Experience needs a Strategy

Think about a brand or organisation that is highly present in your life.

What do you know about it? How do you feel about it? How much do you want to interact with it? 

The chance as that the many tiny experiences you have had of it, beyond the product itself, have fundamentally shaped your perceptions. But it’s often difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that made it happen. It’s a unique experience, good and bad, intended and unintended, that has built over time.

Having a vision for the kind of experience you want to create is almost as fundamental as what product you want to make and sell – and can be even more of a differentiator.

IKEA’s extraordinary success is built on a total unique reengineering of the customer experience, in which every moment has a unique role to play, functional and emotional. Consumer behaviour has changed as a result. As a side-effect, producing the most printed item of literature in the history of mankind – the IKEA catalogue.

If you are in the Apple ecosystem, every point where you touch it reinforces everything you know about the business, and feels totally different from any tech company, ever. Helping to create a business of outrageous price elasticity, that is still loved and seen as great value.

This is what Experience Strategy looks like. Not advertising, or media, or digital user experience, but an architecture for the whole thing, that is centred around people, and touches every part of the journey. It provides a vision, gives some clear missions to get after that will add value to people’s lives, and helps you to identify some clear opportunities to do things better. And it drives you forward.

It’s not a new discipline. But as businesses seek for greater humanity & simplicity, better use of their means, and a clearer vision of the future, near and far, it’s never been more important.

Getting a fresh perspective

There’s never been a greater need for a clear vision for your Experience Strategy.

But it’s never been harder to get at.

Pretty much every business I speak to has told me about an underlying sense of unease and dissatisfaction around how they are communicating. Complexity has brought with it two equal but opposite responses – either doing everything possible but with too little intent to make an impact, or a sense of inertia. And with so much data and so little time, there’s just too much flatness, both in the briefs, and as a result in the creativity of the response.

And that’s just the underlying problem. At this moment, it’s just become a whole lot more urgent. Now it feels like almost everyone has the wrong Experience Strategy in front of them – out of step with the consumer, and with the changing landscape. And in a time where you need to find every bit of edge you can find to get closer to people and drive some growth, that’s a problem that needs resolving.

It’s incredibly hard to know where to get advice that doesn’t have an agenda. Bias is a natural part of life – but it’s difficult to give objective advice on the architecture if you mainly create stained glass windows or make bricks. 

And speed and pragmatism are of the essence. Experiences are complex, holistic systems, and it’s easy to agonise over every piece. But it’s even better to get holistic advice in an accelerated way, to get everyone inspired again about doing things differently, and building towards a different vision for the brand or business experience.

Experience Strategy in action

So, that’s a challenge defined.

How do you help businesses and brands, at scale, to set a clear vision for their Experience Strategy, in a way that they can trust, that aligns them internally, that is developed at speed, and inspires everyone who has to go and execute great thing on behalf of the brand?

It’s a problem that requires highly experienced people, with diverse and holistic perspectives.

It requires an agile and open approach, that provides discipline and increases capability.

It requires a clear ethos and a set of principles on which good work is based.

So that’s what I’ve been working on.

But it’s not a thing you can do on your own – it needs a tribe, and a community.

And I’ve found the perfect partners in Been There Done That – a unique business that has already done amazing things based on the principles of thinking without agenda, clear problem definition and the collective power of a community of the world’s best thinkers.

In the last few months we’ve built a great approach, some fantastic pilot projects and a world-class line-up of holistic strategic thinkers.

If you recognise the problems or opportunities in this piece – or you’d like to be a part of solving them – then please get in touch.

Clear, human, holistic thinking about the experience that brands and businesses create is going to be fundamental to success in the coming years. It needs some fresh, inclusive, agnostic thinking. It's an idea whose time has come.

I am looking forward to helping to make it happen.