Turning products into experiences and bringing brands to life
From theme parks to FMCG, brand marketer Ash Tailor knows how to turn a product into an experience. Ahead of All Access: Future of CX he explains why experience is more important than ever
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Whether it’s new technology or the age-old problem of businesses failing to recognize customer experience as a growth driver, there’s a lot happening in CX right now. But instead of concentrating on the latest trends, brand marketer and CX Network Advisory Board member Ash Tailor, sees a world where many are rushing to turn products into experiences, but not all are succeeding.
Over the course of his career, Tailor has done this for LEGOLAND, Coca-Cola, TK Maxx and Unilever, effectively de-commoditizing products that would otherwise have nothing more than price to differentiate them from their competition. On December 3, during All Access: Future of CX, Tailor explains how any brand can add experience to a product.
He explains: “The world is moving away from either consumers buy a product or they buy a service and now, where every single day a consumer in some part of the world is bombarded by thousands of advertisements – be it press, TV or online – what brands and businesses try to do is ask ‘how do I break out of that? How do I differentiate myself from my competitors? What do I stand for as a product and how do brands then buy into me?’
“Experience is much bigger than previously where it would be that you pay to go to an experience or a theme park and have a great day and if you don't have a great day, satisfaction will be low and you then leave. Experiences are now everywhere and that's from the little coffee shop to the major Starbucks, all the way through to theme parks, retail stores, hotels, restaurants and so on. Everyone is looking to differentiate, everyone is looking to make a difference and it's above and beyond a scientific formula of a product,” he adds.
The role of trust in experience
In part, experience is based on trust; the idea that your target customer can trust the brand to consistently deliver a great experience every time. Tailor’s session will look at how some brands get this right while others do not – in fact, there are even brands that were getting it right but then changed their approach to experience and saw a direct impact on product sales.
Starbucks is just one example. “If you go back 10 years it was all about the third space, it was all about the experience you had when going into an establishment that sells coffee,” Tailor says. While to many people coffee is coffee, Starbucks had its own highly consistent way to deliver that coffee, when it changed its approach sales declined. “I think experiences are really, really important now and it's above and beyond just a service or just a product that's being offered,” he says.
While some brands do this through enormous armchairs and personalization – more on the importance of those later – others are crafting experiences by aligning with their customers’ world views or using their data to elevate how products are positioned and marketed. Others simply have the advantage of not being a legacy company with a prohibitive IT stack that creates and reinforces organizational silos.
Although these factors have been known to drive results, Tailor says the most effective approach is to put the customer first and angle everything else to support that. In fact, according to Tailor, businesses – and their CX practitioners – should rethink their business models to enshrine and nurture a customer centric approach and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
“It’s about everyone, from the board all the way to your call center support staff, recognizing the customer,” he says. And by recognizing, he means answering to that customer. At LEGOLAND this was taken so seriously, Tailor and his colleagues reported to a “mini board” of children aged 13 or younger as part of the LEGOLAND Fun Lab, which had a mission to “drive fun through our experiences and examine what the supply of those experiences meant,” Tailor says. Board members were invited to share their take on what LEGOLAND meant to them, and therefore inform the world-famous brand on its next move.
“It was amazing how direct they were; they were quite happy giving feedback, which is great because I'm not the target audience and they absolutely were,” Tailor says. “We had a range of cultures, a range of geographies, both boys and girls, and they were there to be my sanity; they were there to help me understand actually what is cool at the moment, what really motivates them versus what doesn't, and the language they used to describe these emotions. We learned about everything from the way they speak, what they see and what they love to what they don't like, and we were able to tap into it all,” he explains.
The next step is to get that customer understanding into all the different parts of the business. In another of Tailor’s previous roles, senior decision-makers from across the organization – including the chief executive – were asked to conduct video calls with a target customer, i.e. a child. “They couldn’t get their PA to set it up, it had to come from the exec themselves. They had to do a selfie video, they had to think of the questions to ask these children. They would then conduct the interview, but they were also being interviewed themselves,” Tailor recalls.
The format was a hit, particularly with the chief executive who praised the idea for breaking free of the usual constraints of focus groups and PowerPoint presentations to create “something real”.
“When you can bring those real interactions, A, into the boardroom and B, into the organization, it's really critical so I think that's the first thing people should do,” Tailor adds.
All lessons are transferable to other industries and products, the only rule is that they want to craft and deliver an experience. “In a world of experiences, you've always got to hold a mirror to yourself. In theme parks you're there to build memories, spread happiness and joy, and if that's not happening then that's a key barometer you should use. In any business that is involved with experience, understand what your barometer is and check it on a regular basis,” he advises.
The three mistakes to avoid
While there are some clear actions experience designers, practitioners and marketers can take, Tailor’s insights make it clear that there are some common mistakes they should work to avoid, among them internal barriers based on organizational structure and missing the true understanding of the guest’s needs. But there is one more: distinguishing between operational insights that promote efficiency and operational insights that undermine the experience as a whole.
One case in point is Starbucks, which stopped its baristas personalizing each order with its famous handwritten names on cups and instead printed names on the order receipt. Initially a hygiene requirement during the Covid-19 pandemic, the receipts-on-cups method stayed post-pandemic, which coincided with a sharp decline in sales. This inspired a raft of in-store experience tweaks to bring back the “independent coffee shop feel” Starbucks had built its corporate brand on. Soon Starbucks was re-arming all its baristas with Sharpies – 200,000 of them, according to CEO Brian Niccol.
“Receipts were the efficient thing to do but from an effectiveness perspective, from a brand experience perspective, it went against everything Starbucks is about, which is personalization, it's about you, it's about your relationship with that Starbucks branch or that barista,” Tailor says. “The operational versus guest experience angle means difficult conversations sometimes need to be had internally about the right route to take.”
However, sometimes operational efficiency will take precedence, for example when guests are queuing for a theme park ride. “There is an operational efficiency about making sure you get the right number of guests on each ride, therefore reducing queues and queuing time,” Tailor explains. “So, sometimes operational efficiency is really important. Not having the constructive conversation about what the most important thing is and the barometer you want to measure that against, I think, is why some companies get it right and some get it wrong.”
The growing role of operations – and data – in experience design and management is leading to bigger conversations and questions about who owns CX. Is it operations and their ability to make things seamless and efficient? Is it the data team who hold the key to orchestrated and 360-degree journeys? “Is it brand, is it marketing, is it customer service, is it supply chain, is it corporate strategy?” Tailor asks. “Getting that DNA right at the heart and then making sure the business and the brand are aligned with it is so important. Easy to say, but difficult to do,” he adds.
The future of CX
With all this in mind, what does the future of CX hold? In Tailor’s eyes CX has always existed but it isn’t always recognized. “We don’t clarify who owns it, who's accountable, who's responsible, and who can shape and actually measure it,” he says of the problem.
For CX to continue to thrive this part must change, and this requires introspection on the difference CX can make internally and externally within a business, and therefore who should own CX moving forward.
Likening CX to Hollywood films, Tailor says: “Hollywood employs showrunners to understand the backstory of a film, the brand, where it came from, the different characters. Showrunners are the guardian of that brand and the brain behind that production. In the world of experiences, you don't have one person to do this, you have many different people in that role. That isn’t an issue if there is alignment around how consumers or guests experience that brand.
When you don't have that alignment, however, Tailor says customers quickly “see the ranges” in how experience is being interpreted and delivered. “The quote that I stand by is that ‘the only strategy our consumers see is execution’,” he says. And getting that right, “is paramount.”
Click here to find out more about All Access: Future of CX and watch Ash Tailor deliver How do you turn products and services into experiences?
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