Argo Creative Leader, Laura Richardson, talks about one of the
most important ideas in creating great customer experiences.

Emotionally engaged customers are typically three times more likely to recommend a product and to repurchase.” (The Secret to Delighting Customers, Harvard Business Review, December 13, 2013)

 

Fifteen years ago, Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore forever changed business in their article, Welcome to the Experience Economy. They suggested, “The most significant question managers can ask themselves is, “What specific experiences will my company offer?” The authors stressed that companies must “deliberately design engaging experiences” and that buyers of these experiences “value what the company reveals over a duration of time.” Thus, a company’s main goal was to create a memorable event – made memorable by engaging individuals at an emotional level. We have the benefit now of hindsight and the article has several limitations in the current experience economy.

 

First, what do customers value? The article teased us with its truth – people value engagements that are memorable – but lacked any specificity for how to frame our experiences in terms of value. So, while the article touched on five experience design principles, such as “Harmonize impressions with positive cues” it did not crystallize what specific positive cues customers valued in the new economy. Just one example touched on the currency of an emotional connection: “Harrop (the founder of Barista Brava) encourages baristas to remember faces so that regular customers are handed their usual order without even having to ask.” However, we are left to follow the trail back to the source of value, as it is not explicitly stated.

 

Second, the article suggested an experience as an event, something packaged for profit. But today we understand customer experience as a series of events orchestrated over time across a customer’s journey through a brand’s channels via multiple touchpoint moments. This forms the fabric of a longer and larger story and evolving customer relationship. The Experience Economy was a visionary article for its time, but that was before terms like omni-channel and multi-channel existed. Our opportunities for emotional connections are more numerous, but so are the opportunities for competition, chaos, complexity and customer confusion.

 

Finally, it’s no longer enough to harmonize cues to support a theme, essentially a brand’s story. The article suggested that, “experience stagers must eliminate anything that diminishes, contradicts, or distracts from the theme.” It is no longer a brand’s story that binds us to a company for fifty years; rather, it’s the brand’s ability to co-create a world with us that amplifies what we value as we grow together. We are willing to pay and pay deeply for our immersion in a brand’s ecosystem and we will continue, as customers, to give companies money, loyalty and advocacy if they strengthen what we value.

Emotionally engaged customers are typically three times more
likely to recommend a product and to repurchase

Today, the most significant question managers can ask themselves has changed. Now, we should ask ourselves “What specific emotional values will my experience ecosystem amplify?” We are no longer just meeting needs (recognized at a functional level), but values (recognized at an emotional level). It’s time to change the conversations we have about customer experience and consider the currency of specific emotional connections. As one former client, a VP of Digital Experience Strategy, told me, “Inspired by you, I started talking up the concept of engineering for specific emotional outcomes with my Creative Good Council.” When we understand and design for specific emotional outcomes our experience ecosystems support customers’ deepest experience values.