What do these acronyms mean? Brand Experience (BX), User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience. These are threee areas which are becoming more and more important in both commercial and cultural sectors.
This year, I gave my interior and scenography students a creative seminar on Brand Activation – which brings together brand and user experience, using the luxury brand Jacquemus as an example.
Brand Activation is marketing that both builds a brand’s image and drives a specific consumer action through one or more of six identifiable disciplines. These disciplines help bring a brand to life by connecting and interacting with the consumer on a personal level.
Understanding Your Brand
Identifying Your Target Audience
Creating an Engaging Experiences
Leveraging Social Media
Consistency and Coherence
Measuring Success
With the seminar above, we worked on the first three elements.
Why Jacquemus? This company is an excellent example of a brand which tries to engage its customers around the values and personality it integrates into everything.
From its identity to its runway shows in fields of lavender, to its user experiences in pop-up shows or events. It is always trying new things to surprise its customers and keep its brand energetic and dynamic.
Because the owner, Simon Porte, is from the South of France, he will often use locations close to his home to communicate his passion and his Southern France culture. Simon Porte always adds a personal touch to his communications too. To make the brand more human. His personal Instagram and TikTok pages are full of stories about him and his family. Brand activation on the streets, in product development and ‘happenings’ are part of Jacquemus’s strategy.
Le Bleu pop-up shop, Selfridges, London.
Brand activation is the process of bringing a brand to life through various interactive and immersive experiences. It’s about making your brand relatable and memorable and this can relate to both shopping and visiting art galleries and museums.Brand Aid, the Band Aid for your business – sticking it all together.
Luxury Branding Workshops
I learn as much from my students as they learn from me, They are open-minded, dynamic, young and full of energy, they also have a different view of brands and their communication than I do. But I do have many years of experience to pass onto them as well as a great tool box of creative and strategic ideas.
My branding workshops and courses cover many themes:Luxury Storytelling, the Multi-channel ONO brand experience. Looking at on-line and off-line channels of communication to create unique luxury brand stories. .Find out more about these workshops here.
“The professor is clearly knowledgeable about the topic she is teaching. I love that she provides many hands-on activities and workshops throughout the course. It makes it a lot more dynamic, and I found them all to be very enjoyable!” Student in Masters MSc Luxury Brand Strategy.
Personal Branding – The Brand Called You! Find out more about these workshops here.
Audio Branding and Audio Visual Branding – can your brand be without music or sound? With social media, particularly Instagram Reels, Stories and TikTok, can you really ignore the power of sound and music? Does your brand need a sonic logo? Audio landscape? A genre of music fitting for your products and services. Find out more here.
Audio Branding Workshop with Graphic and Scenography Designers.
Brand Identity and packaging design – the images below are the work of business school students who in 1.5 hours had to take a brief for a luxury white tea and produce their own identity and packaging. This activity is part of my course in Corporate Design in the Luxury Industry, the students are studying the MSc in International Luxury and Brand Management at Rennes School of Business. Please see our other post on Packaging Design.
The work of Business School students on luxury pack design at Rennes School of Business as part of the Corporate Design in the Luxury Industry Course.
“The professor brings with her objects to make the course more concrete and we see that she is really interested in what she teaches so it makes the course very attractive.” Student Feedback 22/23 Rennes Business School.
Brand Storytelling using exercises from Joseph Campbell’s epic book The Hero’s Journey.
How do you develop engaging and memorable brand stories around your brand to attract new or existing audiences to new products or services? I use several theories with my students, Joseph Campbell’s is one of them. I then take them through the process step-by-step to allow them to develop unique stories which engage the reader or follower in a different way.
I run several courses in MultiMedia Storytelling, Luxury Storytelling, How to tell the story called YOU! in different schools around France. I was also invited to Copenhagen early in 2020 to give lectures on this subject at KEA a Communication and Design School. It was a great experience for the students there and I learnt a lot too about the way they teach branding strategy.
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey – steps to excellent brand storytelling.
Brand Stretching and collaborations are becoming more and more necessary to attract younger audiences and to add vitality to established brands.
(Image top of page) I took part in an International Workshop at Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique alongside David Balkwell, joined by Anne van der Graaf and Jeroen van Tongeren from the Dutch school of Engineering and Design in Windesheim for a workshop on Brand Stretching.
It’s becoming a recurrent theme as brands are now stretching further and further into unmarked territories in new product development to attract different audiences who may have slightly different values to the core products.
I now run regular workshops and seminars on this theme, as more and more brands are collaborating with other brands, musicians, artists, charitable foundations…
Brand collaborations are really interesting when trying to target new audiences, such as Millennials or Generation Z. They can bring a new image to an established brand. They can offer new experiences, new product offers, in new formats such as pop-up experiences, events and street marketing.
“Every learning activity was great and useful, Mrs Alouche gave us some creatives activities to do that were very interesting and relevant to the course. Not only slides and PPT like in the other classes.” Student Feedback 22/23 Rennes Business School.
DESIGN RESEARCH, MUSINGS AND INSPIRATIONS 