5 Questions to Make Your "Brand Experience Identity" as Strong as Apple's

Whether you own an iTouch, iPhone or iPad or have just seen the commercials, online videos, or others using these products, you probably have seen people touching, tapping, and making pinching or reverse pinching and flicking motions across screens. This “Touch/Tap/Pinch/Flick” (TTPF) is the new experience vocabulary of commands for Apple, but it’s so much more; it's a powerful enhancement of their brand experience identity.



I remember when the Mac was born because I started to use one almost right away. It was easy to see that the mouse/screen icon oriented interface was much more intuitive than that of the dos system, the prevailing computer OS of the time (which wasn’t intuitive at all). But to use that first Mac interface you still needed some instruction. After all, no one had ever seen anything like it or the functions it could accomplish. By comparison, the new interface Apple has based it’s latest products around is so simple to use that seeing it once, even just on a TV commercial, is enough to teach you to do it yourself.

This simplicity makes this interface the killer interface of screen experience. How do I know? I heard a teenager asking her mother why the phone she had didn’t work that way, and "Mom, why doesn’t everything work that way?" Game. Set. Match. That kid didn’t grow up on this interface; it’s too new. But she adopted it as the standard for “how things ought to be” in record time. This interface has set a new bar for ease of use.

So then this isn’t just the standard by which all other screen-based products will be judged going forward. It’s the standard by which all product experiences will be judged going forward. And I don’t mean that people will necessarily expect, say their cars to be operated through these same three motions, although if one could, that would be brilliant. (And it probably will drive at least how some people will expect the nav/info/entertainment device embedded within their cars to work.) What I mean though is that the incredibly intuitive, natural simplicity on which Touch, Tap, Pinch, Flick is based is now the standard by which people will come to expect everything to work. And in that one motion (or set of motions) Apple has upped the brand experience identity game immeasurably.

So here are five questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Is your brand’s interface this simple?
2. Is it this intuitive and natural?
3. Can consumers learn to use it without any depth of instruction?
4. Is it instantly responsive and satisfying?
5. Does it possess any of these qualities to such a high and differentiating degree that it can be a major contributor to creating or enhancing your brand experience identity and brand preference?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, it’s time to find out. And if the answers are “no,” then it’s time to re-engineer, using TTPF as your benchmark.