Adaptive Path MX 2007: Keynote by Lou Carbone, CEO of Experience Engineering
[Typed after the fact from handwritten notes. The time stamp has been adjusted to reflect when the event occurred.]
Our understanding of value creation is being tested in a big way. In our haste we often fail to step back.
Be a consumer, not a designer or a technology.
Think about Howard Johnson restaurants, once one of the largest brands in America. They invented franchising in America but are now completely gone from the landscape. Why?
Toward the end of the life of the company [Lou Carbone] worked on an ad campaign for Howard Johnson that was incredibly effective at getting people to come to the restaurant. They used all-you-can-eat promos and other gimmicks and it worked... Until it didn't. After the initial burst of customers, fewer came than before the campaign because everyone who came had a terrible experience. The company was focussed on cutting corners, improving efficiency and lowering cost. Instead of thinking about how they were making people feel, they focussed on cutting the length of their straws by 1/4 of an inch or on switching from 4-ply to 2-ply napkins.
Compare HoJo to Disney. Disney created an experience that people pay more for than a trip to Europe. They create something so satisfying, so pleasurable, that people not only part with their cash but they love every moment.
People too often think about best practices instead of next practices. Disney thinks about how the velocity of air on a ride will make you feel. Feel what your customers feel.
Research has shown that 60 to 80% of customers who defect other products identify themselves satisfied. Asking this isn't enough. Look to other metrics, like the Net Promoter Score where you ask a customer how likely they are to recommend your product.
Think about the difference between loyalty and rewards. [Lou] flies quite a bit with Northwest. He's a platinum whatever and they have trained him to receive upgrades. But bad experiences and the general wheedling required to get anywhere make him feel like a bad person when he interacts with NWA. Think about how you make people feel with your products and services.
Think about Jet Blue.
You want your customers to feel ownership.
Look at Harley. Their customers organize owners groups, associations, rallies, etc. People tattoo their bodies with Harley logos.
Think about Truefit & Hill. Experience can come to matter more than quality. It's about how it makes you feel.
Experience preference model (rejection, acceptance, preference).
Designers making experiences can create something not rooted in the industrial age, outside of processed.
The evolution of business can been seen to progress like this:
Commodities > Products > Services > Experiences
A company like Starbucks operates in the latest stage of this evolution. The idea of make-and-sell is wrong. Experiences cannot be created on an assembly line. Sense-and-respond is the new model. We've lived with efficiency over effectiveness.
Drucker quote: The reason for being is value for customers, profits are the reward not the objective.
Think about what experience clues create certain emotions.
"Brand" only represents what a customer feels about the company. The real customer value comes out of how they feel about their experience.
Know how a customer thinks. Understand psychology. Remember that you cannot not have an experience. You must systematically and purposefully design experience clues.
An example of this kind of thinking is to pay attention to ideas of cleanliness and safety.
Books to look at:
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Adaptive Path MX 2007: Keynote by Lou Carbone, CEO of Experience Engineering.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.samfelder.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/253
Who is this guy?
Leave a comment