A Brand Stream emerges when there is not just a single source involved in shaping a brand image, but the brand is also influenced by people participating in its experience. Those people become an interactive part of the brand, passionately defending it and, to a certain degree, even defining its identity.

A recent example of a Brand Stream is the presidential election campaign for Barack Obama. The person brand Obama was not only built by the campaign team. Of course, its initial creation was strategically planned and orchestrated by Obama's campaign managers, but it was a chain reaction of factors beyond their direct influence, which were eventually leading to the campaign's successful result.

To understand the working principles of Brand Streams, one has to examine the principles of branding and the liberation of media by consumers. Brand Streams are an entirely new phenomenon, following the basic principles of game theory and networking theory.

Experience fields are shaping the brand experience

The brand image is an summary of values, so called brand assets, which begin to take shape in our heads as soon a brand enters a market place. This is already the case when the product was manufactured and brought to market, even without any effort in adertising and branding.

A consumer's interaction with the product, his decision-making and how he's going to interact with it, are happening in response to the brand values it represents. That process is affected by various influences, but anywhere where humans get in touch with products and become aware of certain values they see in them, it will form characterization, a brand personality in their heads.

In the life cycle of any product, various experience fields and interaction points are shaping an organic impression of a brand. This has a direct influence on purchase-decisions. It isn't rare that customers can't tell why they were preferring one product over another, after they had bought something. Being questioned, they may refer to the quality of the product, point out its features, or try to explain the superiority of their product of choice. Alternatively, they may have wanted to try something new, and the appearance and presentation of a particular brand just left a good first impression. Sometimes we decide for brands that remind us to similar brands, or trigger memories of positive experiences related to other aspects of our lives.

A purchase-decision is personal and it is strongly driven by psychological factors. Even the most conscious and logical selection-process (like comparing camera reviews of a photography magazine, or browsing a list of comparable functions of different car models), is depending on the influence of your brand experience.

Aside of tangible products (things of matter), also abstract products, like services or performances, can create a brand experience. Additional performance services, which are not directly related to the basic functions but are supporting the condition of the brand experience, are called Added Value.

Experience fields

Classic experience fields can be found at the point of sales (POS), where you buy the product. It is the product experience itself, its packaging, the simplicity or complexity of its first application, its longterm-application, your interaction with customer support, durability of the product, related advertising, public relations articles and reviews from journalists.

Somewhat newer experience fields have become an extension of the classic set of experience fields. They have recently gained importance in the perception of consumers. Among them are public forums, personal experience reports, comments on blogs, magazines and newspapers (who are largely adopting the blogging principle of a conversational medium), microblogging (like Tumblr, Jaiku or Twitter), customer satisfaction-services (Like GetSatisfaction), media platforms (such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo), social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) and interest-driven communities.

Not only are classic and new experience fields linked to one and another, they exist in a seamless integration. It's imperative to understand that consumers are not perceiving a difference between these experience fields. An offline-experience is easily shared and therefore transformed into an online-experience. "Online", after all, is nothing but another channel that lets people do what they've always been doing: to communicate with each other.

Interaction points

Interaction points are areas that provide a direct interaction with the brand experience. These can be the product experience, for an example, when freshly purchased computer isn't working as expected and you are calling customer support. Also, the point where you decide to buy something, in a store, or when you are about to sign an insurance contract, are all interaction points. They are the crossing points, the conversion points, where you transfer from the emotional brand experience to an actual transaction.

Not only purchases are transactions, also filling out forms, giving your information, or retreiving information, are all transactions made through these interaction points.

Especially online, where you are surrounded by all sorts of brand experiences, these interaction points are playing a steadily growing important role. Because your awareness of interaction is reduced to pure intuition, and because your interaction with Web services is mostly a personal, sheltered act (you are sitting alone in front of a computer in most cases), these online interaction points have a large surface on the Web. They are the very fabric the Web is made of.

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