One of the things we love most about our job is meeting interesting people and exploring the work they are doing. We sat down with Ash Mustchin – Director of Digital and Experience at Principals to chat about his role, his passion for brand experience and some of the brands that are getting it right.

Watch the full video here.

Ash, tell us a bit about your role at Principals?

As my title suggests I play a dual role here, the digital side is looking at brand identity and interactions in a digital capacity. The touchpoints for brand are more digital than ever before so that part of my role is really about best practice and accessibility and the other part of my role is about brand experience - how a brand positions itself in the market and delivers it to people in a way that is uniquely them and differentiated.

It’s a useful interplay - one’s quite functional and one is strategic, and together, that’s where the best brand experiences are made.

You’ve been running a series of talks here in Melbourne that have been really well received, exploring the connection between brand planning and customer experience. Can you tell me why that’s an important topic for you?

We created this talk because we saw a rising discourse in Marketing Teams around customer experience…. this term CX that seems that seems to be everywhere at the moment. A frustration we find amongst our clients in CX is that CX can be quite functional. The example I often give is if you have a slow website most companies would say that’s an IT issue, but it’s very much customer experience too – so where does the line of fault lie? Also, across industries CX insights can be quite generic. If you talk to people about what they want regardless of category the insights would probably be the same– everyone wants it cheaper, quicker more personalized.

So what we are talking about in this series of talks is how you can combine how the customer experience with the brand ambition to create brand experience.

So do you think there are any companies out there that can actually get it right?

Yes I do. I think it’s much easier for start-ups to achieve this because they have the ability to test and learn, to change things quite quickly. Plus, if you are entering a saturated market your brand experience has to be different to create advocacy because you don’t have the big marketing budgets. Take for instance the brand Koala(koala.com.au)– they have a really defined brand experience, equity in their identity, tone, proposition is clear and the product itself is different. They also meet all the benchmarks– 3 hour delivery, live chat etc. Larger organisations are struggling because they have to retro-fit their brand ambitions into sometimes old technology and then try and advance that forward.

What tools do you use to understand the customer experience?

Sometimes the problem with traditional qualitative methods like focus groups is that you can get manufactured answers, or you don’t really get a sense of how they interact with the brand. We like to study people in their natural environment and how they interact with a brand in their lives – their home, their office. We run what we call “empathy sessions” and uncover how customers feel about their brand. We film these and let our clients have a first and feedback on how they interact with brands.

Ash, it sounds like fascinating work. What do you love about your role?

Getting out and meeting people and hearing first hand experiences. Sometimes in the echo-chamber of advertising you are surrounded by the same demographic of people so it’s great to get out and meet people and see the reality of how brands are used in everyday life. It’s an important reminder of what we do and the end result. I also love the fact that digital is always evolving and there’s always something new to learn -taking innovations like AI, VR, chatbots out into real life environments and really testing them with the customer.

Can we expect more talks next year Ash?



Yes! More talks in February and one in Auckland and some work with Mumbrella.

Thanks Ash. We’ll watch this space!