When you’re building a website or a mobile app—or any digital technology tactic your customers will interact with—you’re also building your brand and likely creating first impressions. So it’s critical that that technology is married to your brand and that it supports your brand’s identity with every click, swipe, and tap.

Instilling the concepts of Move, Touch, Inspire into each digital feature you create will turn strangers to your brand into ambassadors of it. The concept is based on age-old marketing paradigms, just applied in a different way.

Move
Your customer’s initial experience with your technology should instantly move them, that is, it should be memorable, recognizable, and beautiful so that, given the choice, your customers will choose to use your product over others. Another term for this is brand recognition. Engaging, brand-representing technology should:

1. Have the design elements, style, and quality expected of a modern, growing world-class company
2. Be memorable and instantly liked
3. Instill confidence in your brand
4. Be beautiful so that even if it is the consumer’s first experience with the brand, they remember your company when they are done

Look at Apple, a globally trusted and beloved brand. They spend a lot of energy making sure their user interfaces are intuitive and beautiful—which represents and reinforces the brand’s identity. By doing so, they encourage brand loyalty and fanatical responses.

Touch
Your customer’s digital experience with your brand should add value to the process so that they become attached to the experience. This also adds up to building brand loyalty. A great digital experience should:

1. Be simple to use and allow a seamless experience with the information that users are trying to provide, consume, or interact with
2. Always be available at the right time and never impede
3. Become something users come to rely on
4. Is the first place in your category they think of going

Consider the brands to which you are loyal and how they create loyalty. Instagram is one of my favorites—they have solved a tremendous problem for their users by making it extremely easy to share and incorporate digital photography into their lives. Its simplicity and value create instant loyalty in their users—and loyalty is a prerequisite for brand advocacy.

Inspire
The finest testament to your success is when your customers who use your solutions on a regular basis recommend you to colleagues and peers via public forums and word of mouth. An industry recognized term for this is brand advocacy. Inspiring technology solution should:

1. Inspire your consumers to share your products with their peers, both publically and privately, and provide the podium to do so
2. Get users into your ecosystem who would not have otherwise been engaged
3. Inspire consumers to become career-long, regular customers
4. Take the vendor/service with you when changing firms

Here’s an example of how we applied the Move, Touch, Inspire approach to a recent client request.
Challenge: A Fortune 1000 payroll company needed to deliver mobile solutions to the market to keep themselves competitive. Their competitor had just released a suite of mobile applications, leaving them way behind.
Solution: We assessed their competition and market with the Move, Touch, Inspire lens, and came up with an intuitive approach to the problem. Our desire was to create brand advocates inspired by the technology and, from this perspective, and we knew we could make a larger impact on their clients by touching more people and building solutions for the employees using their services. While their competitors built solutions as extensions of their existing services, we instead built beautiful, inspiring technologies and put them in the hands of the employees looking at their paystubs, vacation balances, retirement plans, and other information.
Result: The result was a dramatic reduction in HR expenses and extremely happy employees who became attached to the product. (By the way, their competitor is now scrambling to catch up.)

Think about how you can use the Move, Touch, Inspire approach to stay ahead of your market and create brand loyalty to overcome any obstacle.