If a brand offers you an experience that feels intuitively like it’s made just for you — then that brand tends to get your attention, respect, and in some cases, even your affection. Some of the most storied innovators of the last decade — firms like Apple, Google and Nokia, have demonstrated just how important brand experience can be in building shareholder wealth and business sustainability. So given that, why are so many experiences so mediocre, and what can be done to change that? Here’s a quick way to understand the roots of the problem, and a quick summary of four heuristics aimed at mitigating these issues.
1. The Empathy Gap
Our consciousness is structured around subject-object relationships, with us as the perceiving subject and the world external to us as the object we sense and act upon. When we reduce other people down to “segments,” “demographics,” and of course “targets,” we reach a level of objectification that is a barrier to seeing the world through the eyes of another human being.
The use of personas has begun to colonize an ever-wider range of business activities — from product design to website design to marketing communications planning. Personas offer an opportunity to consider our audience from the perspective of their motivations and goals — to empathize with them — and thereby enhance our ability to create designs that resonate with the intended audience. Will personas alone save the world from bad experience designs? No. But brand experience design teams that fail to build and use personas skillfully are almost certainly working at a disadvantage compared to teams that have accounted for the empathy gap through this technique.
2. The Authenticity Gap
The Authenticity Gap is related to the idea of the “brand disconnect” when the overall experience feels at odds with the brand. The present case of Starbucks offers an illuminating example. Once a darling of the customer experience conference crowd, Starbucks recently ran into business trouble when they eroded the connection between their brand and the customer experience. For instance, they released a line of quasi-Starbucks operations that appeared in mid-tier hotel lobbies, with off-brand product selection, a staff paid and trained by the hotel, and coffee made with fully-automatic push-button machines.
While it may be impossible to reduce the sum of Starbucks problems to strategic gaffes around their experience, it is not hard to identify these key disconnects that emerged in the marketplace. Had Starbucks allowed a “brand compass” of experiential attributes as a touchstone to counterbalance naked expansionist ambition, it would quickly have ruled such inauthentic experiences out — and perhaps avoided some of the present trouble.
3. The Simplicity Gap
People want simplicity. Simplicity is aesthetically attractive. It is also relaxing and stress-relieving. The problem is — things are often complex. So brand experience designers need to hide, distance, and obscure the complexity — but at the same time they need to make it accessible.
In such contexts, it helps to have a schema — some overriding conceptual model that is familiar and can help provide a context for design choices and for the interpretation of these choices by the people who will experience your design.
4. The Harmony Gap
In customer experience, the pinnacle of achievement is harmonious integration between all elements of a design. Great architects, great car designers, and great interface designers all leverage this principle of resonation. But it is very easy for discord to creep in. Sometimes a design begins with empathy, simplicity and authenticity, and then degrades over time with the buildup of things that don’t quite fit.
Simply knowing what your brand experience attributes should be does not protect your brand from this sort of degradation over time, unless you have established a monitoring and measurement protocol. Some organizations may be attracted to monitoring “net promoter scores” as an index of “customer loyalty” — and no doubt a sharp decline in such scores should send off alarm bells. But some industry experts who build their careers in the field of “customer loyalty” have arrived at the conclusion that people may be loyal to experiences — less frequently to corporations. And if you want to stay attuned to the effect of the experiences you are creating, you will need a projective research toolkit (linked to your compass of experiential attributes) to maintain this understanding.
Working together, we feel these heuristics can both help you create and defend designs that connect with people and win over their attention, their respect, and their affection … if not their loyalty.
May 25th, 2009 2:00 pm
Recently in an article in the Globe and Mail, Roger Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of business wrote “Through a kind of kitchen logic, executives of all sorts of companies, and especially some financial companies, started forgetting about what the real purpose of their company was [to provide goods/services for their customers] and they allowed only stock price considerations to drive their incentives and hence their conduct”.
Thinking about this in the context of the existence of emphathy gap one wonders if it exists because of the popular focus on ‘shareholder value’ as the purpose of corporations. I wonder if there is a role in creating a shareholder persona …
May 26th, 2009 11:48 am
Interesting thought Ray. Your idea brings to mind the kind of following that certain business leaders (Buffet & Watsa come to mind) are able to maintain through long stretches of time when their shares appear to be unperforming relative to whatever is hot at the time. Do you think an explicit model of this sort would give boards the courage to strike a more distinctive and coherent balance between short-term and long-term goals?