Designing for an Inquisitorial Customer
Unlike in the past, the customer has become intelligent.
The consumer behaviour has changed:
“People no longer accept fake offerings from slickly marketed phonies; they want real offerings from genuinely transparent sources’’ (Pine and Gilmore 2007).
Let’s look at the Vienna Opera for a minute…
I think that a theatre is a great way to look at experience from a less abstract level.
A play is usually performed on stage for an audience with a goal of immersing the spectator into the action. The stage is the space where the action is happening, and the curtain is the background upon which a play is performed. Subsequently the backstage is the part that the audience does not perceive. Yet it is the part which supports and allows for a performance on stage.
Ok, let’s go back to the company….
A company’s offering can be seen as a play. The front-stage of the company is what the customer is able to assess, such as the offering— product or service — the marketing activities, the retail space etc. The back-stage makes up the activities the company performs in order to deliver its offering, employees, company culture, and operational processes are all a part of it. As with a play, the companies back-stage program is a crucial part of performing authentically on the front-stage.
A company’s activity as theatre has a front and back-stage as well as a dividing line between these two.
Currently the most predominant representation of that dividing line is the brand, in which a company decides how much of the inner workings to reveal. Branding has not always been like that, it has undergone a series of evolutionary steps to bring us to a current definition of,
how the organisation and its customers understand themselves and each other […] which is meaningful and relevant to the organisation, its customers and its stakeholders. (Bont et al. 2013, p. 126).
The brand started of as a sign of ownership for the company, over time different layers where added such as a functional meaning, an emotional meaning, and a representation of a lifestyle. In the nineties it also functioned as a façade to hide behind. Big companies such as Nike built up a strong brand of premium products to hide their poor manufacturing conditions.
The brand is what the company is willing to show from the back-stage, and what they are hiding behind.
Some chefs have recognized the theatre of their own restaurant and have decided to put their formerly-back-of-home kitchen on the stage. By deliberately opening up the kitchen activities to the consumers, they have enriched the front-stage eating experience. A dividing line can become transparent by simply using an open kitchen and interacting directly with customers.
Chef are intentionally choosing to make the back stage an active part of the performance on stage (I highly recommending checking out Chef’s Table on Netflix as inspiration).
I believe that a company’s offering has three elements:
- The Core Value: the offering itself
- The Core Experience: the experience of that offering
- The Peripheral Experience: the experience of everything not directly connected to the offering
While the first level — the core value, the actual offering— is rather self explanatory, it is the two subsequent elements that are worth taking a closer look at.
The Core Experience
Behind this layer is the idea to think about how a product / service is experienced by the customer.
“A singular experience is made up of an infinite amount of smaller experiences” by Forlizzi and Ford (2000, p.420)
In order to understand the breadth and depth of Experience Design and understand its complexity, let’s break it down by using this model which uses elements diverted from dramaturgy to highlight elements that influence experiences:
This model has four distinct elements:
- Actors (employees): whose presence and actions define the service
- Audience (customers): to whom the service is directed
- Setting (store/website): the space in which the experience occurs
- Performance: service / product
The performance is the result of the interaction of the three respective elements: the setting, the actors and the audience. But while the company can design the setting and the actors, it has no control over the audience. It is the audiences’ subjective interaction with the two elements provided by the company — setting and actors — which will create the customer experience. Nevertheless, the deliberate design of these two controllable elements can influence a consumer experience.
Let’s take Patagonia as a good example of designing meaningful experiences. They are famous for making tough, high-quality outdoor wear and gear — the Core Value. This is as far as some companies in the market think (the pure product experience). Where Patagonia differs from other outdoor manufacturers is its approach to sustainability. Making environmental issues a big part of the design and manufacturing of their products gives Patagonia’s offer a strong Core Experience. With programs such as The Common Threads Recycling, The Footprint Chronicles, The Worn Wear and The 100% Traceable Down, Patagonia is giving their products a higher value, meaning, differentiation and therefore a better Core Experience.
The Peripheral Experience
Peripheral in this context means peripheral to the offering. So let’s bring back the concept of the company as theater from earlier, and connect it with “The Experience Width” concept
As the illustration shows the two concepts overlap. The aforementioned back-stage is part of the Peripheral Experience ; i.e. is not directly connected to the product or service.
Yet the company’s interaction with the consumer is increasingly important. The company’s employee who help deliver the business offering are the closest to the customers, and therefore can have great influence on the consumer experience.
The “Age of Transparency” has begun…
…and customer behaviour is changing drastically. Through the access to an abundance of information, consumers are more aware and critical about their decisions. As a result a new breed of inquisatory customers are using the internet to gain unprecedented access to the back-stage of a company. Financial data, employee grievances, environmental disasters, product weaknesses and scandals — good news and bad: all can be seen by anyone who knows where to look. (Naked Corporation).
The question becomes, how does a company work with a new type of customer; i.e. The Inquisatory Customer?
The Age of Transparency is making the back-stage accessible to curious and interested customers. In this new arena, companies are left with two options:
- be passive, trying to hide behind their brand and hope for the best
- become active and choose to use the back-stage to bring an authentic performance to the stage
The idea behind the active option is that in order to remain competitive in an industry and valuable to its stakeholders it is important that:
all members of an enterprise must be engaged in the strategy discovery and development process, playing the roles and using the tools most appropriate for their positions by Pugh and Bourgeois (2011, p. 177)
Besides sharing the strategic development and implementation, the organization should aim for a shared understanding (e.g. values, beliefs, corporate culture as well as norms of behaviour. Creating this strong foundation allows the company and all its stakeholders to interact with its audience in a more authentic manner.
Paradoxically, the internet and Age of Transparency can become powerful tools for a company.
Never before has it been so easy to build up a strong, personal relationship with the customer. The Internet gives companies a cheap tool to slowly open the curtains and show what’s going on back-stage. Taking this step deliberately makes positive use of the Internet. Yet ignoring the Age of Transparency and the consumers attempts at pushing to see behind the curtains can turn the Internet into a threat for the company. This is what happened for example to Apple with the Foxconn scandal and Abercrombie & Fitch with its employment practices, treatment of customers, and clothing styles.
I believe there is a huge opportunity to leverage the internal workings of a company, and make that part of the offering and thus of the customer experience.
Within this plethora of consumption, customers will seek real, authentic engagement with a product, brand and company.
To use the words of Pine and Gilmore in their recent book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want:
People no longer accept fake offerings from slickly marketed phonies; they want real offerings from genuinely transparent sources.
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References:
- Experience Driven Strategy (2015)
- Dramatizing the Service Experience Grove, Fisk and Bitner (1992)
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Goffman (1956)
- Advanced Design Methods for Successful Innovation Bont et al. (2013)
- The Building Blocks of Experience: An Early Framework for Interaction Designers Forlizzi and Ford (2000)
- Doing’ Strategy Pugh and Bourgeois (2011)
- The Naked Corporation Tapscott and Ticoll (2012)
Thank you Andy Sontag, Simone Bocedi, Manuela Hess for your great feedback!
