The Seventh Commandment //
Prioritize Experience Over Innovation
A collective groan rumbled through Contagious Towers a few years back when one of the day’s crop of press releases heralded yet another ‘world first’. This time it was from an ad agency in Australia: ‘Cummins&Partners change the game forever with the release of “The World’s First Crowd-Sourced 3D Printed QR Code, Live Streamed Via GoPro to a Smart Phone or Tablet Device, Drone Delivery Ticket System Project.” ’
Upon closer inspection, the editorial team sussed out that the ‘project’ was in fact a sardonic jibe at an industry eager to chase shiny new objects and to jump on the latest bandwagon. It turned out simply to be a video promoting a good old-fashioned advertising awards show. But the joke had a strong lesson at its heart: even though 3D printing and drones and other highfalutin tech are full of wonder and promise, they are not an end in themselves.
If you are reading this book and you don’t work in advertising, you may find yourself scoffing at the likelihood that any industry professional worth their salt could have been fooled by such a preposterous claim. Well, we’re afraid you’re very much mistaken. At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2016 – the ad industry’s equivalent of the Oscars – a German entry for a sun-cream brand featured a remote-controlled robotic seagull drone equipped with UV sensors that was designed to squirt sunscreen onto unprotected children at the beach. Yes, that’s right: a branded seagull that defecates on minors. The incredulous jury president, industry legend and co-founder of BBH, Sir John Hegarty, had this to say at a press conference attended by Contagious: ‘It’s the most stupid thing I think I’ve seen in my whole life. I actually thought the Monty Python team had got together and entered it, to see if we would vote for it.’ Suddenly the parody from Cummins&Partners doesn’t sound so far-fetched.
Whenever a technological breakthrough or new media platform emerges, the advertising industry does have a compulsion to rush headlong towards it, presumably under the assumption that novelty attracts attention. However, such attention is insubstantial – a cheap currency – if it is not underpinned by meaningful utility or an obvious bridge between the tech and the brand. Experience should always triumph over empty innovation. Deploying the latest gadget may deliver a fleeting PR spike, but unless it delivers a superior customer experience, it won’t help your brand in the long run. The German agency’s incontinent avian was a silly gimmick that deserved the scorn that flocked its way.
We are living in a complex, cluttered world where billions of people have developed a cognitive immunity to unoriginal marketing messages. Consumers have an abundance of choice, and the democratization of technology means that product parity is rapidly assured. Whether delivering convenience or captivation, experiences therefore wield a disproportionately high value, especially if they are unique. In an age where photos and videos play a key role in not just recording memories but also building social currency, brands that provide people with compelling experiences to treasure and transmit stand a better chance of differentiating themselves amid the din. From a Contagious perspective, this means that innovation must always be viewed through a human lens. The priority must be: How can this enhance the experience of people’s everyday lives?
DON’T BUILD BARRIERS
Innovations live or die based on whether the rewards outweigh the effort. Take QR codes, those little pixelated squares that started popping up like chickenpox across magazine ads and outdoor sites in 2011. Short for Quick Response codes, they were heralded as the link between offline and online marketing, a nifty means for consumers to scratch an immediate itch should their imagination be captured by a branded message. Fantastic in principle but clunky in practice, these codes required people to download an app onto their smartphone before they were able to scan one. Then, having fired up the app and managed to get their camera to focus on this small piece of creative real estate, they would have to wait – sometimes a considerable number of seconds – for the app to recognize the code and retrieve the correct online link back to the brand’s content.
Given that a 2016 study from Google’s DoubleClick found that 53 per cent of mobile site visits were abandoned if pages took longer than three seconds to load, it’s easy to see why consumers didn’t warm to this new technology. Yet, despite this momentum-killing barrier, hordes of brands ploughed time and money into the QR code ‘revolution’. In principle, the allure of being able to capitalize on consumer attention held obvious commercial promise.
In many cases, though, advertisers fell into the trap explored in the fifth commandment: they were so focused on what was in it for them that they neglected to consider what was in it for an end user who went through the hassle of snapping the code. In many cases, the rewards for consumers were low-value sales coupons or merely arriving at the same landing page they’d have found by typing the brand’s name into a search bar. Meagre, to say the least.
Nevertheless, many advertisers and their agencies felt so compelled to ride the wave that they ignored two of the basic tenets of marketing communications: context and call to action. QR codes depend upon close proximity between phone camera and code – yet Contagious came across countless tales of small QR codes placed on billboards fifty feet in the air, in areas without mobile service, or – astonishingly – on trackside posters in London Underground stations that would have required passengers to step over a live electric rail to get close enough to scan the ad! No wonder that research carried out by Inc in 2012 suggested that 97 per cent of American consumers didn’t even know what a QR code was. That same year, an anonymous Tumblr user created, wryly, a completely empty page entitled ‘Pictures of People Scanning QR Codes’. There’s nothing contagious about an underwhelming experience.
RESPECT THE PLATFORM
Fast forward to 2018 and, amazingly, QR codes are thriving – predominantly in China. That’s thanks to the massive adoption of WeChat (now close to 1 billion active monthly users), which has inbuilt QR functionality, enabling citizens to interact seamlessly with the codes. They can even pay for goods and services by simply pointing at a similar photographable, digitized symbol. Similarly, Snapchat hopped on board the now-user-friendly bandwagon by introducing Snapcodes, which give users their own unique QR-like identifiers. Taking a picture of a Snapcode automatically adds that person to your friend list, saving the effort of hunting them down through search.
Brands, predictably, were quick to jump aboard, but this time the balance of power had shifted. We’d like to think that advertisers were chastened by previous consumer indifference, and sensed that they needed to provide intuitive, entertaining, and value-driven experiences that rewarded people for taking the trouble to interact. But the second wave probably had more to do with the fact that the usability of the technology had evolved, making it easier for marketers to deliver better experiences on the back of it.
One of the first brands to pioneer a more sympathetic approach was Coca-Cola-owned soft drink Sprite. The RFRSH Na Lata (RFRSH on the Can) campaign, by São Paulo agency CUBOCC, saw Sprite print the Snapcodes of sixteen carefully selected social influencers on a limited run of cans. Young adults looking for interesting content could scan a can and see up-to-the-minute posts from YouTube stars, skaters, graffiti artists, singers, and Sprite’s own Snapchat account. The brand also invited people to submit their personal Snapcodes for a chance to have them printed on the side of cans, available at retail.
The idea of using Sprite as a gateway to access content (or ‘product as entertainment portal’ in marketing lingo) resonated with the demographic, precisely because experience and discovery were baked in. This was advertising that didn’t feel like advertising. Felipe Simi, the chief strategy officer at CUBOCC, told Contagious: ‘40 per cent of the target doesn’t pay attention to advertising. They are looking for authenticity and for them, advertising is not authentic at all. They have a really low attention span for branded content. They are the skip generation.’
Television viewership in Brazil is high, including among millennials. Primetime ratings on the largest network, Globo, often nudge beyond 65 per cent of the nation’s homes, which means that most advertisers still flock there. CUBOCC’s strategy ran counter to this herd mentality, instead treating Sprite’s product as if it were a broadcast medium. ‘We exchanged TV for packaging,’ Simi told us:
Sprite is present in 82 per cent of all beverage retailers in Brazil. When we think about the impact that this packaging generates at point-of-sale crossed with the frequency of people there, it will probably generate more Gross Rating Points than a TV commercial and it’s also direct to our target. Our research showed us that 60 per cent of the target only communicate with each other using messaging apps, and their favourite social network was Snapchat, because it’s quick content, their parents are not there, they can’t be tracked, so they feel more free to be themselves. By printing the Snapcodes on the packaging, we instantly created a connected product, and also made a mobile campaign without any mobile ads.
When customer experience becomes the bedrock of a new technology, it is much more likely to soar. In their first iteration, QR codes were largely about one-way, transactional conversations, which is why consumer adoption rates were meagre. Once they became more user-friendly and unlocked richer content, they began to boom.
Putting Snapchat’s QR tech into the hands of 178 million people per day certainly served to boost wider adoption, and now platforms like Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, Shazam, and Spotify have also incorporated their own QR code functionality. Amazon has added its own twist by introducing SmileCodes to magazine content. In a tie-up with the publisher Hearst, readers are able to use the Amazon app’s camera to scan codes positioned alongside editorial content, opening a dedicated Cosmopolitan or Seventeen Magazine Amazon page where they can automatically buy products featured in the magazine. Elsewhere, the Bank of Thailand announced in 2017 that, as part of its agenda to increase the volume of cashless payments in the country, it had persuaded MasterCard and Visa to introduce a standardized, interoperable QR code payment platform, allowing consumers to easily make secure transactions with their mobile devices.
If technology is subservient, and designed to enrich and expedite the consumer experience, then people will willingly flock to it. The fall and rise of QR codes is an interesting example of how a technology managed to evolve from gimmick to useful tool, buoyed by the improved quality of the experience it unlocked and of the process of unlocking it.
UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA
In marketing terms, Contagious defines an ‘experience’ as the interaction a person has – anytime, anywhere or anyhow – with a company. Today there are many places and opportunities for these interactions to happen, presenting a clear strategic challenge. Do companies break into little pieces in order to spread themselves across all the touchpoints now available (media channels, retail experiences, social networks, emerging technologies, customer service centres and so on) or do they think about ‘experience’ more holistically and cumulatively?
The management-consultant brainboxes at McKinsey & Company would argue for the latter. The problem they have identified is that most companies are wired for transactions, whereas they should be wired for the journeys their customers take, across multiple channels over time. In March 2016 McKinsey principals Nicolas Maechler, Kevin Neher, and Robert Park argued that firms should resist the logical temptation to fixate on discrete touchpoints, no matter how well optimized they may be. In an article posted on McKinsey.com, they wrote: ‘This siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses the bigger – and more important – picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes – along the entire journey taken – can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve performance.’ McKinsey’s cross-industry research found that performance on journeys is more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction than performance on touchpoints. The clear conclusion was that ‘delivering a distinctive journey experience makes it more likely that customers repeat a purchase, spend more, recommend to their friends, and stay with your company’.
These findings corroborate a 2013 Harvard Business Review study which found that focusing on the entire customer journey is 30–40 per cent more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction than one touchpoint. And it’s 20–30 per cent more strongly correlated with business outcomes, like high revenue, repeat purchase, and low customer churn.
Think back to the first commandment, where we encouraged you to establish an organizing principle; a central belief that drives everything your company does, from internal policies to external communications. Things tend to fragment when organizations lose sight of this core promise and its impact on the entire customer journey.
Take, for example, UK supermarket Tesco. If your advertising slogan is ‘Every Little Helps’, yet your stores appear to prioritize automated self-service checkouts that alienate elderly people or parents of young children who may appreciate a helping hand, it risks feeling like an empty slogan rather than the dynamic, customer-focused organizing principle that it could be.
Tesco is certainly not alone in this (and, to be fair, the company has now rejigged its operational structure to place more staff on the shop floor). Most of its metropolitan rivals in the UK have adopted similar tactics. Sure, some shoppers prefer the anonymity and convenience of being able to scan a few items themselves before whizzing back to their busy lives. But when the scales tip towards the nakedly obvious cash-saving benefits at the expense of the inclusive embrace of customer experience, the brand starts to lose some of its sheen.
A more elegant solution to the same problem, crafted from a consumer experience perspective, are so-called ‘grab-and-go’ stores like Amazon Go and BingoBox (see the second commandment), which eliminate waiting time and require less staffing by creating fluid customer interactions without any need to master a new interface. It’s a model that uses technology to enhance experience, rather than needlessly cluttering what was previously a better interaction in the name of cost savings.
Think of your own brand, no matter what sector you are in, and ask yourself: what is our unexpected item in the bagging area – that glitch in the customer journey – and what steps can we take to reduce or resolve it?
GOOD TECHNOLOGY IS NO EXCUSE FOR A BAD IDEA
From a Contagious perspective, we certainly don’t have an issue with technological innovation within the retail space, as you will see over the next few pages. However, innovation needs to be geared towards human experience if it is not going to suffer rejection or even ridicule.
This probably explains why Google Glass proved to be such a damp squib, stumbling from launch to withdrawal inside two years. The futuristic spectacles, housing a miniature monitor, a camera, microphone, accelerometer, voice command, Wi-Fi antennas, and lots of other geeky stuff, undoubtedly made sense inside the hermetically sealed optimism of Silicon Valley. They could, after all, augment a human’s life by placing the equivalent of a tiny computer with access to the World Wide Web directly over your eyeball. However, what its inventors failed to account for was impact in the real world. Normal people, by and large, thought that the early adopters, those inhabitants of technology’s filter bubble who paid $1,500 for Google Glass, looked weird wearing them. The very presence of these geeky glasses automatically excluded those who were not part of the gang.
This was the killer problem: the devices gave people the creeps. Writing in The Guardian, John Naughton, author of From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, stated: ‘Glass made everyone around you feel uneasy. They thought the technology was intrusive and privacy-destroying. Bouncers wouldn’t let wearers – whom they called “Glassholes” – into clubs. The maître d’ would discover that the table you thought you had booked was suddenly unavailable. And so on.’ Technology columnist and consultant Tim Bajarin echoed that thought, recounting his personal experience of Google Glass in an article on the Techpinions website shortly after the product was withdrawn in 2015: ‘It was the worst $1,500 I have ever spent in my life. On the other hand, as a researcher, it was a great tool to help me understand what not to do when creating a product for the consumer.’
The net result was that Google lost millions of dollars by placing innovation on a pedestal, at the expense of user experience. But, much like QR codes, once the experience side of things caught up, the innovation began to make sense. A few years later Google Glass returned to the headlines, this time as an enterprise tool, better suited to functional settings such as factories and industrial-design labs. Conveniently hands-free and now embedded with tech that enables real-time image search and language translation, the glasses are capable of unlocking superior experiences – and are suddenly (albeit in niche-use cases) relevant again.
In a brilliant fusion of experience and innovation, Nike created a digital stadium in Manila to promote the launch of its top-of-the-range LunarEpic trainers. The brand worked with agencies BBH Asia, Party/New York and Jack Morton Worldwide to create the Unlimited Stadium, which was open for two weeks to coincide with the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The 200-metre running track was shaped like the sole of a LunarEpic shoe and was lined with vertical LED screens. Runners set the pace with their first lap and then raced against a digital avatar of themselves, which matched the speed of their first effort. Participants could then progress onto a series of time and distance challenges. Up to thirty runners could use the track at any one time.
Nike chose to open the Unlimited Stadium experience during the Rio Games to capitalize on the habitual spike in people’s interest in athletics and to provide a synergistic backdrop for the brand’s core message of urging people to push themselves. Usually when runners try to beat their personal best, the battle takes place inside their head. But in Nike’s Unlimited Stadium runners were able to race a visible avatar, making the contest more tangible. Visually competing against yourself is a unique experience for any runner, of any standard, and this is one of those out-of-the-ordinary encounters that is likely to be offered freely only by a brand. A city council wouldn’t make Unlimited Stadium and a gym or a theme park would charge cold hard cash. Here, Nike – which was not an official Olympic sponsor – was clearly on a mission to link experiential marketing dollars to word of mouth, sparking a saboteur-style PR drive at a time in the media cycle when sport is top of mind.
IT’S THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY, STUPID
When a senior spokesperson at the world’s largest furniture retailer declares that the West has probably hit ‘peak stuff’, it’s time to start placing your bets on memories rather than mattresses. Speaking at a Guardian Sustainable Business debate in January 2016, Ikea’s head of sustainability, Steve Howard, implied that the appetite for the mass consumption of material goods, including home furnishings, had reached an apex moment: ‘We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff.’
Now, before we all start thinking it’s curtains for consumerism – good luck brewing an aromatic cup of Bai Han Oolong Tea or making a phone call with an experience – there has undeniably been a collective shift in mindset that now sees people placing a greater value on doing stuff than buying stuff.
The term ‘Experience Economy’ has its roots in a 1998 book by management advisors Joseph Pine and James Gilmore: Welcome to the Experience Economy. They argued that in an advanced economy where most products and services have become commoditized or undifferentiated, the most effective way to gain a competitive advantage is by investing in extraordinary customer experience. Their assertion was that people place a disproportionately high value on the experience surrounding a purchase, service or event. Creating notable experiences, therefore, becomes a primary differentiator. Indeed, in an Eventbrite poll conducted by Harris Interactive in 2014, 72 per cent of millennials said they intended to increase their spending on experiences rather than physical things and 77 per cent revealed that their best memories are from an event or live experience, largely because attending live events and experiences make them feel more connected to other people, the community, and (thanks to the broadcast power of social media) the wider world.
A 2015 study, ‘We’ll Always Have Paris: The Hedonic Payoff from Experiential and Material Investments’ by Cornell University psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Amit Kumar, builds on this. It posited that experiential purchases tend to bring more enduring happiness – known to boffins as ‘hedonic return’ – than material purchases. In simple terms, this means that money spent on doing delivers a bigger bang for your buck than money spent on having. Their argument is that experiences provide enduring satisfaction, build social capital, and foster an enhanced sense of self ‘by becoming a more meaningful part of one’s identity’.
Interestingly, the Cornell research indicates that ‘the hedonic benefits extend to anticipation as well’. In other words, in addition to creating the emotional value of wellbeing through lasting memories, experiences also deliver a psychological benefit in advance: people enjoy getting excited in the build-up. Just ask Santa Claus. Or Science, if you’d prefer. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2007, American researchers Leaf Van Boven and Laurence Ashworth reported on a series of experiments conducted to explore whether anticipation arouses greater levels of emotion than retrospection. Participants in the study were asked to contemplate past or future events. Their emotional reactions showed that they experienced a greater intensity of feelings before rather than after an event. For example, feeling more excited about a future skiing holiday than one in the past, both hypothetical and real.
But why such a downer on material goods? ‘Part of the reason we seem to get such little enduring satisfaction from our possessions,’ conclude the Cornell researchers, ‘is that we quickly habituate to them. Once we get used to them, they provide very little in terms of lasting happiness, causing us to want more and more, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “hedonic treadmill”.’ The power and enduring value of experiences (‘from prospect to retrospect’) lies not just in the treasure trove of memory, but in the stories they allow us to tell. This is primal stuff. Humans are hardwired to talk about our experiences and to keep our stories alive. In contrast, ‘our possessions often just sit there, collecting dust, becoming obsolete, and being all but forgotten’.
ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE
There is an obvious symbiosis between the growing number of people who crave unique, memorable experiences and brands that want to explore alternative, deeper ways of connecting with audiences. Unsurprisingly, many advertisers have turned to immersive theatre groups and experience designers in the hope of creating moments of magic to drive richer engagement with loyal and prospective fans alike.
The acclaimed British theatre company Punchdrunk has enjoyed a number of successful collaborations with brands, including Absolut, Louis Vuitton, Samsung, Stella Artois, and W Hotels. Back in 2011 they dragged gamers from the sanctuary of their sofas to participate in a live theatrical experience, entitled ‘And Darkness Descended’, to promote the PlayStation video game Resistance 3. Participants were placed inside a simulation of a ravaged London and were challenged to find the last pocket of human resistance in the aftermath of a brutal Chimeran invasion. Lighting, sounds, and smells were all specifically inspired by the game, with players required to work together, echoing Resistance 3’s collaborative multiplayer elements. Punchdrunk’s artistic director, Felix Barrett, told Contagious that the ‘visceral fusion’ of the project transcended theatre and gaming: ‘The emotional and experiential potential of finding yourself within a video game is huge – you are your own avatar.’
In 2013 alcohol giant Diageo invested in the Singleton Sensorium: a sensory experiment that proved a change of environment can enhance the experience of enjoying whisky by up to 20 per cent. Led by Professor Charles Spence, head of crossmodal research at the Department of Experimental Science at Oxford University, it was the world’s first scientific study exploring the senses in relation to whisky. The professor ran tests conducted by sensory architects Condiment Junkie at a specially constructed bar in London that featured three rooms with contrasting atmospheres. A ‘grassy’ room complete with turf and birdsong was designed to accentuate the nose of the Singleton Single Malt Scotch Whisky. A room with red fruits, curved shapes, and chiming bells brought out the dark berry and dried fruit flavour of the whisky. A room replete with double-bass notes, a cedar scent, and a crackling fire represented the lingering taste of age and wood in the drink. The study was followed by in-lab testing and under both conditions participants reported significant variations in their ratings of the taste, scent, and flavour when drinking Singleton Single Malt in different environments. The results inspired Diageo to extend the concept into curated retail activities, including tasting rooms at Asian airports.
But it’s not just fancy whiskies and multibillion-dollar videogames that get the experiential treatment. Even something as prosaic as baked beans can have its moment in the sensory limelight. Developed in 2013 by London experience-design studio Bompas & Parr, the Heinz Beanz Flavour Experiences were a collection of spoons and bowls that synced up with various Heinz products to supposedly enhance the eating experience. The spoons came equipped with an MP3 player embedded in the handle. The magic happened only when the spoon was inside someone’s mouth. People enjoying the Fiery Chilli flavour, for example, listened to samba music, while those eating the Curry variant heard a Punjabi Bhangra composition.
Bompas & Parr’s bespoke bowls matched each of the flavours. The bowl for the Garlic and Herb beans was moulded out of laser-cut paper to resemble a garlic bulb, and the Cheddar Cheese bowl was crafted out of wax to look like a cheese round. They proved so popular they were even sold in the high-end food emporium Fortnum & Mason, adding a curiously luxurious experience to humble beans. By bringing enhancements directly to products themselves, traditional marketing distractions are stripped away to leave the product at the centre of the user experience.
Dutch start-up Sensiks has developed a sensory reality pod that combines audio-visual recordings with scent, temperature, air flow, vibration, taste, and light to create immersive experiences. The pods can create a range of encounters, from stress-reducing strolls through the countryside to ‘sensified’ films (featuring less appealing smells such as sewers or car exhaust fumes). Participants wear a VR headset while sitting inside a pod that is fitted with vents, lights and heat lamps. Biometric sensors monitor heart rate, skin conduction, and respiration, which enables Sensiks to track how participants are reacting to the experience. Then, using that data, the artificial intelligence system built into the pod can give suggestions for future content.
‘People want a world where brands no longer tell them about products, but invite them to “feel and live” the service or product,’ says Debbie Ellison, head of digital at Geometry Global UK, one of Sensiks’ agency partners. ‘Brands are looking to tap into sensory to connect more closely with people.’
In 2014 Eventbrite reported that 66 per cent of millennials said they felt more fulfilled by live experiences than purchasing an item of the same value. More recently, the Harris Group found that 57 per cent of consumers crave experiences that stimulate their senses, a figure that rises to 78 per cent for millennials. For brands that sell physical products, this fixation on experiences can have a negative impact; retailers including Next and Ikea have blamed the experience economy for sales dips. Technology such as Sensiks’ sensory reality could give bricks-and-mortar retailers a future-facing solution for creating experiences around their products that can only be realized in a physical setting, thus attracting footfall.
TRANSFERENCE OF EXPERIENCE EXPECTATION
So, from reading The Contagious Commandments thus far, you know that people value experiences, resent pain points and are prepared to reward brands that provide one and solve the other. This explains why user-centric services like Amazon, Spotify, and Uber have flourished, thanks to effortless experience and wallet-friendly pricing. The challenge for marketers – who are increasingly responsible for the entire customer experience – is that people are becoming ever more demanding and judgemental in the real world, precisely because they are routinely exposed to superlative treatment from firms rooted in the digital.
Adam Morgan, founder of UK-based marketing consultancy eatbigfish, has a brilliant term for this. He dubs the phenomenon ‘Uber’s Children’ – a new generation of ‘unreasonable consumers’ who, after experiencing the benefit of a chauffeur for the price of a taxi with just two clicks on an app, no longer expect the trade-offs of old. If Wi-Fi is free at Starbucks, it should be free on planes. (It increasingly is.) Why can’t I order pizza by sending an emoji? (You now can.) If Spotify knows me better than myself, why the hell is the receptionist at the hotel I’m staying at for the seventh time this year asking me if it’s my first visit? It’s natural nowadays to expect services in seemingly unrelated industries to offer the same level of personalization and frictionless experience that we get from the brands we have come to love the most.
Contagious refers to this as the transference of experience expectation. People automatically expect the experience they receive from every brand – irrespective of the category it’s in – to be consistent, compelling and convenient. The role of the marketer becomes much more demanding, but ultimately more rewarding. From data analytics, in-store activity, customer service chatbots, mobile, social, voice, traditional advertising channels, immersive retail experiences and beyond, the marketer’s professional reward lies in the efficient administration of a multitude of experiences that build an enduringly positive and coherent image of a brand in the memories of its audience. Memories fuel mental availability, which influences consumers’ decision-making at the point of purchase. As John Kearon, founder and CEO of market research agency System1 Group, told us: ‘If you make people feel more, they are more likely to buy more.’ And therein lies the power of immersive theatrical events and beautifully constructed commercials that either tickle the funny bone or tug at the heartstrings.
FEEL THE DIFFERENCE
An obvious benefit of living in the age of the unreasonable consumer is that standards have risen accordingly. The customer-centricity of Amazon (personalized recommendations, free shipping, same day delivery, or even a 120-minute shipping window with Prime Now) has ensured a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ scenario in e-commerce and digital. Few brands are incapable of putting their product inventory onto a website and getting your chosen items to you pretty quickly in a relatively convenient manner.
Equally, technology is fundamentally a democratic beast. In purely scientific terms, there’s barely a few molecules difference between an Adidas, Asics, Nike or New Balance running shoe. They’re all made of more or less the same materials and perform the same function. The winner in the race to innovate, it would seem, is parity. The essence of branding has always been about creating the differentiating factor between undifferentiated products, but now experience adds another dimension. Certainly in the retail environment, experience is a curated way to bring the brand to life and to express its defining nuances, attitude, and philosophical principles.
Take Asics as an example. The Japanese footwear brand is transforming its retail environments into 3D marketing exercises, using bespoke experiences and expert human guidance to differentiate itself. For its communications platform, the brand has adopted a ‘Sound Mind, Sound Body’ philosophy, with a mission to educate and inspire people around the physical and mental benefits of exercise. In Europe, it operates concept stores in cities including Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, London and Vienna, all of which are focused on people’s overall wellbeing. Asics’ marketing efforts reach a crescendo in these places. The concept stores feature both workshops, from yoga to high-intensity interval training, and complimentary services provided by personal trainers and physicians with no affiliation to Asics. They function as hubs where the company’s goals and its audience’s needs intersect.
The flagship store on London’s Regent Street features a robotic product-delivery system and kinetic coloured lighting display that pulsates at the same pace as the heart rate of a 100-metre runner. Alongside this are four Asics proprietary Motion ID areas, using sensors to capture the consumer’s natural posture and style of movement when running in order to select the most appropriate shoe. This is immersive, multisensory retail that uses experience to channel innovation, acting as a driver of competitive advantage, and builder of positive memories.
Consumer electronics giant Samsung brought its virtual reality technology to UK festival goers as a way to transform the traditional music experience. The brand partnered with Scottish band Biffy Clyro to create a dynamic VR encounter that plunged music lovers into the heart of the video for the group’s song ‘Flammable’. Samsung’s giant experiential structure, the Hypercube, used the latest in VR technology, 360-degree cameras and the Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone to create a unique experience. Up to fifty festival goers could enter at a time, don a headset and find themselves directly immersed inside the video’s pyrotechnics. The experience was developed by London agency Iris.
Other VR collaborations between Samsung and music artists include a campaign by electropop group Years & Years that gave fans a preview of their European tour using the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and Gear VR headsets. Immersive, exclusive experiences like these serve to position Samsung as more than an electronics company in the minds of music fans. Marc Mathieu, chief marketing officer at Samsung Electronics America, told us that the brand deploys innovative technology to trigger an emotional response from people. ‘We aspire to be a brand at the intersection of technology, humanity and culture,’ he said. Heightened experiences are more likely to live longer in the memory, be seen as a valuable social currency, and therefore boost affinity for the brand.
By building something as ambitious and communal as the Hypercube, Samsung overcame the usually solitary experience of wearing a VR headset and created a shared experience at scale; as well as placing both the phone and VR headsets into the hands of an influential target group. The number of active virtual-reality users is forecast to have reached 171 million by the end of 2018, according to market researchers Opinium. This is why brands like Samsung are responding to the fact that, for many consumers, the virtual world has started to blur with the physical one, breaking down geographical barriers, boosting education, enhancing entertainment experiences and adding a new dimension to socializing.
EXPERIENCE IN MOTION
For some brands, the ambition to create heightened experiences extends beyond redefining the conventional retail environment. Car-maker Buick, for example, conjured a striking visual metaphor to represent its design chops and technical know-how. Blending cutting-edge innovation and theatrical stage design, it built a futuristic eco-home to tempt Chinese drivers to test its Velite 5 hybrid car. This battery-shaped smart home was christened ‘Lifezone’. It incorporated the same kinds of technologies used in the Velite 5 and was constructed using recyclable materials. Solar-power panels, rainwater collection and a waste purification system provided energy. Guests could drive a Velite 5 directly into the living room and use voice commands to control household appliances, play music and adjust lighting levels.
The pop-up was only available for a month in Shanghai, and prospective visitors had to apply via Buick’s WeChat account. In terms of lead generation, it certainly delivered: 13,300 people signed up, despite only twenty-four spaces being available. Those selected could test drive a Velite 5 during their visit. The Lifezone was then taken to numerous Chinese cities.
Cheelip Ong, chief creative officer of Buick’s ad agency, MullenLowe China, said: ‘We want to create unforgettable brand experiences that deeply engage with our consumers. Instead of a traditional print ad or television commercial that tells drivers what Velite 5 is about, Velite 5 Lifezone allows them and their friends to live out the design philosophy behind it.’
Buick’s activity reflects an increasing trend in the automotive and general retail sectors: deploying experiential marketing tactics to drive sales and advocacy. The aim here is to create a bond between consumer and brand by immersing them in a memorable experience. This is especially important for automakers as the bulk of consumers (67 per cent, according to a US survey by digital marketing company Netsertive) now visit only one or two dealerships before making a purchase, and car brands often have little control over how people experience their brand online. The trade-off is that experiential campaigns can usually reach only a limited number of consumers directly. This explains why MullenLowe worked hard to ensure maximum ROI, knowing that images of the lavish, futuristic Lifezone would attract extensive social media coverage by tapping into the popularity of so-called ‘property porn’. The result was 1.64 billion media impressions and 25,504 purchase inquiries for Buick.
Another automotive brand that places a high value on experiential tactics is Land Rover. The SUV market is booming: global sales have risen by 87 per cent since 2013, according to industry consultants LMC Automotive. The consensus within the category is that this popularity is largely down to people wanting to do more with their lives, Tony O’Toole, the head of auto strategy at Imagination, Land Rover’s experiential agency, told Contagious in 2014: ‘We’ve reached product saturation in many ways. People don’t want more stuff, they want an experience they can feel and talk about in an interesting way. SUVs are a natural partner to the growth of this experience lifestyle.’ (In other words, ‘Buy our thing, because we know you don’t want to buy things from other brands.’)
Taking advantage of this behavioural shift is, unsurprisingly, a crucial business objective for the brand. Land Rover’s advertising reminds people that these vehicles let you do more, see more, and, ultimately, achieve more with your life. Underpinning this is a strategy that stresses the superiority of the Land Rover experience: ‘Demonstrating the engineering that goes into these products in an experiential way is the key differentiator for us,’ said Mark Cameron, head of experience at Jaguar Land Rover.
To bring this proposition to life, the brand audaciously succeeded in crossing the Empty Quarter: the world’s largest and most inhospitable sand desert, situated on the Arabian peninsula. Rally driver Moi Torrallardona drove an All-New Range Rover Sport across 528 miles of epic dunes and canyons, setting a new record time of ten hours and twenty-two minutes. The car had received only one modification – a plate to protect the underbody from sand. The brand shot a documentary of the escapade, capturing authentic, adrenaline-fuelled footage live in the moment.
Adaptations of this content then percolated through Land Rover’s marketing channels – involving fans vicariously in the experience and bolstering Land Rover’s capabilities at the same time. ‘As well as being a documentary, the Empty Quarter was an actual event, a TV ad, a print ad, and provided real-time PR and social content,’ David Murray, the global strategy director at agency RKCR/Y&R, told us. Nowhere does this content work harder than on social channels. Land Rover has three key audiences – fans, prospects, and owners. These live events tick each box: fans love the vehicle imagery, prospective owners are impressed by the technical capabilities, and owners feel proud to be part of the Land Rover family.
FEEL MORE, DRIVE MORE
Bolstering mass-marketing initiatives such as the Empty Quarter are more targeted, one-to-one product demonstrations that let consumers feel exactly what it’s like to be behind the wheel of a Land Rover. The brand has three levels of live experience, each with a specific business objective in mind. The first of these takes place in city-centre locations. Land Rover sets up an off-road course using Terrapod equipment – essentially portable slopes and cross axle ramps that mimic extreme off-road conditions – and then uses the ten-minute mini test drives to raise awareness and maximize reach in urban areas.
Second are Land Rover Experience centres, where people are taught how to drive the vehicles on demanding terrain, like steep inclines and deep fords. ‘These centres can be used as loyalty programmes or conquest tools,’ noted Cameron. Showroom visitors who are interested in purchasing a vehicle (but not yet 100 per cent convinced) are given a voucher to attend one of the centres where they can drive the SUV in a genuine off-road environment. In the UK, soon after taking delivery of their SUV, every new customer is invited to take part in one of these days. ‘The insight here is that most people don’t know what they’ve bought, in terms of technology, so why not turn them into advocates by showing them what their car can do,’ Cameron told us.
The upper experiential tier, called the Global Expedition Programme, is for serious Land Rover fans with serious wallets. They pay upwards of £10,000 to be guided across an area of outstanding natural beauty, such as the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, in a convoy of Range Rovers or Land Rover Discoveries. Participants gain access to sections of the park usually closed to the public. Here, a physical experience is essential in communicating both inherent product innovation and intangible brand values.
The brand’s experiential investment (20 per cent of the global marketing budget) plays a major part in social conversations, by giving people distinctive experiences to share across their networks. This, effectively, creates an adjacent stream of communications whereby vehicles and terrains are captured and shared by fans, for fans – placing experience at the centre of marketing communications and actively supporting the rest of the brand’s advertising. Here, innovation is being used to enhance consumers’ interactions with the brand, driving affinity by building memorable experiences.
PIONEER AROUND PEOPLE
One strategic approach is to lead with innovation to build experience; the other is to lead with customer experience to build innovation. But what happens when a company links innovation to experience by adopting an anthropological relationship with its customer base, helping it to transform the category it competes in?
In the spring of 1991 an employee at the Turkish bank Garanti risked his career by sending an extraordinarily candid letter to the bank’s owner. The handwritten document, sent by the then executive vice-president of marketing, Akin Öngör, outlined his proposal for a radical shake-up of the company – one that involved halving the number of bank staff in order to invest in technologists instead. His vision was simple: reinvent the company around the customer, and apply innovation to change the concept of banking by aligning with new consumer behaviours. Two weeks later, Garanti’s owner accepted the plan and Öngör was promoted to chief executive.
Being the first Garanti leader from a marketing background, he was intent on using his expertise to understand customers’ needs and to design experiences around them. For Öngör, this meant repositioning the bank as a pioneer. And so, throughout his nine-year tenure, Garanti became a company of technological, experience-driven ‘firsts’. In 1997 it became the first private Turkish company to launch digital banking services, at a time when national bandwidth was so slow that Garanti removed text from its webpage so transactions could process. Two years later, the bank created the first virtual point-of-sale system, enabling merchants to process purchases made over the web.
Even after his retirement in 2000, Öngör’s legacy of technological milestones lived on. In 2005 the bank offered SMS-based money transfers, and a year later enabled people to personalize credit cards by choosing the interest rates and rewards programmes that suited them – both world firsts. In May 2013 the bank released iGaranti, a suite of twenty-three different banking services contained within a central smartphone app, affectionately billed as ‘the smart friend in your pocket’. The app – developed by service design specialists Fjord – gets to know the customer, their spending habits and their wider interests. It can forecast how much money they will spend, using an algorithm that crunches personal spending habits over the past six months. If things look rosy, iGaranti advises customers to divert some cash into a savings account. If things look tight, the app offers a micro-loan until payday. Crucially, these contextual, personalized services take the worry out of banking, inspired by the company’s mantra of ‘helpful simplicity’.
At the centre of Garanti’s vision is a platform agnostic, omnichannel strategy – a commitment to provide a seamless, personalized and connected customer experience across all available touchpoints. The strategy succeeds because it mimics the habits of one of the most digitally demanding populations on the planet. Even as far back as 2012, 80 per cent of transactions took place through the bank’s digital platforms. When targeting consumers, conventional banks tend to use segmentation models based on demographics. In contrast, Garanti creates its own distinct model centred on behaviours. This is based around the idea of ‘Generation C: the connected customers’, who are fast adopters of technology, whether eighteen or eighty years old.
TO TECH IS TO SERVE
Underpinning the bank’s trailblazing prowess is Garanti Technology, a subsidiary responsible for maintaining Garanti’s status as a global leader on digital platforms, and for keeping up with technological advances in the wider world. The firm employs 1,000 IT experts, sector analysts, and software developers. In order to encourage agility and objectivity, the facility – in true 5% Club fashion – is located apart from Garanti’s headquarters.
One of Garanti Technology’s biggest technical accomplishments came in 2016, when it unveiled a Turkish natural-language equivalent of Apple’s Siri, capable of interpreting financial questions. Called Mia (Mobile Interactive Assistant), the technology took eighteen months to develop. Using voice commands, customers can perform tasks such as paying rent, requesting foreign exchange conversions and locating the nearest ATM. Why did the bank go to such lengths to achieve this hands-free, linguistic extravaganza? Because it knows that its mobile-first customer base finds it faster to talk to their devices, rather than type.
Keeping close to your consumers gets to the heart of what Contagious means by ‘experience over innovation’. We’re not saying innovation isn’t important, but any new means of interacting with people needs to start from the right place. Innovations are adopted only if the needs and behaviours of real people are prioritized.
Building successful experiences requires an almost obsessive devotion to listening to customers, acknowledging preferred behaviours, and adapting your services to match the needs of the people you would like to engage with. No wonder that, for Garanti, every innovation starts with a clear instruction: This has to be useful, simple and instantly understandable. Rather than falling into a trap of tech for tech’s sake, the brand’s innovations are born out of a commitment to improve the banking experience. Humans must always win.
OBSESS ABOUT EXPERIENCE
‘Experience’ as a marketing strategy is so sprawling and crosses so many disciplines that it often falls between stools inside organizations. At a Contagious conference in 2015 that explored the theme of ‘Obsessing Experience’, Tom Raith of service-design company IDEO identified this as a ‘back-of-the-deck’ problem. Less-progressive clients are used to buying ‘conventional’ advertising but find it tougher to commit to experiences, because they require discrete budgets and shared responsibility across teams. However, by prioritizing the customer and the role the brand can play in their lives, many of these back-of-the-deck ideas can be brought front and centre – especially those that drive loyalty, recruit new users and amplify awareness. The most effective way to embed experiential thinking, Raith suggested, is to work iteratively and maintain a relentless focus on people’s everyday needs and ambitions.
The new paradigm – innovating around the consumer – is heavily influenced by service design, a discipline that rose to prominence around the time Contagious was founded. Unlike traditional design practices, service designers create experiences around the needs of the customer. Close attention is paid to reducing friction in the customer journey and speeding up processes so that there’s a consistent, intuitive flow. Every touchpoint – from call centres to distribution, marketing and point of sale – is an equal hero, because all leave an equal impression with the customer. Optimized brilliantly – and engineered as the cumulative, end-to-end journey advocated by McKinsey that we mentioned earlier in this commandment – this experience-centric approach can transform a business.
‘Experience’ is central to the future of marketing, because of the two-way communication channel it opens between a brand and its audience, and the subsequent scope for word of mouth – the most effective medium of all. Experience, executed well, becomes the bridge between the promises made by a brand’s marketing and the reality encountered by those real people formerly known as ‘targets’.
PRIORITIZE EXPERIENCE OVER INNOVATION / ESPRESSO VERSION
What is an ‘experience’, anyway? Contagious defines it as the interaction a person has – anytime, anywhere or anyhow – with a company. Given that organizations need to spread themselves across new technologies, media platforms, retail experiences, and social networks, it is more important than ever to nail exactly what promise (or organizing principle) your brand is making, and ensure that this is consistently and elegantly manifested across every single touchpoint, as part of a cumulative, end-to-end customer journey. Keep close to your customers. Observe their behaviours and anticipate the gaps.
Don’t fall into the trap of ‘tech for tech’s sake’. Innovations are adopted faster and used more deeply if the needs and behaviours of real people are prioritized. And utilities will always beat gimmicks. Remember: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Whenever a technological breakthrough or new media platform emerges, the ad industry has a tendency to rush towards it. Yes, novelty can attract attention. But attention is a cheap currency if it is not underpinned by meaningful utility or an obvious bridge between the tech and the brand. As well as getting the basics right, marketers need to behave as scientists, cultural curators, and service designers: experimenting with technological change, creating memorable stories and experiences, and working iteratively on the needs of real people in order to add benefit and remove friction. Being an advertiser is all well and good, but is it better to be seen as the smart friend or helper? Enable, don’t distract.
Experience must come first when thinking about innovation. If an innovation doesn’t serve the key points of experience – compelling, consistent and convenient – it’s probably not worth the effort. Consult the flowchart shown on the previous page to make sure your idea is ticking the boxes.
By focusing on experiences, you’ll unlock a dirty secret the advertising industry has always known: stories are better than stuff. It’s widely acknowledged that we have reached ‘peak possessions’; that people place a greater value on doing stuff than buying stuff; and that extraordinary, intangible experiences have become the prime differentiator in a landscape of commoditized products and services. This environment enables brands to treat customers as co-producers of value, encouraging a two-way dialogue to improve quality and sense-check new technologies. It also places greater emphasis on experiential creativity as a way to connect with consumers. The enduring value of experiences lies not just in the treasure trove of memory, but also in the stories they allow us to tell. Humans are hardwired to talk about experiences and to keep our stories alive.
Some essential questions to start you on your journey:
// Think of your favourite products and services that you use in your personal life. What makes the experience distinctive or useful enough for you to remain loyal? Will your brand pass this ‘transference of experience expectation’ test? In other words: how does it stack up against the best experiences in any product category, not just your own?
// What kind of heightened experiences can you create that will appeal to people’s senses?
// How can you invite people to feel or ‘live’ your product or service? What kind of memories do you want your brand to be associated with?