I spied this terrific video over at the Adaptive Path blog, and couldn’t resist sharing it here.

In less than nine minutes, Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer gets Josh Levine to explain how customer experience not only affects your brand, but effectively defines it. Levine encourages marketers not to get caught up in defining their brand solely by the look and feel of their company (or product), but to focus on brand as reputation that is determined by customers.

What I like: the focus on a company’s responsibility to design a target customer experience and engage employees to carry it out. This in an investment, but as Levine notes, this is a more impactful approach than an advertising-driven approach to building a brand reputation. I’ll extend Levine’s argument and say that a clearly defined ideal, or target customer experience will create alignment and empowerment among employees across an organization faster and better than any “list of customer experience best practices” ever could.

Every customer experience begins with a person and a need to be solved. It’s what happens and how customers feel as they learn about options, try you out, buy, use your product or service to solve their need, and evolve to a new need over time. And their experience does indeed create the definition of your brand that lives in their hearts and minds.

While neither Schauer nor Levine says this explicitly, they are making a strong case for using customer experience as an operating strategy.  If your brand fundamentally live in the hearts and minds of your customers, how does your existing customer experience influence their thoughts, feelings and perceptions?

How does your customer experience look from inside your company? Is it proactively designed from the efforts across your organization, or is it the happenstance result of smart well-intended people all working on what they think is best?  Is it delivering the brand reputation you want?

If you a few minutes to spare, this video is well worth your time.

Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less from Brandon Schauer on Vimeo.