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The Branded Experience
Magic Castles, Paris Hotels, and the Huge Success of Pinches and Swipes
Mr. Paul Ward
Vice President, Customer Experience, YourMusicOn
G-CEM International Partner (US)
www.Pkward.com
This article is exclusively written for G-CEM.
Someone once complained that Disney's theme park experience wasn't authentic, it was manufactured. The person complaining was from Amsterdam which is one of the must manufactured geographies in the world, with dikes holding back devastating amounts of water, and gardens and canals making the country one of the world's most civilized and enjoyable.
Disney's great contribution to the world of branding is not only in its valuable portfolio of brands as objects (Mickey, Buzz Lightyear, and even Snow White - a character who, like Alice in Wonderland, was not invented by Disney but who has been brilliantly exploited by the company), but as circles of icons that can be manipulated to create even more value: as amusement park attractions, movies, toys, and straight-to-DVD entertainment. Some brands, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean, have become film franchises whose concepts have developed significantly over time, remaining attractive to contemporary viewers.
Physically, Disney has organized their amusement parks with a central object (or two, in the case of Disney World, with the Magic Castle centering the Magic Kingdom, and the giant Buckminster Fuller-like ball holding down Epcot Center). Families use these objects as a convenience ("Let's meet at the Castle at 5pm"), but they also serve to organize the entire physical experience at the park. Each unique area of the park, such as the Haunted Mansion, Tomorrowland, or Main Street, USA, all feel like they "belong" to the Magic Kingdom. And they do, if by "Magic Kingdom" we mean the imaginary world that Disney "owns" inside your head.
Making the physical brand space reinforce the mental brand space is one of Disney's greatest accomplishments. The circles of brands, from adult (Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures) to toddler (Minnie, Mickey, and Disney Babies), and from theater (The Lion King) to film and television, there's hardly a creative product - and beloved brand - that isn't reinforced by a physical experience in a Disney amusement park.
How many amusement parks are you building?
Brands - whether they are hated or loved - are fundamentally shortcuts that trigger an emotional response. But what are the elements that create that emotion? You might think it's all in the communication you do about your products and services. Certainly communication is important - but remember, emotion is what truly builds your stock. (I think of Apple, Inc.'s huge cash reserves as a pile of customer love.)
It's critical to remember that your products, services, and experience processes communicate in and of themselves, and that they create a memorable experience (or not) based on the way customers experience them in time. The components of this time-based experience have trigger points that elicit symbolic responses, challenge values, and remind customers of things extrinsic to your product, service, or direct experience -- this is the fundamental reason for celebrity endorsements.
If you are dealing with prospects, they may not want to visit you physically - but thanks to the Web, they can do it virtually. Virgin Atlantic in the past ha allowed you to interactively visit its upper-class service, starting with a chauffeured virtual ride, by car, to the airport lounge, and onward.
Not everyone will respond the same way to these trigger points. You can either use a mass-market approach to try to get the experience more or less right most of the time, or you can determine how to customize experiences for different segments, or even individual customers.
Laurette Dub??¨??, Jordan Le Bel, and Donna Sears report in From Customer Value to Engineering Pleasurable experiences, "Brands that wish to position themselves on the basis of specific pleasurable guest experiences must account for the fact that the portfolio of objective attributes assembled in designing, managing, and communicating the core brand promise will probably be felt and 'lived' differently by different guests." In fact, you can count on the brand promise being redefined in proportion to the cultural, age, and income diversity of your market. In one company I managed, a software product included advertising. The product wasn't free (although it was not expensive by any definition). For older consumers, the ads were perfectly fine. Young consumers were outraged. Ads in software were acceptable only in free software, to this audience.
This underscores points made by Dub??¨??, et al. "[Different customer responses to the same experience] presents two challenges. First, it requires carefully defining and delivering a brand's objective attributes (i.e., those things that can be controlled operationally) that are critical to producing the subjective experience underlying the brand promise. Second, it forces experiential marketers to understand how different customers will essentially have different experiences."
I would add a third component: you have to choose the customers you want to fight for - as described by the experiences they want. If you break up a hotel's pleasure trigger points into sensory, social, emotional, and intellectual, you can determine which of these pleasure triggers most conform to the demands of your target customers. Consider the result of a 2002 study by Dub??¨??:
If you look only at the summary data for hotels and resorts, you might conclude that your baseline performance would need to look like this to meet customer expectations:
This would be the mass-market approach. But it may well be that your target customer is wealthy and appreciates privacy. Which boutique hotel is your competitor?
The conclusion you would draw is that Le Saint-Sulpice Hotel (in Paris) is your competitor in that category, because social components of the hotel experience are the least valued. And sensual components are very highly valued.
An interesting consequence of this choice of customer experience is that it has direct consequences in how you spend your money. An upfront investment in top amenities may pay off for you handsomely in word-of-mouth. While many customer experience management consultants are very process-specific, in the hotel business, it turns out that hotels that follow process-related best practices rarely see those best practices mentioned in the stories that customers tell. When they are listed, they are less correlated to future purchase and loyalty (Dub??¨??, op cit). In fact, when presented with what mattered most to customer value and memorability, "surprise arose from the discrepancy between the [hotel] guests' frequent mention of physical attributes as an important source of value and the minuscule number of property-related best practices ... Surprise persisted when managers learned that only one out of two customers who stayed with one of the best-practices champions was able to remember something particularly pleasant that stood out during their last visit to the hotel." Loyalty was 50 percent higher when something happened that was truly memorable.
So, when you are building a branded experience, you want to consider the following key inputs:
1. Whom are we targeting?
2. What kinds of experiences do they want?
3. How can we make them memorable?
Critical information for your branded experience planning is to find a framework that helps you answer the first question as a function of the second question's answers. A Club Med visitor wants a richly social experience. How can you do that and make it memorable? How do you promote that kind of experience to attract the right people? How can you make that value sticky even after the visit to encourage repeat visits?
Memories, in the corners of your mind
Any experience with your company, products, or services has the potential to establish a disposition regarding your brand (see my definition of customer experience at touch points in the G-CEM white paper overview on CEM.) These experiences can prompt your customers and prospects to create a clearer landscape for your brand, and even allow them to imagine a product or service in use, to the point where the pleasure and resulting memories have force in later decision-making.
So don't wait for your customer to experience your product or service in the traditional way to have them experience your brand. Your values can be present every day on Facebook (now the #1 most visited site in the United States). Get them to imagine using your product and service through online video using YouTube, or even your corporate site, as Apple does so well with its product videos. "Prior product knowledge enhances one's internal memory and assists in the decision-making process," says Panisa Mechinda, et al., in An Examination of Tourists' Attitudinal and Behavioral Loyalty: Comparison Between Domestic and International Tourists, Journal of Vacation Marketing, 2009.
It's not just product knowledge broadcast to your customers, either. Edvardsson, et al., in Cocreating Customer Value Through Hyperreality in the Prepurchase Service Experience, Journal of Service Research, 2005, says, "As customers, we take part in these hyperreal [simulated] services to cocreate a service experience. Although Grove and Fisk (1997) use the metaphor of service as theater, hyperreality takes this stage further, suggesting that customers go "on stage" and take an active or passive role in cocreating the experience, similar to improvisational theater."
Test-driving a car is a classic example. The event creates a hedonic (presumably pleasurable) experience that informs future decisions - not just about the car you tested, but about cars you didn't test. But the best approach to such pre-purchase memory building is multidimensional. Edvardsson recommends:
1. Relate the experience to the prospect's context and needs
2. Know what they want from the service, practically and emotionally
3. Let the prospect have some control over the experience
4. Involve others, including family and friends, for example
5. Reduce risks involved in moving from the pre-purchase experience to the purchase
I would add:
6. Make the simulated experience "on-brand"
7. Provide a peak experience that generates a strong emotional response
8. Provide an end to the experience that is memorable and valuable, and ideally empowers the prospect to do something, say something, share something, etc.
These suggestions are based on the work of Daniel Kahneman, a key thought leader and Nobel Prize winner in cognition, memory and perception.
The iPhone brings it all together
Branded experience is not just about driving sales, although that helps. It's also about creating a set of repeatable behaviors that "feel" like your brand. This creates stickiness, because other behavior sets become less familiar and therefore less comfortable. The push-button started on the Toyota Prius becomes a symbol for innovation and reminds the consumer of the gas savings and positive environmental impact of using the car. Turning a regular car key in a regular car key ignition will never feel the same.
Think about the iPhone as a branded experience. The model developed by Apple's engineers that make it easy to open, zoom, close, find, choose, etc., are now second nature to millions of consumers - most of them not Mac users. Other smartphone companies copy such moves, or reinvent them (those who copied Apple are being sued by the company) - but they'll never "own" these new behaviors. Apple "owns" them as part of the phone's identity.
And now the impending iPad is about to bring such behaviors to a larger format, one that will likely feel a lot more like a computer than a phone ever could. And a great many of the iPad's users are former iPhone users - again, many of whom do not use a Mac.
Yet.
And now you see the power of a branded experience. It's not just owning a physical layout, nor a mental layout of a set of brands or values. It's also inventing a set of behaviors you can own, and which customers adopt through the act of creating value with those behaviors. It's so powerful that Apple is likely banking on it to convert millions of iPhone users into iPad users, and millions of iPad users into Macintosh users. iPhones have 75% market share of smartphones in the United States. Care to guess how many Macintoshes will be eventually purchased by Windows-using iPhone owners in the next few years?
Given the stickiness of Apple's branded experience, I predict a huge boost in the company's market share of desktop computers. Just from "owning" the pinch and swipe behavior that makes their branded experience so ... well, fun.
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About the author
Paul is a strategist providing customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience management (CEM) consulting for growth-focused enterprises. Currently VP of Customer Experience at a new high-tech consumer startup. He leads management strategy seminars in Asia, Europe and North America.
Paul is a graduate of the TRIUM Global Executive MBA program (ranked #3 globally by Financial Times) through London School of Economics, NYU-Stern, and Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC). His studies took place in Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Paris, New York, and London. As part of TRIUM he also studied with Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and in Sao Paulo with Funda??o Dom Cabral [FDC]. Currently head of the TRIUM alumni steering committee, Paul is organizing events in Shanghai, Florence, San Francisco and Paris. He lectured at Cornell University on Internet trends, social networks and the impact of the Web on economics and globalization. He also lectured at American University (Washington DC) and Robert H. Smith School of Business (University of Maryland, USA) on customer experience management, competitiveness and brand equity. Paul is also the editorial board member of CRM Today.
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