This session covers the evolving experiences building block. Its objectives are to review the growth study findings, identify the characteristics of winning experiences and how technology delivers them, and understand the participant’s own role in driving them.
The core finding is that over-performers focus on eliminating friction, because consumers ruthlessly transpose their best experiences and expectations from one category onto the next. A customer who has a superb experience with an intuitive app expects the same from anyone else with an app, and a company does not get a pass for being in a different category.
Key findings
- The gap the session works in is stark. Geoff Northcott of AKQA cites 8 percent of customers saying they have good experiences against 89 percent of companies saying customer experience is the primary basis on which they compete.
- A named barrier is digital sameness, which comes from running the same processes, copying the neighbor and following the same format as everyone else.
- The reframe offered is Jeff Bezos describing customers as beautifully and wonderfully dissatisfied, which turns customer frustration from an annoyance into a signal about where a company can beat its competitors.
- The economic frame is B. Joseph Pine II’s experience economy, following the agrarian, industrial and service economies, in which customization is the antidote to commoditization.
- The session pushes past that frame, arguing for constantly evolving experiences built around the full solution a customer needs and the job they are trying to solve, rather than around the product being sold.
Three companies that did it
Care/of started from its founder’s own confusion in front of a wall of hundreds of vitamins. The proposition is digital first, starting from understanding the individual customer, their age, routines and health, and turning that into a tailored recommendation fulfilled by subscription. It solves the paradox of choice and produces a good business model at the same time.
L’Oreal built digital services that generate the data behind personalization, from shade matchers to skin diagnosis tools. The distinctive move was not building them brand by brand but stepping back and building them as services deployed across dozens of brands, which creates an economy of scale.
Peloton took an exercise bike, one of the oldest and most commoditized pieces of hardware, and wrapped it in a service, an experience and a community. The value sits in the interaction with trainers and the community that motivates people to do more.
The five things winning experiences take
First, understand people continuously. The session warns that teams often think about the end first, a beautiful campaign using the hottest technology, when what matters is knowing what people are looking for, how they live and what role brands play for them. Journey mapping remains relevant even as it becomes a more complex multi-journey map.
Second, filter through purpose. Every experience contributes to memory structures around the brand, and an experience inconsistent with those structures will be ineffective or harmful. Many experiences fall short because they are disconnected either from the audience or from the brand. The Dove and Nike collaboration on Body Confident Sport is the example given.
Third, find the right framing. That means asking how customers perceive the brand today, whether that has changed, and what fresh perspectives exist. The framing can be strategic, rethinking how the category is experienced, or tactical, finding new ways to engage in existing channels.
Fourth, win with the available means. The means are endless, from new platforms to generative AI, so the skill is finding partners who can navigate the jungle of possibilities. The session notes this goes beyond technology: a credible partnership or powerful creative can be the unlock.
Fifth, codify the experience. Once the journey is understood, define what each point of interaction should look like so they add up to one holistic experience. Disney is given as the master of this, having codified its experience and translated it into everything it does, in what it calls the Illusion of Life.
The method and the homework
Design thinking is offered as the process. It begins with empathetic listening to understand unmet needs, including psychological and emotional ones, and moves through concept development, applied creativity, prototyping and experimentation. Applied to business, the session says, it substantially improves the success rate for innovation.
The workbook asks where the participant’s organization leads and lags on evolving experiences and what is blocking success. The three stated learnings are to start with empathetic consumer understanding, to embrace the always beautifully and wonderfully dissatisfied customer, and to play the role of bridge builder across internal silos.
Scope and limitations
The document is the platform export of an online session, so the videos and interactive case material it points to are not part of the text. The examples are illustrative cases rather than measured results.
Source
This page summarises SESSION 7: Evolving Experiences, by Eva Linderborg, Geoff Northcott, B. Joseph Pine II, James H. Gilmore, Javier Meza, Lucas Perraudin, 2024-04-30.