There is a growing awareness these days that brand is not just about image, but also about what’s behind the image. And about what comes after it.

Some companies get it. Ikea is a great example. From the beginning, Ikea understood furniture buying as a journey and built the retail experience around that, supported by a value proposition of good design at low prices. Southwest Airlines is another great example, based on the simple promise of low fares and excellent (and entertaining) customer service.

But brand promises are more often broken than fulfilled. Companies often spend 80% of their marketing money creating perceptions, and precious little making sure they are justified.

The reason is simple. Even after years of being browbeaten with the phrase customer-centric, many organizations still try to fit the customer to the offer, not the offer to the customer.

We may spend all kinds of resources trying to understand customers, but it is only so that we can attract their attention and hold it long enough to sell them something. Very few of us really ask ourselves how we make customers feel about dealing with us.

Enter the phrase brand experience.

What is it? It’s a process. First there is perception (how we want them to see us); then there is an interaction (what actually happens between us); and finally the recollection of that interaction, which may be good or bad, depending on how it went.

Guess which stage makes the biggest impression on the customer? Stage three: recollection. It’s what they remember about the interaction that influences their ongoing perception the most.

The thing to remember about customer interactions is that, like all human relations, they are primarily emotional. So you have to ask yourself, how do we want people to feel about us after we have had an interaction? And then, how do we create interactions that will make people feel that way all the time?

Sounds simple enough, no? Far from it. In fact, take Bell’s tagline, making it simple. Now when I see that, I expect my experience with the brand to be a simple one.

Making it simple is about convergence, which for the customer means one-stop shopping for TV, landlines, wireless, and Internet.

But my recent experience turned out to be anything but simple. I learned that while I may be able to buy all those things from one provider, I couldn’t do it in one stop. The wireless rep couldn’t sell me a landline and the landline rep didn’t have access to the same data as the satellite folks.

I felt disappointed. Let down. And eventually jaded. My recollection of the experience created a negative perception. The brand lost my trust.

The problem is that the customer experience is not linked back to the brand promise. The brand lives in the marketing department, as a tagline, not at the frontlines as an experience.

Without operational alignment and support, a company can’t deliver a brand experience. The challenge is to use the brand promise as a cross-functional lever for sustainable competitive advantage, not just as an image developed by the marketing communications department.

Wanna be really different? Align your business so it does what your tagline says it will. Make the brand an experience, not just a promise.

Will Novosedlik is a founding partner of chemistry, a consulting firm focused on brand as experience. He can be contacted at will@chemistrycorp.com