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The author begins by reminding everyone of some basic business facts and using them to raise his point. “A business has to make money,” he says, “and a business has to make customers. … The customer (emphasis by author) is the ultimate arbiter of the value an organization creates and delivers, not CEOs, CFOs, shareholders, or stakeholders.” He goes on to state, “I believe today’s organizations have become extraordinarily vulnerable. By neglecting to consistently factor in customer expectations and preferences, they have essentially disenfranchised the customer from the determinations of value. …The things businesses do to make money need to be balanced against an enhanced assessment of what it will take to make and keep customers in tomorrow’s even more competitive global economy. Without the long-term loyalty of their best customers to provide stability, the foundations of countless businesses are essentially anchored in sand.” This is the point of the book.

The fact is, customers cannot not have an experience! They’ll have one whether you want them to or not. The question is, how random or managed is the experience you are delivering? To be sure, the customer’s total experience – much of it unconscious and emotional, rather than coldly rational – has always been a component of the value proposition puzzle. By ‘experience’ we mean the ‘take-away’ impression formed by people’s encounters with products, services, and businesses – a perception produced when humans consolidate sensory information.

The author cites Dr. Leonard Berry who states, “The marketed brand contributes to brand meaning but not as strongly as the customer’s actual experience with the company.” The tangible attributes of a product or service have far less influence on consumer preference than the unconscious sensory and emotional elements derived from the total experience.

Clued-in management, says Carbone, focuses on the total experience as the customer value proposition. The creation and constant evolution of effectively managed experiences require a long-term commitment to a sustained system. Take your eyes of the customer’s concept of experience=based value and you can lose – big time. You must constantly monitor the essential clues involved in what you’re doing for changes in customer behavior that may invalidate strategies that were successful yesterday. And when necessary, create new and inviting experiential designs to meet those changing customer expectations.

When businesses accept the idea that the quality of the total experience has powerful effects on long-term loyalty and advocacy, the plane on which the organization can compete broadens remarkably. It is maximizing the total customer experience that truly creates value and builds preference.

Creating value around multidimensional, well-integrated, and consciously managed experiences will challenge you to connect to the unconscious emotional passions of your customers and in the process, you’ll discover how to differentiate yourself from competitors in ways that can be almost impossible to copy and commoditize.  When you’re clued in to what customers actively desire and when the clues you’re providing are validating and enriching that value proposition, you’ve taken a step up the value progression ladder. The value and willingness to pay increase as you move from a commodity to a product to a service to an experience. Carbone discusses a number of companies and services that have proven this point.

The author discusses some scientific points and states that as much as 95% of what influences consumers’ conscious choices resides below awareness. It’s not the rational elements that engender a customer commitment but the emotional bonding to the experience that transforms those commodity, product, and service components into something uniquely memorable – something that indelibly connects with customers. It is on the basis of the unconscious feelings that the customer will decide not only who to call the next time, but also who to recommend to friends and neighbors if they face a similar need. Those that develop a system to manage the sensory and emotional signals – the “clues” – being emitted throughout a customer’s experience will gain powerful competitive advantages.

Brand management and experience management are directly related yet distinctly different. Managing a brand is not the same as managing experiences to create value, and managing experiences is not brand management per se. Brand management is more focused on how customers feel about the company and experience management is focused more on how customers and/or employees feel about themselves. The trick is to manage brand and experience in a distinctive yet complimentary manner.

Customers value the “reality” they perceive and feel. They will reward or punish you by voting with their feet (or fingers on the phone or in cyberspace), returning to organizations that create experiences that connect with their deeper needs and desires, and walking away from those that don’t.

The author states that the organization should develop an Experience Motif. The Experience Motif literally is “customer-back”: It starts by identifying emotions customers want to feel as a result of an experience (which recognizes that the customer is in control), then works back to what the organization has to do to get to that emotional end frame. In Experience Value Management, a motif becomes the overarching filter for all the clues customers encounter.

Clearly, people prefer some experiences more than others. That preference is based on both functional (or rational) value and emotional value personally derived from the experience. When we prefer an experience, we become committed to it and seek it out over and over again. The result is that we become loyal customers. Regardless of the business you’re in or the nature of your customers, you can manage experiences that are more distinctive and powerful and result in bringing committed customers back again and again.

Truly understanding customer preferences can provide deeper insight into what builds loyalty versus mere satisfaction. This is vital because satisfaction in and of itself is not enough to fuel and sustain loyal customer behavior.

To help understand the customer’s experience, Carbone explains the “Experience Ribbon.” It usually has three stages: 1) Perception, which starts with customers’ preconceived ideas and feelings whether conscious or latent, good or bad, accurate or inaccurate, relevant or irrelevant. Customers bring these thoughts and feelings with them to the encounter. 2) Interaction, which involves customers’ contact with the people, physical environment and systems of the experience. And, 3) Recollection, which involves the way customers remember the experience. 

What customers “feel” about what happened to them is much more important than their rational explanation. Experiences are not point-to-point timelines with distinct beginnings and ends. Instead, they start at a point you may never specifically be aware of and continue well beyond a customer’s momentary interaction with your particular business.

Carbone discusses what he calls “experiential math” – a concept he gets from Marketing professor Dr. Len Berry. This helps you calculate the value of an experience. Berry maintains that to compute overall value accurately, three distinct variables must be mastered and managed: Customers’ expectations about what is about to happen, the outcome that does happen, and customers’ observations of everything that goes on in between. The three separate variables don’t add up to a cumulative total. They are multiplied. The author gives some powerful examples of how this works.

It’s impossible to overemphasize the extent of linking the breadth and depth of an experience. As customers proceed along their identifiable cycles on their experiential journeys, the number, diversity, and intensity of the clues encountered will also contribute a sense of distinctiveness and differentiation. All of the senses should be involved in the management of a memorable experience because they are the input channels for impressions. It’s the way the human brain processes information.

Once you’re clued in, the thrill of hunting for clues and the meaning and importance of clues in managing experiences can be exhilarating.

Experiences are formed through the combination of three different but inter-related types: Functional Clues, which are emitted by the functionality of the specific good or service and generally register most with the customer’s rational thought process; Humanic Clues, which involve stimuli produced by people such as choice of words, tone of voice, enthusiasm, body language, etc.; Mechanic Clues, which come from the physical things that are intimately woven into the experience and include things like sights, sounds, smells, etc. Each clue – functional, humanic, or mechanic, carries a message, suggesting something negative, neutral, or positive to the customer, either consciously or unconsciously.

Getting clued in is about awareness; it’s such an elemental process that most people never think twice about it.

Managing experience as the value proposition requires a shift from a make-and-sell mentality to that of sense-and-respond. Implicit in this is a commitment to a customer focus. The way to manage experiences is through the development of a system. An important aspect of a system is that it’s measured in terms of performance, whereas process is often measured more in terms of adherence. The author goes on to compare this way of thinking to a theater performance.

The practice of managing experiences is all about being deliberate and purposefully organizing clues around a customer-back defined goal and thoroughly understanding the effect the designed clues and their interdependencies will have on the whole. Managing from this perspective requires a directional shift in thinking to a point of view that proceeds from the whole to its parts, rather that the traditional from the isolated parts to the whole. That’s where a systems thinking focus comes to the fore.

The design and development of an experience management system involves a wide variety of tools and competencies in support of distinct but interrelated disciplines. Configuring such a system relies on three fundamental principles: 1) Start by understanding the output of the system from a customer-back perspective. 2) Keep the big picture or end frame in mind; concentrate on the interactions between the parts, rather than actions within any particular segment. 3. Always measure progress in terms of the purpose of the system and its reason for being.

The disciplines you can depend on to create experience management systems (and that the author explores in detail) include:

Assessing Experiences – Defining and understanding your organization’s creation of experiences for multiple audiences in the context of existing information and practices. It focuses on identifying a link between your organization’s internal resources and the experiential expectations of your customers. The best place to start is by figuring out what you already know, identifying what you don’t know but need to know, and being prepared to gain insight about what you don’t even know you don’t know. The goal of assessing is to understand better where your organization stands in its ability to manage meaningful customer experiences and how it will move forward on that front. The discipline of assessing should yield both a strategic understanding of how you’ll leverage experience and a tactical work plan for how you’ll get there. 

Auditing Experiences – The ability to evaluate how random or haphazardly experiences happen and the identification of the gaps between what customers desire and what they currently experience. Gathering knowledge in three areas will produce robust insights that guide subsequent actions in the practice of managing experiences: Identify the customer’s deepest emotional needs and desires (modern neuroscience tells us that as mush as 95% of what we process in an experience takes place in our unconscious mind); Deconstruct the sensory experience the way the customer experiences it; and, Determine the qualitative gap between customer’s needs and desires and how they currently feel in an experience. As in the assessing, be prepared for what you may discover. In auditing, your priority should be less what kind of research you do and more what kind of discoveries you can make.

Designing Experiences – The deliberate articulation of humanic, mechanic, and Functional Clues created to be prompts that collectively deliver the experiential end frame and bond customers to the total experience. The process for this involves five distinctive practices: building a diverse design team, drilling down to the experiential core, focusing on clues, clues, clues, and more clues, developing the experience narrative or story line, and, prioritizing experience implementation opportunities.

Implementing Experiences – Embedding selected clues and integrated experience designs into customer experiences, then testing, sourcing, building, and rolling them out economically and efficiently to accomplish specific objectives that loop back to creating value with customers and employees. This involves five broad activities: aligning resources and opportunities, educating the organization, orienting and immersing people in their roles, rolling out the design itself and embedding Experience Clues, and, establishing accountability and performance. An important step in making the transition up the line from commodity, product, and service to an experiential value proposition is helping people understand that the roles they play in the customer experience are every bit as important as the functional aspects of what they do.

Stewarding Experiences – Managing the system by continuously monitoring the effect and refreshing the clues for maximum impact on customer loyalty and advocacy. In an Experience Management System, every individual is a miniconductor, helping to steward the experience which combines various talents and resources in front of an attentive customer audience. Stewarding experiences challenges organizations to continuously examine not only the effectiveness of the experiences that have been implemented but also the way they have been integrated throughout the Experience Design. Four different but related learning activities are involved here: Measurement of the changes that take place over time, Monitoring to ensure that you continue to observe the emotional value and experience, learning and refining intuition tests your commitment to challenge even your most basic assumptions, an adapting or improving the way you deliver your organization’s experiential value proposition.

If you would like more information about past summaries, they are available on our Archives page (just click on Archive at the top of this page).

As always, if Tom or I can be of any help to you and/or your organization, do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to speaking with you.