BX and CX are not new.
People have always experienced a brand.
The question is: Was the experience designed thoughtfully?
Over the past 20 years, digital ecosystems contributed to dynamic market changes that shifted the center of gravity (power) from within brands out to their customers (audiences).
The general market response has been to accept this shift as new universal law, allowing the center of brand gravity to be placed with the customer—and putting brands and their agencies in the challenging position of being led by customers.
BX + CX evolves this gravitational shift.
By realigning the internal orientation of the brand to a horizontal, cross-functional structure, and refocusing organizational thinking as human-centered and customer-empathetic, brands can move the center of gravity back to it’s natural, appropriate place—inside their organization—while embracing and honoring the influence and importance of their audiences.
The result is a high-functioning brand that authentically attracts customers, intentionally engages all audiences, fosters a healthy and inclusive nature.
Changing the Perspective
The internal structure of a brand organization is oriented vertically. Core business teams—such as Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing, Operations, Product/Service/Revenue, Technology—each specialize in their own category, attending to increasingly complex objectives and systems to deliver on business performance. As a result, they tend to operate in silos. The vertical orientation of their perspective is an inherent and natural feature of their responsibilities.
The customer, however, experiences the brand horizontally. Whether online, in-store, or at-experience, the customer engages the brand across its entire organizational structure.
BX + CX aligns the internal thinking of core business teams with the horizontal experience of the customer. The process—built on the foundation of design thinking, organized with proven frameworks and methods, and guided by experienced designers and strategists—illuminates opportunities, creates comprehensive and lasting solutions, improves experiences, unlocks potential, shapes culture, and creates sustainable competitive advantages.
The Ecosystem
BX is a plan for the systematic development of a brand in alignment with business objectives to produce authentic and thoughtful experiences for all audiences. The frameworks used for brand strategy help maintain a high altitude and goal-oriented point of view, and may include methods for market position, competitive landscape, audience identification, marketplace models, core brand messages, and foundational brand design.
CX is a plan for the expression of brand strategy as a system of tangible assets designed to engage all audiences. The frameworks used for CX focus on a low altitude, customer-centric, value-centered point of view, and may include methods for internal alignment, customer journeys, service blueprints, experience maps, process visualizations, and direction for visual and semantic expression.
Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology rooted in design discipline, systems thinking, and cultural anthropology. Design thinking places the customer at the center of activities, and focuses on the intersection of notions such as desirability, feasibility, and viability. Applied to brand strategy and CX, design thinking frameworks can help solve big, abstract problems while supporting the full range of complexities that human-centered thinking surfaces for consideration.
Human-centered design is a discipline that grounds systems thinking in empathy and curiosity: It places people at the heart of organizational problem-solving. As the connection with customers and communities evolves from relationship to partnership, human-centered design will make certain that it remains rooted in humanity.
BX, CX, design thinking, and human-centered design have distinct purposes — and are inextricably linked. Together, they create expressions of a brand’s promise that inform, enchant, and connect its audiences.
The Craft of BX + CX
We exist for passionate, thoughtful clients and agencies…for the remarkable moments when everything comes together in perfect, unified form to create authentic and magical experiences.
Our core is design. Which means we love to solve big problems—and we love to make things that are beautiful and purposeful. For us, design is a discipline, an application of meaning, language, and intention that produces lasting results across all digital and physical mediums.
We are obsessive about the quality of the outputs we create, because it is directly related to the level of outcomes we produce. Distillation is crucial, and details are everything—because they respond directly to the human need for simplicity and harmony that inspires the audiences of premium and purpose-led brands.