A Well-Designed Experience Playbook

Here are some of the things they get right:

• Know your customer — and prove it by the way you recognize her and/or personalize her experience while shopping
• Deliver high-quality products — a great balance between form and function
• Stand behind your products with great customer service, to achieve superior fit to the customer’s individual needs
• Extend the brand across multiple touchpoints
• Manage the experience from order entry through eventual in-home delivery (for online shopping)
• Look for unexpected opportunities to create delight

My Own Experience with the Brand

Here are some examples of Lululemon’s principles in action, from my own observations.

Behind the Scenes

I’m aware that they have adapted Apple’s “evangelism playbook”: choosing brand ambassadors from among well-respected yoga instructors within a local community.

Empowering your brand ambassadors can be a highly effective tactic for expanding the cult of brand loyalists — which I understand well from my days at Apple.

Having said that, I’ve not yet encountered any brand ambassadors in my local community — except for the unofficial, vocal enthusiasts who love their Lululemon gear and wear it all the time.

So it was a wonderful contrast to enjoy some stimulating conversations over the past 24 hours with two vibrant and accomplished women: one, a consumer marketer par excellence, and the other a top-notch interaction designer.

It felt like we’re members of the same tribe, even though we’d never met each other before.

In our “Candy Jar”

In no particular order, here are a few of the things we touched on during our brief time together:

• Memories of introducing experience/interaction design to the New Zealand business community
• Memories of introducing capitalism to Hungarian bottlers right after the Berlin Wall was taken down
• HyperCard — remember when?
• Seattle versus Silicon Valley — pros and cons 
• The pleasures to be found in fine white burgundy wine, especially when you can find it at a reasonable price
• The many joys of Seattle for “foodies” — or for hikers, bikers, yoga or pilates enthusiasts
• The fun of designing the initial user interfaces for first-generation digital cameras
• Marketing those early Macs…
• What it feels like to talk to newcomers in the workplace who can’t remember what life was like back when cameras required film
• The exciting new options for listening to the marketplace and seeing the changing perception patterns as they unfold across traditional and new media, such as social media
• What can happen to a staid business (like an insurance company) when you introduce experience design into the mix, and then mentor and train a core cadre of people who diffuse this discipline more broadly throughout the company
• Travels to Europe, wine tasting in France
• The difference between design, when approached as a strategic problem solving and communications discipline, versus its more common function as business “cake decorating”
• Microsoft and UX/experience design — pro forma, or the real thing?
• Marketing as art or as business architecture
• Daniel Pink and his notions about the growing import of “right brain” qualities and thinking styles for business and society
• The impact of serendipity or luck in our early career opportunities
• And a whole bunch of things I can no longer remember

Yes, we enjoyed free-wheeling conversations, moving fluidly back and forth between business and pleasure, without being all that conscious of the transitions.

Brain candy for right-brain thinkers…

The Experience Illusion — Brian Haven

Here’s how Haven raised the question in his blog:

I’ve noticed a breakdown between the image some brands project and what they actually deliver…. Consider Target. The ads I see on TV and print paint a very specific (modern) aesthetic about that brand. In many ways it feels similar to Apple. But when I go into the [Target] store it just doesn’t deliver. It’s messy, lacks a modern aesthetic, the employees are often rude or are not knowledgeable — the experience they project through brand messaging is not consistent with the experience when you walk through the door.

For me the answer is pretty simple. While accountability for brand disillusion is shared between the agency and their marketing clients, the company that owns the brand is ultimately responsible for all disconnects between the brand promise and the way the brand is experienced or perceived. It’s the company that makes the promise; it’s the company that should fix its broken promises.

The chief marketing officer and her brand steward(s) should be monitoring brand experience across all brand touchpoints, both real world and online. She’s responsible for raising issues and making actionable recommendations when the brand is at risk — or preventing stupid (avoidable) mistakes before they occur.

Why the Company Is  Accountable

The company that owns the brand:

• sets brand strategy;
• pays attention to how the brand is being perceived (or should audit those perceptions);
• identifies changes desired in brand perceptions, and defines objectives and success metrics;
• allocates investments (or not) against the brand;
• hires the agency and other specialists involved in expressing the brand promise and influencing brand experience, across all media and brand touchpoints;
• decides how to allocate resources across all the entities and media that play a role in shaping consumer experience — which goes well beyond the marketing mix;
• designs, develops and delivers the final product or service that embodies what the brand stands for.

Moreover, the company is responsible for allocating internal and external resources and priorities across a broad spectrum of activities and media that influence how the brand is experienced, such as:

• the look and feel of their website, and other sales or marketing collateral;
• the TV, print, online and/or SEM campaign;
• how much training is invested in call center reps, and how motivated their CSRs will be to help customers resolve problems;
• all the operations that support the retail store environment and the shopping experience, including training and incentives for retail sales associates;
• how well they deploy social media to encourage productive conversations with customers, partners and suppliers — and to respond to what they hear.
• Etc., etc.

What Went Wrong at Target?

I’d guess that Target operates under the classic silo organizational model, with little strategic interaction between the marketing team and retail operations. Structures like this make it all too easy for brand disconnects to occur.

To address the disconnect between the brand promise implied by Target’s summer TV/print campaign and the reality of a Target shopper’s retail store experience would require a long-term strategic change initiative that aims to redesign what happens once a shopper enters a Target store. That design must be realistic and achievable.

For anyone who’s ever been in a Target store, it’s obvious those stores don’t deliver on the hip, modern aesthetic that Haven has described as the underlying promise of Target’s ad campaign. Yes, they merchandise some cool SKUs, but the overall shopping experience leaves a lot to be desired.

Their agency is accountable for recommending a creative strategy that’s so clearly out of touch with the reality of today’s Target stores. They should have known better. Did they aim for a creative award, without caring enough about what was authentic for their client and the client’s brand?

What’s the Solution?

No amount of lipstick will make this pig more beautiful. In this case the fix has to be more than skin deep — more than the cosmetic allure of a hip, cool TV/print/online campaign.

And yes, Target should engage a high-quality experience design team to envision, design and then execute the kind of experience their customers deserve to have once they walk through Target’s doors.

But they must also add to their team “retail anthropologists” who understand the science of shopping, plus people who manage retail operations and who have the wherewithal to put those recommendations into action. It will take a multi-disciplinary team like that, coupled with experience design experts, to ensure that the future shopping experience chez Target, matches the brand promise they’ve been trying to convey in their ads.

And the company must sign up to the strategic investment and executive patience to make all this happen. They may also have to tinker with organizational design and compensation to ensure that behaviors and action plans will reinforce brand strategy and deliver on the desired brand promise. These are not quick fixes, but they could lead to lasting change and a more enduring brand promise.

Because these are not quick fixes, they may not have the courage  to tackle something whose results won’t show up in the next quarter’s same-store retail performance metrics.

It takes a lot more to emulate the Apple brand experience than cool advertising.

I love my iPhone not just because it’s an object of beauty in its own right, but because the experience of using it is so pleasurable, so much of the time.

It feels great in my hand: the curved shape, the weight balance, and the tactile feel of the materials. I smile at the way it sounds when someone calls me or an alert chimes to remind me of an upcoming meeting.

The user interface for voice calls has been thoughtfully designed, so when I’m on a call and a new one comes in, the UI offers sensible options for how to handle those calls. I don’t have to remember any silly key combination in order to juggle multiple calls.

The hi-res display is fabulous, and I love the way images are rendered, whether mine or those provided by Apple. Everything about the product says its quality is more than skin deep.

A Model for Others?

Experts in interaction design and brand experience undoubtedly look at the iPhone launch as a case study in how to convey brand attributes throughout every aspect of a product, its marketing and the consumer’s usage experience.

Speaking for myself… My experience of activating the phone and porting my mobile number from one carrier to another was simple and flawless. The self-service online approach was fast, easy to understand and visually elegant: everything that Apple has “trained” me to expect as a customer over 20+ years.

The user interaction model had Apple’s fingermarks all over it. Although I hear the behind-the-scenes carrier work was messy, the way Apple and AT&T managed the self-service activation process should be an inspiration for other technology-based consumer services.

Part of the magic of the iPhone comes from the way Apple has managed the brand experience at all the consumer touchpoints, from point of sale through activation to usage and maintenance. (Not to mention the way they whipped the early adopter and analyst community into a frenzy during the long wait for the device to arrive in the stores.)

iPhone versus Treo

Before buying an iPhone, I was a frustrated Treo user (after a long love affair with earlier Palm OS devices).

In my first 90 days as an iPhone user, Apple has already updated the iPhone 3 times, with noticeable improvements each time. This compares to the 2 years I had to wait before Palm, Access and Verizon fixed the bugs in the Treo 700p that caused it to crash all the time. The firmware updating process is simple, if you’re used to using an iPod; and requires much less effort from the user than the equivalent process on the Treo.

Compared to the Treo’s limited capabilities for email handling and web browsing, I’ll put up with EDGE in order to have an email environment that’s actually useful. Messages are clear, well presented and nicely formatted. And you can actually use the web browser!

Synching an iPhone works just fine, especially compared to what I experienced using Verizon Wireless, a Treo 700p, and a POP email account with 500+ contact records. I must have done a dozen hard resets on the Treo in order to fix the duplicates and triplicates caused by the poor quality synching utility that Verizon delivers to its customers. To make matters worse, those problems would work their way back into my Outlook file if I made the mistake of synching the Treo to the PC without checking to see if Verizon’s service had introduced duplicates again.

So far (first 90 days) I’ve had no problems synching the iPhone to a PC — and I’m using Plaxo to synchronize Outlook 2007 calendars, contacts and to-do’s across two PCs. It all works like a charm, and I don’t have to waste my time maintaining what’s on my phone.

It just works — and provides pleasure during its various interactions with me.