[MUSIC] As we think about how do we go about designing experiences, as a way to differentiate our brands, it might be useful to think about how we think of differentiation in the more traditional sense. One way companies have visualized, if you will, their differentiation is through what's called performance curves. Some of you might call them value curves. I prefer to call them performance curves, and I'll share with you in a minute why that is so. But what you're basically doing is you're going from the various attributes that your products and services have to the consumer benefits. And then you asking yourself for this consumer benefits. For example, how white is your washing powder wash, or how reliable is your service. And of course the most important one maybe or one of the most important ones is it is affordable. You know what cost are you offering it? Are you affordable to your customers? And we can kind of visualize that the value we provide based on that. And we can think about well how do I line up. Compared to my competition and I'm looking for those points of difference. Now these tend to be kind of measurable components of your offering, quality dimensions, and they tend to be quite functional as a result. Now if that's the spine that's driving my differentiation that passed, things have shifted quite a bit. The spine for an experience delivery is really the customer journey. So what are the different journeys our different customers go though as they interact with me over time, and across different parts of the organization often silos. Whereas service in the old model tends to be quite reactive, problem oriented. This is really events and experiences we have that kind of celebrate the brand, and maybe shine a bright light onto where we have a point of difference, in terms of the brand purpose or the brand positioning. And importantly, it's also about making that journey as smoothly as possible. Just from an experience standpoint, and really just to whet your appetite I guess, is to think of the most mundane products or services and how you can enhance them with an experience. There's a key cutting service that for example has been quite a bit of money on in terms of automating this. But, they spend even more money on visualizing it so, you, yourself could insert your key, you could see how your new keys made, you could even choose a different design for the key, maybe the flag of your country or your favorite football team. And of course, for some brands, the experience is really core to their brand promise. For Disney, the magical experience you have in their theme parks. For Nespresso, the experience you have in making coffee. And maybe in less obvious ways, you can think of, let's say a football club. You go to the stadium. What's the first and last touchpoint you have. Well you might be parking your car. And there's one example, he'll remain unnamed but one of my friends was the chief operating officer for one of the major football clubs. The parking attendant had. As he pulled up he didn't realize he was the Chief Operating Officer. He told him well you can either park all the way in the back, or for ten pounds I can move these cones and you can park right here near the stadium where you can also exit right away. Of course, that's a not the kind of experience you want to offer to your clients. In very unsurprising ways, I guess things we don't think, or even observe as companies, they really destroy the customer experience. Moments which we think are insignificant, like two staff members talking to each other In the store might be seen not as insignificant, but as indifferent or signally indifference towards the customer. So really nothing is neutral when it comes to the experience and it's sometimes taking those very mundane aspects of the experience and branding them. For example Singapore, where the brand really is about customer service. The flight attendant, which they're called in the old days at least, Singapore girls, if you went to the bathroom, you would return and you would see your seatbelt folded in a certain way on the airplane. Which really signaled the attention to detail, the service orientation, of the company. And many companies have also transformed themselves from being product providers to experience providers. An example from Hong Kong is Hong Kong Gas, or Town Gas. They isonate. Now these are monopoly providers. Their competitor really is electricity providers in Hong-Kong and they kind of really went down that route of efficiency. So, how do I provide you this commodity, the gas at a lower price. And the first app they produced was also to, you could read your gas meter by yourself. We didn't have to invest in the cost of the person coming to your home and reading your meter. But then something happened inside the company, they asked themselves the question, well who are our best customers? Why are they using gas? And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that our best customers are those who love cooking. They cook with very high hit in those woks, they use a lot of gas so they said, well, what is the purpose of us providing gas? And that purpose became very much around cooking, the ing, we're inging the purpose in some sense. And rather than using the mobile app to reduce cost. They said, well how can we enhance that brand purpose? So how can we share with our consumers recipes, for example. How can we give them tips for cleaning their pots? And rather than preventing our people from visiting our customers. Let's think about all the touchpoints we have and turn them into kind of the voice of the customer. So they learn about the customer so we can enhance our services and the customer experience. As a matter of fact, they visited their customers much more than the companies that made the woks or even designed the kitchens and they became such experts, that they have their own rage of kitchen ware, they have their own kitchen range. They even have a restaurant called Flame, where they have cooking demonstration classes for their customers. And this really permeates the entire organization, the senior management including the CEO will spend time visiting customers in their home to be reminded of the purpose, which is really about the customer experience around cooking. And surprisingly they've won major awards and they've continued to win major awards for there services going forward. They've also build such a strong costumer relationship that they now have their own credit card service and gas you might imagine is really about safety. They even offer insurance to their customers. They've gone from providing a commodity product which is gas. To a customer relationship around cooking and safety in the broader sense. They now own the customer relationship and it's transformed their business. So you can already see in that story from Hong Kong gas, their seven or at least seven stages in terms of designing and delivering On a customer experience that is on brand. The first one really starts out by understanding what the brand purpose is from an experiential component. It's about the doing. Why am I doing this? Why am I buying this product? And that's really, I call it inging the purpose and if you think about it, well for Hong Kong Towngas, this was about cooking. For Nike, it might be about running. And to really understand what that purpose is, from a doing standpoint, that already puts us into the realm of experiences. And then you think about that purpose. The second step is to understand the customer journey, and you really want to map that out. What are all the different "ings" that customers are doing? Well, they're learning about your product. They're navigating the information. They are buying. They're trying. They're using. They're disposing. These are all different events, if you will, in that journey. And you want to map those out, not just from a basic service standpoint, but from a brand standpoint. Is it undermining your brand promise, or is it actually demonstrating, delivering on the brand promise. Not like slapping your logo on something, but maybe like in the Apple store, the idea of creating, being creative, being evident at each of those steps and adding up in a consistent way. Now in order to deliver on that, of course, you have to map the various touch points of the organization against those different moments that matter in the customer journey, that's the third aspect. Think about your organization, how it has all those various silos. And the customer is cutting across them over time. Across these different touch points. The fourth step then is to think about, well how do I actually go from maybe a generic or poorer experience to creating one that is meaningful, rich, and on brand. How do I express the brand experientially. That's the fourth step. The fifth one, and I'll talk more about it in the next module, in module three, is about, from an organizational standpoint, from a leadership and an alignment standpoint, how do I gear up organizationally to allow me to seamlessly provide this customer experience. In the fourth module, we'll talk really about the individual level. How do I think about my people in this equation? How do I create brand practices typically through HR, and how do I create brand engagement at the individual level. So that my people know what to deliver, and they do this with full conviction, with passion even, so the experience then is an authentic one for the customers. And finally, in the fifth module we'll talk about some of the returns, the measurements that you might want to employ In order to drive this over time, in order to know that you are actually doing well. So I'll spend a little bit more time on the first few of these, and then I'll come back to some of these different elements in the later modules. [MUSIC]
