The Emotional Construct Of Brand Experience: The Wow Moment.
CAPTURING WOW IN BRAND MANEUVERS
Feelingness?
You know the sensation, the moment of wow,
which sets into play a kind of cascading—“wow, isn’t that something?”
And, hopefully, it keeps going as—“will you look at that?”
There are a number of words in our vocabulary that relate to the spherical [that which is a-round us] nature of experience. We’ve coined two words: “feelingness” and “experientiality.” Feelingness has an expression in Korean, 감각적임; 예민함; 다감함—which translates roughly as sensibility. Experientiality, which we’ve defined as
“design thinking founded on a
multi-sensory strategy of experience development: an integrated holism.”
In the storm of data arrays in massive flurries of content,
the swarm of scientific measurements,
crowd swirls, the waves of trends and movements
and, in all these, potent brand experiences
might come down to one thing:
“wow.”
And when we think of wow, as I was talking to someone this morning—and I asked them, “what’s wow?” And the answer that came back, it was “a tingling,” as she put it, as an adrenalized moment of surprise, the spectacle of discovery—for an instant—“an instance of electrified feeling.”
Wow is an ancient word, a 16th century expression of amazement.
And how does it feel?
There’s a meditation on journey—“where are you going, where have you been, and where did you come from? And in the journey, what of wow, what of amazement?
In my journeys around the planet, working or exploring
—or both—
I find myself.
And, in all the studies of branding places—and designing brands in those places, understanding people, examining sensations and the localization of stylized taste,
I still go to the center of feeling.
Interestingly—to each place, their own: working in Jakarta taught me balance, working in Tokyo taught me energy, designing in Paris taught me stride, NYC taught me watchfulness.
In the differences of their places, branding work, I learned to look for spectacle, the large, the small and the design towards wow.
The stories come to individuated contexts in place—whether placemaking inside those environments, or designing brands in those places.
J A K A R T A | B A L A N C E
B R A N D P A T T E R N I N G | S E I B U
The wow lies in the line of delicacy of detailing
balanced with the gigantic scaling of visual messaging.
The small made large.
The large made small.
T O K Y O E N E R G Y | TVAsahiTokyo
The wow sparks energy in the line of creativity, holistic environments, which leads to media renderings that are packaged as measures of brand storytelling—sensations seen, of scent inhaled, form touched, sounds held, and
tastes savored.
P A R I S | S T R I D E > P E R F U M E
Wow design: brands that are receptacles of sensation,
luxuriation of experience,
life well-lived.
I could react to a place by studying the calculated candle power, the math of lumens in a lit space, or measuring acoustics, or touch the materiality of texture and study the nature of epidermal reaction—
sense heat, scent fragrance, examine taste, or bask in the wholeness of sight—gathering in the whirlpools of impression,
measuring the character of messages and visuals.
All that could be done— but in the end—
it will be:
How does it
feel?
In leading thoughtful teams,
my key offering is the sensate and emotionally-reactive.
Nice design,
but how does it feel?
Good package, but..?
Nice interiors, but..?
Pretty logo but..?
“I like the feeling of that.”
And of course, what is the thinking
journey of the story that unfolds?
Cool story, but who cares if there’s no feeling?
What do you hold—when you listen?
What is carried away with you?
What could be held?
My, and my team’s, work will always start, and end, with feeling.
Since in the reality of my legacy, that’s where it all started.
As of this year—that’s 45 years of consistent performance.
I like how that feels.
Feeling is:
a gathered-up rope-work,
knotted tight with decades of experience —
it is the braiding of time and moments, and
the momentum it brings;
it ties knots in
the memory of holding something in your heart,
it synchs up
the layering and interlacment of impressions
that do just that:
they make an im-pression.
They imprint.
And they
become part of you.
TIM | Old QueenAnne Hill | Strategic Magic
…..
The Strategy of Holism | Emotionality
and Design Engineering World of Work