Want to know how best to incorporate experience design into your business planning? Ralph Ardill answers some common queries.
Where should I start when it comes to experiential design?
Start by learning how to get customers to want to spend more time with you. Providing quality, convenience, usability and customer service are still important, but it's your brand's personality, attitude and sensory dimensions that are most likely to evoke a positive emotional response. Deliver these functional and emotional benefits in ways that the customer regards as time well spent.
How can I identify what my 'experiential' brand should be?
Be absolutely clear about your fundamental brand truth and the causes and issues that you can uniquely and credibly champion with and on behalf of your consumers. Brands have been making false promises to consumers through advertising for decades. Now they must experientially stand up for what they believe in if they are to evolve and grow.
How can I best involve my customers in new experiences?
Look at how you can match your experiential activities to the specific and localised needs of the communities in which you operate. Also create initiatives that encourage your customers to take up the challenge with you - and once again, make sure they regard this as time well spent.
How can I ensure my staff buy in to this new experiential approach?
Conventional wisdom tells us to first define the brand, second to mass-communicate this to the market and third, deliver it to customers. More recently, companies have realised the need for all their people to 'live the brand' by developing internal programmes and culture-change initiatives designed to turn strategic brand values into front-line behaviours.
The key challenge is to provide people with a brand framework within which they can improvise and be themselves, as opposed to turning them into overly scripted brand automatons.
How can I best motivate my people to continually develop and deliver a more rewarding experience for the customer?
If your core experiential offer to the consumer provides a personal, tailored service (eg telephone banking), then you should also ensure that you 'walk the talk' when it comes to the experience your own people have of working for you.
In the above case, this might involve HR policies that tailor benefits and remuneration packages to individual employee life stages. Furthermore, the ability to create positive re-enforcement and alignment between the employee and consumer experiences is likely to become a critical success factor for the consistent and sustainable delivery of valued brand experiences.
How will I know when it's working?
While measuring customer satisfaction is a given for most businesses, the development of rigorous methodologies to measure customer experience is not.
By its very nature, such measures will need to look beyond quantitative sales measures and include much more emotional and ethnographic criteria.
These might include sophisticated 'mystery shopping', random inspections and the detailed profiling of individual customer preferences and choices, such as not calling a particular customer at the office on a Friday afternoon. This could enable each customer to set the 'ground rules' for if, how and when they would like the brand to engage with them as part of a new approach to Customer Experience Management (CEM).
What are the things that will set my experiences apart from others?
Be willing to imagine and create new and original brand offerings. Hire employees for attitude and people skills before qualifications. Put passion before profits. Shake up and redefine what your industry is and can be (before someone else does). Create experiences that provide deeper and more sustained transactions with people and that have an inherent value to us above and beyond closing the sale.
Above all, know that creating successful brand experiences - ones that really drive loyalty and profits - requires considerable dedication, effort and resources. It will require new kinds of collaboration between marketing, human resources, finance and operations departments. It will require the seamless integration of 'high-technology' with 'high-touch' human behaviour. And it will require the courage to lead from the front, in order to deliver the real-time, real-life moments of every experience your customers and your people have of your business.
What role does emotional branding play in experience design?
As brands increasingly recognise that it is emotions that drive most, if not all of our decisions they will begin to focus more effort on ‘emotionalising’ their entire approach to branding to create more emotive and powerful connections with consumers to help change our attitudes and behaviours and in-turn build deeper relationships and engender our loyalty.
An approach that will increasingly bring the passion of an organisation and particularly it’s people centre-stage, that will relish the opportunity to harness the power of design in it’s widest sense to increase our aesthetic and multi-sensory appreciation of the total brand experience and that will not only communicate with consumers but also ‘collude’ with us to co-create and customise the brand encounters we want.
How important is storytelling in designing experiences?
With the act of ‘communicating’ no longer any guarantee that a brand message has been received and/or understood it is the age-old art of story-telling that is deeply rooted in our psyche that is becoming a driving-force in the way brands will relate to us.
Brands will increasingly embrace the art of storytelling to articulate their point of difference and the values and personality of their business. An approach where captivating characters, plot and narrative become more important than the traditional obsession with audiences, messages and media.
How are organisations rising to the experiential challenge?
As brands and branding evolve they will look to orchestrate the entire delivery of their internal and external brand experiences around sustainable Organising Thoughts that capture the fundamental truth, essence, ‘cause’ and raison d’etre of a business and convey it in a simple, direct and increasingly human way.
An Organising Thought is not a campaign strapline but a powerful and motivating encapsulation of what a business believes in, cares about and stands for that can be harnessed to re-define and re-orchestrate the total brand experience both inside and outside a business.
Why has the Experience Economy developed?
As our society has become wealthier we have seen our economy evolve from one dominated by the extraction of commodities to be replaced by one dominated by manufacturing which in turn was then ‘commoditised’ and more recently replaced by a service economy.
However, one of the major forces shaping the future direction of branding is that the service economy itself is now being commoditised by an experience economy where brands are going far beyond the basic provision of products and services to develop and ‘stage’ much more immersive, entertaining, enjoyable, memorable and higher value experiences for consumers.
Where is the Experience Economy going next?
As the Experience Economy develops brands will increasingly look to position themselves as the providers of transformational products, services and experiences that are no longer only ‘consumed’ but that also empower and inspire us with new knowledge, tools, and skills to help us improve the quality of our lives along whilst changing and improving ourselves in the process.
Whether this be helping us to become stronger, more intelligent, healthier, more fashionable, more informed, more attractive, more confident or simply believe we’re now ready to put-up those shelves.