “designs” the experience and leaves the
“directing” to the consumer.

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