More and more, Traction is being asked by our clients to help improve the entire brand experience that they offer to their customers. What is a brand experience? It’s your product. It’s your advertising. Your website. It’s how you answer the phone.

It is every way that your customers experience your brand.

Much of the focus in marketing today is on ensuring measurable ROI for every dollar spent. Clearly it’s important to measure what we do, but the truth is that half of the things we should do for our brands are not predictably quantifiable. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored—even if the investment in them is not predictably quantifiable.

According to Forrester Research, 83% of purchase decisions today are influenced by work-of-mouth. That’s a big number. The funnel is an antiquated model because it does not account for getting customers to advocate for your brand. Having a brand experience that brings value and delight to the people that interact with your company is vital.

So, how do you accomplish that?

1. Audit the current experience

Start by mapping out the “user flow” of how customers interact with your brand in different scenarios. Take an ethnographic approach to really understand the steps they might walk through as they become aware of your offering, consider a purchase, buy it, try it, use it, share it. It may be helpful to develop “personas” to visualize yourself in the consumer’s head.

This is not about making a pretty chart or diagram. It’s about gaining deep empathy. Try to observe the little things that make them smile—or make them frustrated. Document them.

If you’re a user experience designer or an information architect, this may seem like an obvious first step. To you, it is. But it’s a valuable endeavor whether your product is software, a stay in a luxury hotel or sliced bacon.

• Were you overwhelmed or clear on where to being when you started using that online budgeting application to manage your finances?

• Could the check-in process at that hotel have been made you feel like signing up for the rewards program was really worth it?

• Wouldn’t it be great if you could close up the other half of that package of bacon without using a piece of tin foil?

You won’t have any answers yet, but the audit is a critical first step in improving your brand experience. Without it, you won’t know the right questions to ask later on.

2. Assess your factors

Looking beyond quantifiable ROI does not mean having your head in the clouds. I often describe what we do at Traction as aligning our clients’ business objectives with human behavior. To do this successfully, plan to do your work within the context of situational factors.

How do you get a clear picture of the situation? Start by clearly articulating business. It’s important to be clear about what we are trying to accomplish. Think of influences that fall into three camps: guidelines and restriction, assets and opportunities, and external factors.

• Guidelines and restrictions. We each have one tabula rasa moment in our lives. Then we turn one-day old. It would be wonderful if we could begin every initiative with a blank slate, but reality often dictates otherwise. Are there technical restrictions to contend with? Brand guidelines to follow? Legal policies to adhere to? Opinionated executives or company cultures to consider?

  It is important to be objective, but stupid to be blind. It would be nice to always just do what’s “right,” but if the goal is an implementable solution you need to know what you can change and what you can’t.

• Assets and opportunities. Equally important is what we have to work with. Do you have existing research at your disposal that can inform your work? What tools and assets can you leverage? Are there technologies or processes that can help you? Are there new market opportunities to go after?

  A factor is defined as a circumstance, fact, or influence that contributes to a result or outcome. Don’t limit the ones you consider to the negatives.

• External factors. What is going on outside of your sphere of influence? Be aware of behavioral trends, competitive opportunities and relevant best practices. By adding these to your consideration set, you’ll have more a better picture of what to explore when you ideate and develop concepts for a solution.

3. Define benchmarks and measurement goals

Just because you can’t put an Omniture tag on something, doesn’t mean it can’t be measured. Brands use metrics based on survey date like awareness and purchase intent regularly. In this digital age, it’s easy to forget that while surveying customers is perhaps a less perfect science that counting clicks, it is often far more meaningful.

For instance, companies like P&G, Intuit, GE and Zappos use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure their brand experience. NPS is a metric where you take the number of people who say they are likely to recommend your company and subtract them from the number of people who say they won’t (I’m simplifying slightly here). That’s a benchmark that means something. Now, go optimize it.

4. Develop concepts

Business Intelligence is often defined with a very left-brained mentality. Corporations look at data. They are analytical, rational and logical. Complex software can make inferences based on the above, but can it be creative?

Creativity is a critical tool in improving brand experiences. Combined with the holistic understanding gained in Steps 1-3, give businesses what I call Right-Brained Business Intelligence.

Brainstorm, ideate and work in teams assembled from multiple disciplines to develop creative concepts that could solve your problem. Uncover ideas that are smart, unexpected and practical.

5. Map user flows

Just as you mapped out scenarios of brand interactions in your audit, map out improved exchanges based on your best solutions concepts. If you are improving a digital product, this is where you would create high-level wireframes showing the experience. If you are not, pretend you were. Create a cartoon flowchart if that’s what illustrates your ideas best.

What’s important is not a preconceived notion of what this deliverable should look like, but that it effectively allows you to see how your idea would actually work.

There often will be gaps you’ll have to patch. Allow your ideas to continue to evolve. Concept morphing should be an expectation, not a frustration. You’ve identified your factors. Now’s the time to make sure you’ve thought them through.

6. Design and produce your vision

Here you shift from high-level vision to implementation-ready designs. What you need to design depends on what business you are in and what solutions you’ve devised. If you’re selling a box of soap, maybe you need to design the box.

This is a big step. It contains a lot of potential steps—interaction design, graphic design, copywriting, production, quality assurance testing—but I lump them together because these are all about getting stuff done. I consider strategy defining your objectives, envisioning your end state and architecting a plan to get there. This step, however, is about execution.

7. Develop testing plan

This process will improve your brand experience, but it will rarely make it the best it can be in one shot. Continue to incrementally optimize by identifying areas to test alternatives. Whether you test-market geographically or conduct a digital A/B test, be sure to isolate your variables. If you see an effect, you want to know the cause. No apples to oranges, please.

It’s the experience that matters. This is framework can help you consistently improve yours. Today, most marketers are perversely risk-averse. Investing in something new can be perceived as a risk. But I suggest you perceive this as an opportunity. Because the brands that do take risks will be the ones that will create value, happy customers and business growth.

The brands that take risks will be the brands that win.