What is a brand home?
Brand homes, also known as brand houses or branded houses, are interactive, interpretive spaces created to connect brands and consumers to increase brand loyalty, promote community, and boost sales.
Advantages of brand homes
The advantages of brand homes are being realised by hundreds of successful brands, including:
- Generating revenue: These sensory encounters may be profitable. Take Dublin, Ireland’s Guinness Storehouse, as an example. The brand house has made a profit thanks to adult ticket prices ranging from $15 to $30 and over 1.7 million annual visitors.
- Building a brand: A potent pillar of brand strategy is to open your main office, manufacturing facility, distillery, or flagship store to the public. It also allows you to stand out from the competition. Customers who visit your business have chosen to spend two or more hours engaging with your brand experiences and learning more about your company’s identity.
- Community & consumer advocacy: Moments of advocacy can be created when you gather your most devoted customers in one place as a community. Companies like Michaels have recognised the strength of this community through their community classroom programme, which has drawn over 1 million participants since 2019. This advocacy may generate buzz on social media and increase direct sales.
- Preservation of history: Many brands preserve distinctive structures and locations by supporting the heritage community. With House No. 29, a meticulously preserved Georgian townhouse, the power utility provider ESB accomplished this in Ireland.
Brand-home examples
Plant tours
It is ideal for visiting the factory to see how your preferred products are made. Numerous companies in the US allow visitors to take factory tours.
There are many choices, from hot sauce to aircraft.
In addition to guided tours of the factory floor, many of these experiences also offer museum-like experiences.
The Tabasco experience and the Honda Heritage museum are excellent examples of brands building branded homes.
Refineries and breweries
Breweries and distilleries are some of the most well-known places to house brands. Numerous alcoholic beverage companies open their doors for tours, gatherings, and tastings.
Consider Guinness, whose establishment at St. James’ Gate in Dublin, Ireland, is consistently the busiest spot in the nation, drawing more than 1.7 million tourists in 2019.
Strong brands can use their current assets to create unique experiences for their clients and fans.
Pop-up stores
More and more companies are creating experiential pop-ups and demo areas for their products. For many brands, this is a component of a D2C strategy, but for others, it’s just a way to reduce costs overall.
The Dyson Demo Stores are one successful example of this.
These can also be a way to trial new products with a smaller audience before launching them internationally.
In-store experience
Providing in-store experiences like concerts and hands-on demonstrations is a common theme among retailers in addition to pop-up brand homes.
While some brands might object that this goes beyond what constitutes a brand home, many of these initiatives are born at retailers’ flagship locations.
Sports
One common type of brand home is sports stadium tours. Most professional sports teams provide tours and other events that allow visitors access to the stadium’s backstage areas.
As an illustration, the New York Yankees give stadium tours.
Driving experiences
Track days are items on bucket lists for racing enthusiasts. It’s an adrenaline-pumping thrill to drive your dream car on a private track with expert instruction and no speed limit.
Theme parks and dedicated experience centres are available from many of the world’s most well-known sports car manufacturers.
A theme park
It’s unlikely that you think of “branded experiences” when you think of theme parks, but many of the most well-liked attractions are brand residences.
The world-famous media brand Disney is physically represented in its theme parks.
Such large-scale operations make these kinds of brand homes primarily profit centres.
Electronic experiences
Usually, brand home experiences take place in the real world, but in light of the Covid pandemic, marketers are increasingly experimenting with digital brand home experiences.
These can include digital experiences that attempt to replicate the traditional brand home experience online, such as microsites, virtual events, and branded online experiences.
