The Experience Is the Position

Authored by: Prakruti Pandya

On a real estate project, none of the media worked. The hoardings had fractional visibility, people do not really wait on the crossroads specially to look at hoardings. Print had the same problem, once the ad was printed, it stayed for the first two hours of the day on the reader’s mind. Online was worse, GWI puts ad blocker use in India at half of all internet users, and the people who have not installed anything are scrolling past anyway.

The reflex in that situation is to make a better ad. But we did something else.

The thing people kept saying they missed was time with their families. So we gave them a platform for it. Small events, thirty to forty people at a time. Families painting canvases together. Karaoke. Nothing about the apartments. No selling. No ads.

Everyone in the room was buying into the same building, so they met their neighbours months before they moved in. People showed up, every time. Apparently they loved gatherings.

Those groups became communities before the handover. Then they started inviting their friends to come and see the apartment. Under construction, nothing was finished yet. The enquiries that came out of that were ones we had not paid for and could not have bought. Neither we could have ever reached them online.

In branding, majorly the sequence runs one way. You settle the position, you express it in an identity, you communicate it, and the experience delivers it at the end. Experience is the last mile. And sometimes, one doesn’t even think about experience, because it brings all the chaos. To manage spaces, take care of the visitors, serve them good food.

Here it ran backwards. The position was in real an experience, a building where people already knew each other on move-in day. We dint really prepared for it in months advance and we dint even make projections. The position lived in the building itself. People walked into it.

This is the part worth taking seriously. The experience is the position.

Why this works now

Announcing a brand position requires media, and the media is where nobody is these days. Attention has to be bought, and it is getting more expensive to buy less of it every year.

Whereas an experience does not have to be announced. People choose to enter it, they bring other people, and they describe it in their own words afterwards. They feel something about it. The friends who turned up to look at an unfinished apartment were invited by someone who had spent a Saturday painting with their kids.

This holds wherever the human experience is the product. Hotels, restaurants, wellness spaces, retail floors, cultural institutions. In those categories a position cannot live in a deck, because the customer meets the brand as a sequence of rooms and moments, and whatever happens in those rooms is what they repeat to someone else.

It is also why this decision cannot sit with marketing. Moving a hoarding budget into art supplies and a karaoke setup is a decision about what the business spends money on.

The test

So many brands can tell you their position in a sentence. Fewer can tell you where a customer would run into it. If the only place it exists is a website and a pitch deck, it is a description.

The experience is the position. Everything else is a description of one.

Author Bio: Prakruti Pandya is a brand strategist working with consumer, lifestyle and hospitality brands on positioning, identity and brand experience. She works from India.