Monthly Archives: October 2014

Making an Experience Sharable

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 Some words that we use frequently and automatically are taken for granted. Recreation is one of those words. I don’t mean the concept I mean the actual word. We think of recreation is an activity, but delve into the language and what emerges is the idea of re-creation. Recreation is activity worthy of remembering, or re-creating in our minds.

The aim of any interaction with a Brand should be recreational. The experience should leave a a positive residue that is worthy of memory, and sharing. We want the audience to re-create the good points out loud… one-on-one or with social media. Naturally when we enjoy something we want to share the experience. Things seem more real, more tangible, when we can see and feel the reaction of others. Enjoyment validated is enjoyment experienced.

We share positive and negative experiences because we are social beings, meant to live in groups and watch each other’s backs. If we could travel in time back to pre-history, I would bet that our ancestors would engage in stories about happening upon a field of berry bushes (positive), or the time they startled a mama-bear (negative). These stories inevitably become exaggerated and embellished as they are retold. The net result is that they teach others what to seek and what to avoid.

Research by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman speaks to the idea that we commit experiences to memory in specific ways. Kahneman’s discovery of our “experiencing selves versus remembering selves” tells us that an overall positive experience can be “ruined” in our memory because of one profoundly negative element. When we are in the moment we are engaged in consuming what is happening with our senses and responding. What Brands and experiences must connect with is the remembering self, that storytelling part of our memory that we can access and share. In Kahneman’s words, “what we get to keep from our experiences is a story”.

The challenge with Brands and experiences is to not only mitigating negatives, but to prime the story and make it’s retelling more likely, and more salient. Much has been written about “storytelling” and it’s role in brand and marketing, but I want to add a different slant. We want our Brand to be a mentor, the customer to be a hero, and a transforming journey, but what storytelling “seeds” are we planting in the customer’s head for them to share. How can the experience provide a memorable landscape, populated with signature events and landmarks that can be re-created and re-told?

These experiential landmarks are key to creating memorable, and therefore sharable experiences. And to be really sticky in the memory, they need to be personal. The trap of many experience designs is that they reach for the “big bang”. They offer an initial value in the ability to be the new cool thing. The first folks who visited a Rainforest Cafe had a story to tell, but it was about the newness of the experience and getting credit for seeing it before others. After that the experience stories became about the food or the prices and a downward spiral ensued. There was no more storytelling fuel as the experience wasn’t personal, it was  “mass”. The signature event didn’t refresh or connect one-on-one with individuals. It was one gigantic landmark; an event.

Effective landmark experiences add up to a story versus explode all at once. And they provide a memorable context for personal experiences to happen. They can be architectural spaces, exciting merchandising and displays, scents and sounds, but the common denominator is that they must be unique to the brand, and play a supporting role to a personalized interaction.

An effective way to to think about a sharable experience design is to test the story-worthless via scripting the story you want told. Work the story back to the design and keep refining. What contexts need to be created and what personal interactions need to be orchestrated? The goal is to get to that pre-historic moment where the delights and amazement of finding the berries crowd out the unfortunate encounters with bears.

Bill Chidley is a Partner and Co-Founder at ChangeUp. Creating Innovating Experiences that Drive Growth. http://www.changeupinc.com

Admiring a Brand for the Wrong Reason is the Biggest Branding Mistake

Apple Logo

Do you have Apple Envy?

Several years ago I was put in charge of informing how a giant telecommunications company should rebrand after a major acquisition. The client saw their past as an era of “utility monopolization” and all of the consumer negativity that comes with it. The post-merger future appeared to present an opportunity to start a new chapter, and be an iconic brand that people would love and respect, versus tolerate. The available resources put towards the new brand seemed limitless, so the potential for this big change seemed plausible.

What resulted was what I dubbed “Apple Envy”, and it inspired me to look at brands in a fresh way. Following Apple was a potential trap. Did the audience for telecommunications services want their provider to be like Apple or did emotions and “belonging” not drive their choice?  We did exhaustive research on what does drive choice in this space and concluded that consumers did not. In fact they hated the idea. They certainly didn’t want the current brand, but they did want one that helped them do more and be better connected to the world.

So can a brand be iconic and not be another Apple… not be a rockstar? This client’s brand was an American institution so it seemed destined to make an impact, but how and why?  The answer appeared to lie in how we as humans attach to brands, not how brands project themselves to us. Understanding Brand Attachment was going to provide the answer, and it did.

I won’t disclose the details behind the eventual solution for this client, but I will share what I believe to be an important aspect of how we all should approach Branding, based on how customers engage and attach with Brands.

To begin, we humans are not hardwired to create relationships with corporations; we are wired to relate to each other as fellow humans. We identify each other by name and we categorize each other based on perception and experience: friend versus foe, strong versus weak, supportive versus destructive, etc. We can see this categorization in action when we feel in need. Who do we turn to when we feel lonely, feel depressed, need leadership and wise counsel, or maybe need a ride to the airport? This categorization process is fundamental to our social abilities as humans.

Brands are the personification, or humanization, of corporations. We can’t help it. As humans we automatically evaluate corporations as human entities. We project our human bias onto whatever and whomever we have a relationship with. This can be seen in our behavior towards our pets. Who hasn’t felt like their dog is sad when we leave them alone? We project our human feelings and emotions onto a dog or cat irrationally and expect them to be like us emotionally. In reality the opposite is also at work. Our dogs and cats project their “dogness” and “catness” onto our behaviors. A recent scientific article just proposed that cats see their owners as giant, benevolent felines. We import each other into our respective realities. Likewise we project our human bias onto organizations, and Brand is the manifestation of that projection.

The mistake many Brands make is benchmarking against a homogenous, monolithic notion of a great brand. The reality is that there are myriad ways a brand can be great, or iconic, just as there are many ways a person can be great. We categorize people as great leaders, athletes, entertainers, hard workers, and on and on. We would not expect an Olympic champion to go through a makeover and become a world-class chef.

With brands the first level of categorization is utility. Not basic utility, but a higher order idea of what we need from them as human surrogates. This first division is Affinity or Enabling.

Affinity brands fill our need for identity; to define ourselves to others, project our values, and our basic need to belong. Affinity brands end up on tee shirts and tattoos. Apple is an affinity brand, as is Harley-Davidson, Nike, and Rolex. These brands are iconic in the way celebrities are iconic. These are the friends we want to be associated with. The cool kids who make us feel good that we know them.

Enabling brands fill our need to be more powerful and effective. They give us “Superpowers” to become like comic book heroes. Enabling brands give us extreme capabilities like the ability to get a package from New York to LA overnight, or get a pizza to magically show up in 30 minutes. We don’t wear enabling brands on tee-shirts, but they make us feel secure and empowered on the inside. They make us feel smart.  UPS, Delta, and Verizon are enabling Brands, and iconic. These are the experts we go to when we have a problem. These are our BFFs.

There isn’t a “preferred” place to be with this Affinity/Enabling classification. Both fullfill a need and both have icon potential. It is like male and female; they are different but equally human. I also believe that it is more of a scale than an absolute, but be careful not to try to be both. Take a stand. The point is that a brand should know how its desired audience desires to attach to it and the utility it provides. For existing brands, like my telecom client, it is not impossible, but unnecessary to change from what they were (Enabling) to what they aspired to be with Apple Envy (Affinity) and they fortunately saw the logic.

In today’s customer-centric, brand-experience focused world, an understanding of Brand Attachment is not an option. Resources are too scarce and there is less time to correct mistakes. So start by asking yourself if your brand would pass the tee-shirt test. Would your shirt make you feel like you were really cool or delivering a delicious pizza?

Bill Chidley is a Partner and Co-Founder at ChangeUp. Creating Innovating Experiences that Drive Growth. http://www.changeupinc.com

Learning From Orlando: The Center Store Re-imagined

Disney World

Disney World

Attempts to invigorate the “center store”… that wasteland in the grocery and Supercenter… seem to be in limbo. A few years ago it was the hot topic at retail conferences and trade shows, but it looks like the topics of omni-channel and mobile/digital are now stealing the show.

But the truth is that the center store remains an automatic, list driven experience that doesn’t inspire or excite us. The perimeter of the grocery is still the sensorial star. Mobile coupons, a smattering of department reinventions ala P&G, Kimberly Clark, and Purina that appear to be incongruent, and the occasional curved fixture are cries in the dark. Beyond that, the center store is nothing but gondola runs ad nauseum.

Understandably the perimeter of the supermarket has received the most attention and investment. Grocers saw their expertise in “fresh” as a strategic advantage, and lever, over the Walmart Supercenter onslaught. But the playing field has become more equal now, 20 years later. The center of the store is still untapped potential.

What if? What if the center store was an experience and not a task? I want to take a few moments to jump-start the topic. And I want to be a bit unorthodox. So, let’s talk about how we can learn from Orlando Florida.

In the 1940’s, Orlando was a swampy, humid town in the relative center of a state already known as a tourist destination. The only thing notable about Orlando was that it had an Army base. That was probably the only reason to visit Orlando.

Then, all the attention in Florida was fixated on the coastline. The great beaches, sun and surf fueled the investments in Miami, Daytona, Naples. These were the produce departments, delis, and bakeries of the state. They are sexy. The center of the state was just the leftover land in between the coasts. But look at Orlando today? There are more direct flights to Orlando from points elsewhere in the US than any other city in Florida and is annually the most visited American city.

The reason is vision and investment. Walt Disney had created Disneyland in southern California in 1955. He had an even grander vision for an eastern version that would be closer to the majority of the American population, but coastal property was expensive. The center of the state was economically irrelevant, so it was cheap. But it had traffic and infrastructure. Disney World opened in Orlando in 1971, and since has been a magnet for other development, including Universal Theme Park. The place attracts people, and the people spend.

Orlando is a great analogy for what could happen to the center store with vision and investment. With today’s additional pressure for retailers to stay relevant in the face of Amazon same-day delivery, the center store must create value beyond inventory holding power. Of course it needs to be easy to shop for shoppers on a mission, but with 50,000 items and only 500 in the average household, couldn’t space be re-imagined? What if it wasn’t a sea of gondola shelving, but a collection of themed spaces that flowed into each other, like the “worlds” at Disney? What if you could learn about how the products can fit into your needs best or solve a problem versus check off a list?

With breakthroughs in mobile technology, in-store networks, and especially mobile payment, the grocery may not even need a single entry/exit anymore to funnel shoppers through the checkouts. What could this do for convenience that could shake up the entire center store layout?

Let’s see what we can learn from Orlando as the evolving future of retail demands fresh thinking. The store could be the best of both, with great beaches AND a fun exciting destination in the center, creating a destination experience that no eCommerce retailer could match.

Would You Buy Crackers From This Owl?

Kroger's new entry price-point brand

Kroger’s new entry price-point brand

Have you heard this one? Knock-knock. Who’s there? Moo. Moo wh…INTERRUPTING COW! Well meet Kroger’s new interrupting owl.

In June Kroger launched 3 new private label brands to replace their aging “Value” brand for entry price-point products. The move was more than a facelift; it was a complete re-imagining of the branding strategy for this tier of products. It marks a big shift in the role of the Kroger name in the mix of merchandise by excluding their logo altogether. Two of the new brands are certainly quirky- an owl whispering “P$$T” for food items, and “Check this out” for non-foods. There is also a fresh food solution that used to scream “Value” in red and blue but is now tastefully presented as Heritage Farms. It is the talking owl, however, that is worth examining.

This “talking owl” approach reflects a new consumer proposition around savings grown out of the Great Recession; saving is fashionable, saving is fun, savings are gathered not hunted. (It also shows some bravery on the part of Kroger to embrace an unorthodox new creative direction.)

The past solution utilized the store’s logo as an endorsement and the big Value message was code for “cheap”. I can see the up side of removing the store name from these entry price-point products for Kroger. It’s a potential drag on quality associations when the chain is looking to associate its logo with national brand competing products elsewhere on the shelf. It is also tough for Kroger generally since they go to market under so many different banners (Ralph’s in California, Fred Meyer in the northwest, etc.) Removing their name neutralizes the products across their system.

What is breakthrough about the solution is that the owl character directly engages the shopper in the store. Additionally the brand communicates something positive about the shopper’s decision once at home versus being just a graphic announcement of low price. The packaging, by actually “speaking”, becomes a part of the store experience itself as shoppers scan the shelves. The owl and provocatively bouncy type interrupt with a proposition that is almost anti-brand. Once in the home pantry, it then reinforces that Mom is smart, not a mere penny-pincher.

Here the owl as a spoke-species is the wise purveyor of intelligent choices. In this economy of “good enough” he intervenes in the aisle and alerts shoppers with a direct message; “Psst, check this out…”

Private label merchandise is a powerful means for retailers to manage margin and retain customers with proprietary offerings. Here the new Kroger program creatively becomes part of the store experience itself. The hard part is the art of managing the SKU’s so that they do not trade down shoppers from their higher priced options, but entice them into categories they are buying at dollar stores or avoiding all together.

After a few hundred trips I may get tired of the owl or he may start to lose his interrupting power, but hey, he may start saying other creative and relevant things and become a valuable new brand asset. Knock knock. Who’s there? A great new approach to connecting private label with the store experience.