What Is Brand Experience Strategy? (And Why Most Brands Get It Wrong)
In 2026, most brands are polished, but weakly felt by customers. That gap is a strategic problem, and itās where commercial value is decided
BY: DR Fiona Maciver | Brand & Experience Strategy AdvisorPUBLISHED: 01 June 2026
Brand experience strategy is the discipline of shaping how a brand is felt across every customer interaction - using insight, emotion, design and behaviour to create trust, distinctiveness and commercial value.
Most definitions of brand experience strategy ignore the current market climate in 2026.
In the past, brand strategy was defined as brand-building through a coherent application of customer touchpoints: The store, website, campaigns, socials, partnerships, packaging and service moments. These all still matter, but they donāt explain why some brands are penetrating the customer imagination, while others are instantly forgettable, immediately disappearing from memory.
Thereās been a massive shift in the market over the last 2-3 years: Successful brands no longer manifest solely as sequences of interactions - rather, theyāre construed upon customer feelings. Those feelings are formed through a series of cues: language, service, pacing, design, tone, materiality and behaviour.
But the frustrating thing about feelings is theyāre intangible, constantly in flux, and difficult to manage from person to person. Consumers register feelings before deciphering them, or even being consciously aware theyāre happening. People sense whether a brand (and by extension the company) is, for example, careful or careless, generous or extractive, distinctive or generic, human or hollow. They then decide āIs this for me?ā. These cues might be minuscule, but are the first steps in the consumer forming a judgement. Once thatās established, is difficult to recalibrate.
āCustomers judge whether a brand is for them based on how they feel about it. And once that judgement is made, itās difficult to recalibrateā
Brand experience strategy builds emotion based on understanding customers
Customers judge based on their feelings and emotions. Yet brands can construct these these based on having a deep understanding of the customer. That is the role of brand experience.
Developing a customer vision - an understanding of who they are, what they expect, and what they desire - is the foundation of an enduring, loyal and committed relationship.
Emotional resonance is a state where every part of the brand appears to understand the same customer, hold the same standard, and belong to the same world. That takes deep work and deep understanding.
Creating the desired feeling requires its reinforcement in every part of the brand. Brands that are struggling in 2026 are often visible, but emotionally unclear.
āEvery part of a brand with strong emotional connection understands the same customer, holds the same standard, and belongs to the same worldā
Visual polish is a given in 2026, but visibility ā meaningful connection
Polished visual identities and content strategies are a given in 2026, but theyāre not what carries an enduring, successful brand.
Businesses carrying polished identities and carefully optimised content are getting frustrated that the experience created lacks strength. Consistently delivering content is necessary, but only when itās grounded in depth, substance and customer understanding. Likewise, a glossy visual identity can still be perceived as weak, transactional and emotionally hollow.
These are not what carries an enduring, successful brand. Polish is being confused with meaningful, emotional connection.
This is especially dangerous for premium, design-conscious brands. In their worlds, customers are not only buying the product or service. The business has to understand what the customer actually wants to buy: A feeling of confidence or status, belonging or trust?
Brand experience strategy asks questions that go deeper than how should the brand look and behave. We talk about what kind of world does this business create around its customer, and what does that world make them feel?
The brands with strongest customer connection create experiences based inside deep customer understanding, and reinforce that consistently.
āBrand polish is being confused with meaningful, emotional connection.ā
āThe brands with strongest customer connection create experiences based inside deep customer understanding, and reinforce that consistently.ā
Emotionally resonant brands are design-led
Back in 2016, I published research in The Design Journal on the concept of design leadership, arguing that this is where design becomes a strategic capability, rather than used in a narrow visual sense. Itās where design shapes how a business behaves, communicates and, ultimately, is felt by consumers.
Developing this point, I now believe that the brands that build deep emotional resonance with customers deploy design as deeply integrated, decision-making discipline that pervades all elements of the business operations - such as company ethic and staff training to R&D, product marketing, R&D and of course, customer experience.
In 2026, as consumers increasingly seek more meaningful, authentic connections of all types, a design-led coordinated approach is essential for businesses of all kinds to truly and deeply connect with customers.
Aesop is an interesting example of this in practice. The brand is clearly well designed, but it has also created its customer experience around an ethic of cultivated care. The stores, packaging, product names, language and personal service rituals combine to create a specific emotional atmosphere. Itās thoughtful, restrained, sensory, intelligent, and clearly distinguishable from the noise of ordinary retail. The customer doesnāt come to Aesop just for skincare. The world Aesop has created is about calm, ritual and aesthetic discernment. The visual system is part of a deeper design-led approach that is applied to every decision the brand makes.
SKIMS works from a very different emotional rationale. Its world is bodily, contemporary, intimate. The brand understands that confidence isnāt an abstract notion - itās something its customers feel against their skin and see in the mirror, in a strange tension between concealment and exposure. SKIMSā power lies in turning fit, form, colour and cultural proximity into a proposition that resonates with its customers at a very physical level.
At Bottega Veneta, an abstract idea of āsilenceā is part of its brand meaning, and is based on an in depth understanding of the needs of an understated yet wealthy customer. Bottegaās brand world is constructed around the silence and restraint that customers crave. Itās demonstrated through material and superior craft, unique proportion and quiet. Bottega never shouts. Customers appreciate a world where status is recognised only by those who know how to read it. The brand has chosen depth rather than noise, and, by result, has built extraordinary commercial value.
All three examples have a laser focus in what customer emotions they organise around. Creative and design is used to protect that abstraction of feeling. Many brands donāt realise that this intangible, unpredictable abstraction is actually the core strategic asset in 2026. Design must be grounded in deep understanding.
By failing to ask what emotional connection customers seek, they miss the opportunity to build long-term, trusted bonds with a defined audience base. Without that strategic depth, the most beautiful aesthetic or design are at best superficial, and at worst hollow.
AESOP
Customer Goals: Calm; Discerning skincare; ritualsBRAND APPROACH: Intelligence; minimalism; SophisticationSKIMS
Customer Goals: Body confidence; Acceptance; Direct, Direct experienceBRAND APPROACH: Intimacy; TacTIlity; SoftnessBotTega Veneta
Customer goals: Anonymity; Subtlety; StealthBRAND APPROACH: Silence; superior craftsmanship; integrity of materialsAn uncomfortable truth most brand consultants and marketers avoid: The noisiest brands are frequently the weakest.
The reason for this isnāt because noise fails immediately. It can drive awareness, generate engagement and fill a pipeline. But volume without substance is not brand-building. It is brand erosion - and it takes long enough to show up on a spreadsheet that most businesses never connect the cause to the effect.
WeWork is the clearest recent case. At its peak, the brand was culturally omnipresent ā loud, visually confident, fluent in the language of transformation, community and a new way to work. It created atmosphere at scale. What it did not create was emotional resonance, because the experience never matched the promise. The feeling the brand sold was borrowed, not built. When the substance failed, there was nothing underneath to hold the brand's value. It didn't simply lose money. It became a monument to what happens when narrative is mistaken for experience.
Peloton followed a different path to the same conclusion. At its height in 2020, it was one of the most culturally present brands in the world, selling identity and belonging as aggressively as it sold its hardware. But the emotional proposition was fleeting - it was built on a specific cultural moment rather than rooted in a genuine understanding
The loudest brands are often the weakest
of its customer. When that moment passed, the noise had generated awareness without loyalty. The audience had been trained to consume the brand, not to connect with it. Retention collapsed because there was no resonance to retain.
When a brand substitutes content for meaning, it trains its audience to consume rather than connect. Followers accumulate, but emotional resonance does not. And when a quieter, more considered competitor enters - one with genuine depth, a clear point of view, and an experience designed with real intelligence - the noisy brand has nothing underneath to hold its ground.
In 2026, AI has made this more urgent. It is now easy to produce language, imagery and campaigns at speed. Every business can sound articulate. Every brand can fill every channel. The baseline of acceptable output has risen, and will keep rising.
But almost none of it will resonate with real people. Most of that content will feel interchangeable - active and fluent, but strangely empty.
The brands that survive this shift will not be the ones that produce the most. They will be the ones with the clearest feeling, the deepest customer understanding, and the design leadership to translate that understanding into an experience that is genuinely, consistently felt.
WEWORKCreated atmosphere without substance. The brand fandango was mistaken for experience.
VERDICT: BRAND EROSION
PELOTONAn of-the-moment proposition. Audience was trained to consume, not connect.
VERDICT: FAILED RESONANCE
What strong brand experience strategy really achieves
Brand experience strategy gives businesses a structured way to create a relationship with its customer, and whether the current experience is capable of creating it.
This is the work I help businesses do: clarify the feeling they want to create, understand where the current experience weakens that relationship, and translate customer insight into sharper brand, service and experience decisions.
It begins with attention: to customers and their changing expectations, market shifts, category conventions, and the details most day-to-day operations overlook. It then turns that attention into a creative direction: Sharpening the emotional territory of the brand, identifying where the experience weakens, and building the kind of resonance that compounds over time.
A brand may believe itās warm, premium, personal or distinctive. But until it evaluates its direction from the perspective of the customer, it risks feeling cold, vague, impersonal or like aggregated version of its competitors. These failures of understanding, translation and design leadership are correctable.
The brands that will endure are the ones that create the clearest feeling, that understand their customers deeply enough to form a real relationship, and that turn care, intelligence and meaning into experiences people can recognise, trust and stay loyal to.
A brand becomes commercially powerful when customers feel its point of difference. In 2026, emotional resonance is central to business value.
āBrand experience strategy gives businesses a structured way to create a relationship with its customer.ā
ABOUT Dr Fiona MaciverIām a Brand & Experience Strategist, PhD in Design Strategy, and former UX Research Lead at Meta. I bring together experience from design and marketing, research and innovation, alongside practical techniques I teach at Central Saint Martins, London.
I help businesses develop original thinking and more distinctive brands.
Get in touchShape a brand people remember
If your business wants to get and stay ahead, work with me to notice what your competitors have missed, and turn that into your distinctive point of view.