A brand is often described as the look and feel of a service or product. Elements like logo, colors, icons, and typography make up the “look” part of the brand equation. This is what most people think of first when they set out to create an on-brand digital learning experience. It makes sense – visual cues are incredibly effective for creating immediate understanding and transferring the trust and loyalty a parent brand has built onto a new experience or product.

But if you stop there, there’s a good chance your experience will fall short of learners’ expectations. That’s because the “feel” part of your brand is just as important.

What is brand experience in online learning?

The feel of a brand is harder to define. Elements like quality, price, your differentiators, and touchpoints across the customer journey make up your brand experience. An online learning experience should deliver on customers’ expectations in that area, too.

“We call it your company’s secret sauce,” says Josh Newman, head of the learning practice at Studion, about pinpointing the differentiators that make each client’s offering unique and valuable. “The challenge our clients face is how to translate their secret sauce into an online experience in a meaningful and scalable way. That’s where Studion excels.”

Take Hawk Ridge Systems, a software reseller with robust training and support services. Hawk Ridge Systems is known for high-touch customer service. Clients could receive in-person or virtual training on the software they purchased, and they could call a helpline or email a design file for one-on-one support from an engineer.

The challenge for Hawk Ridge was providing that high level of service in an online learning experience that would allow them to scale their offerings and reach more customers. Studion designed an online portal to streamline customer service requests (previously coming in through several channels) and offer on-demand digital learning resources, all on one platform.

The result was a digital learning experience that offered clients more choice and connection, delivered on their customer service expectations, and saved the Hawkridge team valuable time, unlocking the opportunity for growth.

Defining your secret sauce

What if you aren’t sure what your secret sauce is? Studion has a tried and true method for helping clients navigate that challenge.

Start by answering a simple question: What are you known for?

Here’s another way to phrase the question: What’s the main reason customers choose you over their alternatives?

Dive deeper with Studion’s High Engagement at ScaleⓇ framework. Review each of the five ingredients of engagement and outline how your brand delivers on each. Keep in mind, you shouldn’t have equal emphasis on each ingredient. This framework is a way to strategically focus on the elements of engagement that will help you deliver results for your learners and set you apart in the marketplace.

Once you define your secret sauce, you’ll know where to spend the most time and effort when designing your brand experience.

Studion’s client Colibri went through this process to refresh and relaunch an online learning product. Colibri is a professional education company that provides training to prepare for licensing exams. After acquiring several companies focused on industry verticals like real estate and financial services, they wanted to produce a cohesive online learning offer tied to their mission and values.

Studion helped the team deepen their value proposition and differentiate their offer (aka define their secret sauce) by moving beyond exam readiness to become a career partner. The online learning experience Studion developed included prompts to articulate individual career goals, a dashboard that tracked progress, and checkpoints where learners received messages from experts that were tailored to their career journey.

“We developed five design principles that determined the focus areas for the learning experience,” says Amanda Lacanilao, lead project manager at Studion. “This was a really important brand moment for the company because it acted as a market differentiator.”

How to design for brand experience in digital learning

It’s best to design for brand experience early on in the process of creating an online learning experience. The elements of engagement you want to emphasize will determine what tools you need in your learning experience. Create a list of the tools you need to bring your brand experience to life and use it as a rubric to evaluate your options for learning experience platforms.

Studion used this approach to help Effie, a global nonprofit, turn an in-depth library of case studies into a revenue-generating online learning experience. The team pinpointed an innovative approach to Case Challenges as Effie’s secret sauce. That requirement led them to choose a combination of customized and off-the-shelf elements for the learning platform, which hosted 32 case studies on launch.

“By designing an online learning experience that taps into your secret sauce, there’s an amazing opportunity to not just support your brand, but amplify and strengthen it,” says Newman. “It’s all about bringing the things that make you unique and that are key pillars of your existing brand into a digital experience. Even if you don’t have documentation or you can’t quite articulate it, Studion knows how to level up the parts of your brand experience that will help you stand out in the marketplace.”

Tips for implementing effective branding

Before beginning your learning experience design process, decide on your brand strategy. Will this online learning program be part of a unified parent brand, a sub-brand, or a stand-alone brand?

Keep your learners’ needs at the center of your design process. If there’s a conflict between making the experience on-brand and prioritizing the learning experience, always side with learners’ needs.

Lastly, take an iterative approach and maintain a learning mindset. At Studion, we prototype early on to test if the brand differentiators we have identified are the right ones. Plan to test your hypotheses and adjust based on what you find.