How Brands are Truly Taking Off with Creative Differentiation

What separates your brand from competitors? Across industries, brands are increasingly investing and allocating resources to improving the customer experience (CX). While that’s great news for customers and the audiences they serve, for brands, it means they’ll have to work much harder to stand out. With a sea of sameness looming over the horizon, brands must hone in on their key, unique qualities that differentiate them from the rest through best-in-class creative experiences. 

Creative differentiation is more than simply raising awareness or traditional notions of driving customer loyalty. In his Forrester report “The Cost of Losing Creativity,” Jay Pattisall writes that “every brand offers the same digital experience because they all address the same customer needs.” Rather than fulfill the same KPIs as their competition, organizations must seek out opportunities that fulfill a unique brand promise and offer memorable creative experiences.

MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar notes that what separates average or even good creative from truly exceptional work is impact. “It’s not just about big ideas. If you have the right idea, you have to go really big on the idea itself,” he says. “The scale of those ideas–the way you commit to them to have real impact–defines the pinnacle of creative work.”

One way brands can begin thinking about this is through purpose. Look at it this way: while you might know your brand’s purpose, what really matters is whether consumers do. 76% of brands may think their organizations have a defined purpose, but only one in ten have actually defined a purpose statement that they’ve put into action, according to the ANA. 

When faced with competition from digitally-native brands that have integrated purpose well within their platforms (like making it easier to get a ride in a couple of taps at a guaranteed rate), brands must likewise ensure their promise is fulfilled through the creative user experience. It’s through these experiences, if done right, that brands can strike an emotional connection and build brand love in the mind of consumers.

Creativity as a Key Factor

The challenge of creative differentiation is felt across all industries these days, though it’s especially relevant to industries that push traditional strategies around growing loyalty–retailers, travel brands, and fintech are just some of the industries that could benefit most by embracing creative differentiation. As part of a digital transformation process, MediaMonks worked with leading Mexican airline brand Aeroméxico to revamp their app, turning the typical ticket-booking experience into a space for wanderlust and travel inspiration.

“What differentiates one brand from another nowadays?” asks Carlos Rivera, Consulting and Platforms Lead at MediaMonks Mexico. “Loyalty is not easily achieved unless through experiences that result in habits or small moments that inject emotion to the customer journey.”

Craft alone doesn’t solve the challenge. Brands must leverage consumer insights and data to address and solve the primary needs of customers, aligning the essence of their brand with a strategy that reacts to those needs. This makes all the difference between novelty and designing truly differentiated experiences that cultivate lasting emotional and business impact. “Differentiated creative combines an understanding of culture with real, heavy-lifting business impact that drives real bottom line value,” says ter Haar.

The process must begin with placing the human at the center of your creative focus. Working with Aeroméxico, MediaMonks put this idea into practice, helping the brand creatively differentiate by striving to truly transform the full scope of the customer experience. 

“Often it’s not about the place you’re going; it’s about the person you’re visiting,” says ter Haar. “This insight bubbled up, can we build people into the app as a destination? That’s a really nice message and normally if you look at the siloed nature of our industry, that’d be it–with some shiny creative around it. Instead, we’re filling the gaps. Yes, there’s creative and an app, but what’s happening in between?”

This question sparked the development of “People are the Places” for Aeroméxico, a state-of-the-art platform that enables the brand to build meaningful relationships by letting travelers experience places like never before: linking them to the people actually living there. This experience was recognized with the Gold Cannes Lion 2019 in Brand Experience & Activation.

What separates the best from the rest?

The challenge in embedding such emotive experiences in a platform lies in “trying to communicate different experiences to different audiences,” says Aeroméxico’s Angélica Romero, UX and Web Optimization Lead. Brands must design strategies to create personalized experiences that impact users directly and make those experiences memorable. For example, once a user fills in their profile in the Aeromexico app, their name appears throughout the reservation flow, along with geolocalization and recent searches, which anticipate their needs and require fewer taps for them to take.

Redesigning the Customer Experience

Nowadays, many brands are redesigning their corporate image, but these tweaks are often a matter of brand identity. True transformation requires balancing commercial goals with experiences that resonate with consumers. The challenge with the Aeroméxico app was clear from the start: establish a strategy to increase ticket sales by improving the experience of buying a ticket in mobile format. This prompted the team to study the booking process, looking for opportunities to redesign the process as a whole, from discovering flights to inspiring users to act on a destination–a strategy that we’ve taken with subsequent campaigns for the brand, too.

The focus was put not only on helping the user find flights, but also on inspiring them to travel. “And so we launched the complete redesign of the reservations section with a user-thought experience process,” says Carlos Rivera. “We carried out prototypes, interviews and even testing sessions to ensure that every button made sense and to determine what information to show at what time during the reservation flow.” From color choice to animations, each element in the process serves a specific purpose to impact the user experience. Through ongoing analysis, MediaMonks and the Aeroméxico team can tweak and adjust the app to enhance the CX even further and continuously iterate.

González notes that the centerpiece of the design is how visual elements change and conform as the user follows the flow. From the background image that changes when you select the destination, to the copy and image that indicate the step in which you are in the header of each screen, the design builds a sense of excitement and anticipation before culminating in an animated message that lets you know that “Your trip is ready!”

“We know that buying a plane ticket is a rational decision,” says González. “But that carries a very important emotional load because, in the end, it materializes in your next trip: It’s happening!” 

Creating user-centered experiences goes a long way to help brands make their purpose clear and to establish the differentiator that will make them stand out from the crowd. Addressing customer’s needs is something any brand can do, but doing it in a relevant and unique way is something only brands with defined purposes can aspire to achieve.

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