Here goes the story of an 81-year-old VanCity customer: she met her soul mate in Hawaii during the war, but relocated to B.C. and never saw him again. Sixty-five years later, he pens a letter, asking her back for a visit. Intrigued, she asks her trusty credit union branch manager for a loan to cover the trip.

He tries to stretch out the payments to make it happen. Problem is, his higher-ups balk. So he fights for approval and his loyal customer is finally reunited with her one true love.

The stuff of movies? Actually, it's from the Vancouver-based financial firm's "story book," which is meant to inspire staff and, ultimately, solidify its brand experience in the process. Surprising tactic for a financial company?

It shouldn't be. After all, the phrase "brand experience" has recently replaced "branding" as the favourite word to come out of the mouths of agency folk and marketers alike. The trouble is that few know where to begin.

And that is trouble indeed. "There's not a whole lot left to differentiate on,

because everyone's selling a commodity," says Will Novosedlik, who just founded a Toronto-based consultancy called Chemistry with Susan McGibbon, a former colleague at Taxi, to assist companies in this quest.

Novosedlik recently returned from Prague where he helped Oskar, a cell phone company, revamp its stores to be more engaging, among other things. (See sidebar.) "One of the things that bugged the hell out of me [at agencies] is you'd take on an assignment for a client, and it would go out and make a big splash, and you'd realize there was really no internal mechanism to deliver on the brand."

However, brand stewards are increasingly interested in wowing consumers through one-on-one interaction. Max Lenderman, president of Montreal-based guerrilla marketing firm Gearwerx, is also a founding member of the International Experiential Marketing Association (IXMA), HQ'd in San Francisco. Although the organization started up only a year ago, it now counts over 10,000 members, mostly marketers at the VP and EVP level, dedicated to taking their brands to the next level.

Experiential marketing, explains Lenderman, is an umbrella term for the tactics implemented to create a brand experience. A manifesto that Lenderman wrote for the IXMA states: "Consumers want ... experiences that are personally relevant, memorable, sensory, emotional and meaningful.... Businesses will live or die ... by the experience they offer customers at every touch point."

And that's just the beginning: Pundits believe that down the road the brand-customer relationship will be entirely flipped on its head. In a recent speech given at the IEG Event Marketing Conference in Chicago, futurist Andrew Zolli talked of the quickly approaching "culture economy" being brought on by a "participation revolution" instigated by consumers.

Adds Lenderman: "Brands have been controlled by brand managers and, in the past, God forbid you messed with top-down messaging. Now brand play comes from the bottom up, and it becomes culture."