Topics: Brand Environment

Meaning and Definition

‘Your brand environment includes everything from the carpeting in your office to your clothing, your techno-gadgets, and even where you might choose to host a dinner for your clients. Each and every decision you make that might give others a “clue” about who you are and what you’re like equals your brand environment.’ (Gogos, 2009)

The brand environment is the personality of the brand. It is a strategically designed set of choices that differentiates the brand from others. The environment can reflect the brands values and ethos. This can be seen in store fronts, packaging, logos, colours and taglines.

Scholarly Points of View

’Consumers are very influenced by the POS (point of sale) environment and so manufactures’ brands need to influence consumers before they enter the retailers’ store.’ (Jackson and Shaw, 2008)

The atmosphere of a store has an immense impact and influence on the consumer. For that reason, brand employees need to be able to form a perception of the brand before consumers step into the stores.

‘A brand environment tells a story, supports a common vision and mission, sparks emotional human connections, triggers pride and motivation, creates a sense of excitement and ownership’ (Perkins and Will)

A successful brand environment is able to build a connection between the brand and their consumers through the brands physical embodiments. These connections may spark different kinds of emotions towards the brand within the consumer, emotions that can later be associated with the brand.

‘Brands have to compete for attention with other brands in complex retail environments and online, so a design team developing a brand identity will undertake analysis of a brand within a retail store environment, a company website and third-party retailers to uncover how it communicates to its audiences in a variety of contexts.’ (Slade-Brooking, 2016)

Brands have to compete for consumer attention due to the vast number of other brands in the market. This includes brick and mortar shops as well as online shops.

The design team will work on establishing a clear-cut brand identity in order to insinuate a specific way to communicate with their consumers.

‘Exterior architecture represents yet another opportunity to stimulate immediate recognition and attract customers.’ (Wheeler, 2013)

An appealing store front and interior, has the capability to draw a vast amount of customers inside it. For example, the lingerie store ‘Victoria Secret’ is known for their distinctive environment. Each of their stores look similar in that they are glamorous, pink and have warm lighting. The Victoria Secret store exterior is unique and stands out from the rest of the stores which makes the stores more appealing and that is how they gain consumers even from far away (see figure 1).

Figure 1, The Victoria Secret store exterior

Real Life Example

Anthropologie is a clothing and a lifestyle store that is a part of the URBN company. There is 216 Anthropologie stores worldwide, most of them residing in the U.S. What makes the Anthropologie brand environment so unique is that it is distinctive from all other lifestyle brands.

They are known for its eccentric and whimsical aesthetic ‘Every season the brand anticipates the pieces we'll covet for our homes—and always gets it right’ (Miura, 2016). The store transports the shoppers into a different world, the Anthropology world. They are famous for their store displays which give them a clear identity (see figure 2).

Figure 2, A big scale papier-mâché whale in an Anthropologie store

What makes Anthropologie’s brand environment so notable, is that they value the creativity of their own employees and give them the freedom and opportunities to express themselves through the shops design. ‘Each store employs their own team of Visual Display Coordinators and Merchandise Coordinators, everything is designed and executed by hand, and is custom to the individual store’ (Claire, 2016). Anthropologie does not operate like a typical retail store. They put an emphasis on store design (see figure 3) however, they let their own employees interpret the brief and concept to their own manner. This means that all the stores are cohesive yet, unalike.

Figure 3, An eccentrically designed Anthropologie store

Anthropologie moulds the store experience from a human level, meaning with each concept they have, a certain woman and lifestyle in mind. Due to these types of concepts consumers can connect themselves to the store. ‘The reason it is easy to picture the life of an Anthropologie woman is because the store is designed with these woman in mind (Claire, 2016). Even if the consumer is not an eccentric or whimsical person, when they walk into any Anthropologie environment they feel like they can adapt that lifestyle.

‘Anthropologie creates a perfectly crafted image that inspires their customers to fit them’ (Claire, 2016). The brand is selling a fantasy, not a product, and that is what drives the consumers in to get the footfall to buy their product and into the brand fantasy

Personal Evaluations

Every brand needs to know who they are and what makes them unique. This is why working on the brand environment is critical. In order to gain consumers, the brand needs to know who their target audience is and what attracts them. This could come in different kinds of forms such as exterior and interior store designs, packaging, logos, colouring and even smells.

For example, Singapore Airlines used a specific fragrance throughout all their flights- the cabin crew wore it, it was used in the hot towels and sprayed across the airplane, this made the fragrance familiar to frequent flyers, thus triggering a positive memory of the airline. Every brand application is important, they must all appear to be coherent, so as a result, that the consumer undergoes a holistic costumer experience.

Another good example of this, can be seen in the brand Apple. As a brand they sell different tech gadgets, but they do so in a unique way. Everything that Apple does is done so in a way that is only distinctive to the brand. For example, each of their stores have the same store design, a glass cube, this conveys the message to consumers that they have arrived to an Apple destination. In store the customers will have the ‘Apple experience’. They find all of the products that Apple has to offer as well as have the option to try them out for themselves. Each store has a ‘Genius Bar’- a location inside the shop where Apple employees known as ‘Geniuses’ can help customers with any tech problems they might have free of charge. No other tech company offers this ‘Genius experience’ in store and online, which puts Apple in the frontier of all the tech brand in regards to customer service.

Apple is known as a leader for ‘store experience’. However, the brand experience does not end there. The company ‘appreciates the power of a multisensory brand more than most’ (Slade Brooking, 2016) meaning all of their products have been developed in a way that uses our senses. For example, the iPhone has been manufactured so that its surface has a distinguished feeling to the touch. Each Apple product greets the consumer with a simple ‘hello’ or ‘welcome’ when they are first turned on. Its elements like these that make the brands environment special.