Why The Future of Brand Lives in Digital

Our recent event, in partnership with leading cloud platform Acquia, centred on a simple but powerful question: can digital experience drive customer and brand value? 

If the conversation on the night was anything to go by, the answer is a clear yes. There was strong alignment across the panel, which brought together digital thought leaders Simon Manchipp, Jennifer Griffin Smith, and our own Chief Creative Officer Jonny Goodall.

What emerged was a shared recognition that, in a world of shrinking attention spans and rising expectations, brands need more than a polished interface.

As Simon pointed out, brand does not live in logos or surface elements alone. Instead, the best brands build around big ideas. defining concepts that shape storytelling and digital interactions. From Pixar’s Plussing philosophy (always adding, never stripping down) to Compare the Market’s meerkats, the strongest digital experiences don’t just function. They entertain, engage, and evolve.

Jennifer’s insights only served to reinforce Simon’s thinking – because big ideas in digital are so often dependent on the sophistication of systems beneath the surface.

Cohesion across those systems, she argued, is what truly matters. Even great creative ideas can hit hurdles when journeys are fragmented or inaccessible. When they’re seamless, intuitive and intelligently connected, value builds. Jennifer went on to highlight how brands like British Airways lose customers through clunky, disjointed systems, while Tesla wins by making car buying seamless and digital-first.

The takeaway? Digital experience is brand perception. Get it right, and customers stay. Get it wrong, and they leave without a word.

Jonny extended this thinking into practice, calling for a cultural shift in how integrated platforms and services are used to place greater emphasis on quality of experience. He went on to explain the profound implications from a design perspective – a pivot away from ‘minimum viable thinking’ towards inviting challenge and – through iteration and experimentatio – adopting more elevated, exploratory design approaches from the outset.

Proof of this new kind of thinking is, he argued, is evident all around us – demonstrated by a surplus of websites and apps that look uniformly templated, soulless, and easily ignored.

In short, function alone won’t cut it. Experience is everything.

To close the evening, Bernadette’s Chief Strategy Officer, Iva Johan, hosted a live panel featuring all our speakers. They were joined on stage by Lisa Johnstone, Director of Priority, Loyalty & Rewards at Virgin Media O2, who brought a sharp perspective from the client side – diving deeper into the intersection of brand, technology, and customer experience.

Lisa’s message was clear: digital isn’t just a tool, it’s a test that brands either pass or fail based on how well they listen. From tackling fraud with AI to balancing scale with humanity – she championed trust, cultural relevance, and omni-channel cohesion as the real currencies of loyalty.

Curious how the whole conversation played out? You can check out the full video below.