Brand and experience innovation is the most apparent to the customer, and is usually the most widely recognized beyond a particular industry or culture.

Imbued with the flavor of Richard Branson’s other brands, his US airline Virgin America has reimagined routine in-flight features to make flying itself a better experience. For example, by replacing the flight attendant’s mandatory safety monologue with a witty, celebrity-studded music video and using mellow purple (rather than harsh white) ambient lighting, Virgin lent a nightclub feel to the cabin.

For online and mobile-based bank Simple, making the user experience more fun and relevant may have seemed like a stretch. After all, banking has never really been seen as an enjoyable activity, but it is a necessary one and we are all aware that it can be a bad experience. Simple has relied heavily on little data™ and empowered customer service teams to find out what customers like and don’t like about their interface and has prioritized innovations based on that customer feedback to make changes smart and quick which directly improve the user experience. For example, when Simple’s data showed them customers generally use their smartphones to check balances, rather than move money around, they adjusted the security protocol to make these “balance check” logins faster and simpler than a login for more complex account management. As a result, Simple’s customers use their smartphone app three times as much as the average mobile banking user, and have less overdrafts and balance-related complaints as well.