CHAPTER 02

YOUR FIRST KISS

Harnessing the Power of Experience

Every brand needs a story. If the role of story is the most powerful tool for connecting brands to consumers, is it possible to evolve that connection into a relationship? Yes! Meet the power of experience; it catapults the effects of storytelling. It is the element within the definition of storytelling that we believe is the most powerful, yet in most stories, remains sorely underleveraged: Storytelling: Sharing of events with words, images, sounds and/or experiences, sometimes with improvisation or embellishment. Experiences are more powerful than pictures and words alone. The best stories are ones that also create shared experiences. People don’t just want to be told a story; they want to be part of the story. In the past, the way we had become accustomed to marketing our businesses was more about the telling, primarily using words and images. And that worked pretty darn well for about 100 years. We still use those elements, and now with the onslaught of technology advances, we can evolve telling into shared experiences between the consumer and the brand. What is so important about this thing we keep calling experience? It has to do with creating deeper connections, increasing retention, and extending loyalty.

Power of Experience. We remember and retain stories about ourselves much more vividly than we remember stories about others, because we’ve experienced them. Think back on your first kiss. Now think about how reading a really well-written story about someone’s first kiss can facilitate a connection in your mind to your own first kiss, thereby connecting you to the story. How about watching an amazing film about somebody’s first kiss—a film with great acting, great directing, and great camera work—see how that not only makes the connection but takes to the next level? What about when you hear a secondhand story about a friend’s first kiss? This also makes a connection, partly because it’s someone you know, partly because that personal reference probably makes the story rather entertaining and perhaps the connection here is even deeper because of our natural instinct to compare. But your own first kiss? The experience of your own first kiss . . . you can still feel it now, can’t you? It’s unlike reading, watching, or hearing about anyone else’s first kiss—because you experienced it. If you had never experienced your own first kiss, the connections you made to the stories of other people’s first kiss would not be nearly as strong. This is why experience should be the element that marketing plans and maybe even business models are designed with. We must all look for ways to create opportunities for consumers to have “first kisses” with our brands, rather than just telling them about our brand. This is story making versus storytelling; there’s a big difference. Start designing your marketing efforts toward offering first kiss experiences—in several ways and in several areas simultaneously if you can. Facilitate opportunities for your consumers to have experiences with you wherever and whenever they want.

A first kiss is memorable. A first kiss is emotional. A first kiss hardwires itself in the brain. A first kiss can be reexperienced with every new partner. Each time we lean in toward the next new set of lips, our anticipation engages all the senses until they stand on end. This is the emotional and physical response you are looking to create for each experience with your brand. Then human nature kicks in and our minds replay all these first kiss experiences. If you’ve lived on the edge a bit, maybe you had a first kiss with someone of a different race or religion. You replay it. How about lip-locking with someone of the same sex? You replay it. Extramarital affair first kiss? You replay it. Or, more seriously, that moment in the birthing room of the hospital with your newborn, your first kiss with this new life . . . you replay it. Create experiences with your brand that people want to replay, like they do their first kiss. Create experiences that make people want to come back again and again and reexperience your brand in a variety of ways. In other words, as a brand, create more experiences to increase brand retention. The more you reengage consumers, the more they remember you and stick with you, thereby extending their brand connection. You have to keep kissing!

Experience is also a powerful platform for learning and building knowledge. When you were two years old, your mom undoubtedly told you 50 times not to touch the hot stove. Inevitably, you did. In that moment, you not only burned your skin but burned and branded an experience into your brain, which became part of your story. That experience sits more deeply grounded in your mind than your mom’s audio loop. In the story of “don’t touch the hot stove,” your mom = storyteller and you = story maker. Why? Because you experienced it. It becomes knowledge for future reference and telling, and possibly even leaves a little scar.

People will much more vividly retain an experience of actually traveling to Nepal or to Sao Paulo or to Brooklyn for the first time than they would if they read a book about any of these destinations, right? And, not only are people more likely to remember personal experiences, they are much more likely to share the memories of those experiences with other people, possibly influencing them to try the experience, too. Experience engenders further storytelling. With the amplification of technology, an experience can be so much more than a splash; it can send ripples everywhere.

What is it that brought us to this point of having to evolve our storytelling into Storyscaping? Let’s examine some of the changes that are driving this necessity.

Consumer Expectations. One of the biggest challenges is that consumer expectations are off the dial. They are extreme both in the speed with which they shift and also the fact that they set new norms on a constant basis. Consumers are also inspired to review, critique, assess, and analyze everything from socks to political parties. There is a newfound relationship with content, and with it, a social pressure to be involved by sharing it. This has given consumers a new world of power and influence.

Today’s consumers have totally forgotten how we used to walk to find a payphone to make a call—on a rotary dial. We needed a quarter to start and fumbled for more change when the conversation went on longer than 3 minutes. They are unaware of the concept of having to wait to make a phone call. Modern consumers have phones that pay their bills, locate their children, make videos, map out car trips, and even tell them what to cook for dinner, in any language. We get all this with the press, click, and swipe of a screen or two. What’s more, you can do any of these, and about 3 billion other things, electronically 24 / 7 / 365. As a society, we have so quickly adapted to this convenience that it has become a full-on expectation, and when something, a-n-y-thing happens to disrupt this flow of fingertip availability, beware; the whole world is going to know about it . . . as soon as the whole world is back up and running that is (which, to our point, will most likely just be in just a matter of moments).

Posts, status updates, live streaming videos, and tweets are some ways of hearing a fellow consumer’s opinion about any service, product, brand, or respective representative he or she interacts with throughout any given day or night. This creates a living, dynamic “rap sheet” or trophy shelf, whichever applies at the moment. We are now surrounded by the ability to provide and/or read customer reviews instantly in social media, and the major retailers and service industries encourage consumer ratings now, too. If you can’t find them there, check one of the many referral and review websites specifically designed for service reviews.

Consumers Are Marketers. Beyond reviews and ratings, your company is no longer the sole determinant of the brand’s perception or content. Who is? Consumers. They create massive content around brands today. Consumer relationships with brands dramatically shifted around 2008, when social media began dominating online interaction. The social media apparatus provided an opportunity to be on equal footing with brands, talking to them directly and using the facility of technology to share, comment, and like content. People now interact with brands in ways no one could have imagined when studying brand management in school just a short time ago. In those days, no one was welcome to use logos freely or produce anything for a brand that wasn’t directly controlled by the corporate or advertising domain. Now it’s the opposite. The brand belongs to the people. It’s a brand free-for-all. With technology, consumers can take a screenshot, photograph, and disseminate content related to your brand whenever they like. And they do. Users now take time to submit photos classified with your hashtag on Instagram. There are no quality controls possible to monitor these personal photographs of brand interaction. Sometimes these interactions are not appropriate or even PG-rated. Welcome to a new age of democratic expression—one that includes the use/possible misuse of brand communication or branded experiences and products. A brand’s Twitter tags can be applied to any thoughts, any political assertion, and any consumer satisfaction or complaint, and instead of litigating, a brand must now conduct itself as an interacter with its consumers. A modern approach dictates that these interactions still qualify as part of a valid brand journey. Mechanisms such as a Facebook page put brands in direct dialogue with their customers and those customers’ sharing of experiences, good and bad. It no longer matters what the official customer service hours are. A bank’s Facebook page must be ready to deal with published content about its outrageous fees. A health food manufacturer might be called to task about its political contributions. An automotive manufacturer might be questioned about its factory standards. All of this happens in a very public domain with an audience of thousands who are sharing stories with clicks, in hyperspeed, 24/7, all around the world.

Even British Airways (BA) was taken to task with a paid social media promotion started by a customer’s relative because of a lost bag.1 After complaining on social media about the poor service, the consumer received a message that BA’s social media monitoring is active only for certain hours and that a direct message should be sent to get a response at a later time. This spawned an interesting chain of events in response. Basically, the complainer paid to promote his tweet (like buying an ad buy) and targeted key BA markets. This generated a massive response of criticism for BA. What was a small problem that could have been easily addressed—a lost bag—became a huge social conversation of criticism fueled by a paid promotion to gain great reach in core targets. Now content by consumers is amplified like ads, by paying for coverage. It’s not the first time people have paid to complain, but its easy now, its dynamic and powerful, and it reminds us of the use of our content in brand conversations and the expectations of consumers in service and on social media channels.

The fact is, everyone is more creative and expressive thanks to the Internet. Photography apps have turned everyone with a camera phone (i.e., everyone) into Andy Warhol or Ansel Adams. God help us! Clickable filters and photo editing tools democratize the ability to produce highly engaging images. Free (and robust!) blogging platforms give everyone the chance to be a published author and write about anything. Anyone can post editorial content and wax poetic about anything. Scores of blogs exist solely to offer reviews of products and services to specific subsets of customers: daddy blogs, crafter blogs, single mom blogs, parents of twins, gay auto enthusiasts, cosplay fans, furries, plushies, and many, many more. People start social media campaigns to save TV shows from cancellation. There are blogs dedicated specifically to a single TV program and recapping episodes of that show. There exist lively discussions among fans that can go on for pages and sometimes will include input from that show’s writers and actors. People are creating and consuming content faster than ever before. This is a massive shift and cannot be avoided or stopped. Instead, evolve. Continue your shift from brand control to brand enablement. Build in the ability for greater participation through the creation of worlds and immersive experiences.

Consumers Have Spidey Sense. Now that you are connecting with the power of experience, let’s understand why experience is so important. We must open our minds to one glaring, big, fat fact: In this information age, there are no secrets. This is truly an always-on world with anything you need at the click of a key, a mouse, or more likely, a tap and swipe across of a finger or two. Being hyperconnected brings an automatic by-product: increased transparency. Consumers feel, they sense, everything they need to know about a brand in approximately 4 seconds. Think about how this is true in your own life. Imagine you’ve traveled far, far away; you don’t speak the language or know much about the culture. You walk into a mall and simply look around, determining which initial stores to visit. As soon as you step near the entrance of any store, you can very quickly determine whether that store is “right” for you or for your mom, whether it’s upscale or downscale whether they care about quality, whether they care about their customers, and so on. Consumers subconsciously arrive at these conclusions through the use of all of our senses, especially our sixth sense or, what we half jokingly call Spidey sense.

The reason customers want experiences rather than ads is rooted in basic human nature. We are all constantly writing, rewriting, editing, and conspiring about the story of ourselves. It’s the one story. It’s the one thing that you’re tuned into all the time. You’re never tuned out of your story, except for when you want to jump into a different story—like when you watch movies or read books or play video games. That is when people can escape from themselves and actively suspend reality. It is human nature to live from the concept of me, me, me—not just your customers, but all of us. Our minds are constantly assessing: “What’s in it for me?” “How do I see myself in that car?” “How will someone else see me in that job?” If you could listen to the conversation that goes on in other people’s heads, 90 percent of the conversations you’d hear would be about them, not about what’s happening in the room, not about some higher-order thing. Everyone is involved in the journey of me.

Storytelling gurus know that the main ingredient in preparing great stories that connect with audiences is to make sure the audience finds themselves in the story. That makes it relatable. Whether your plot is overcoming a monster, a journey of survival, or love lost, it doesn’t matter. When people read a book, watch a movie, or hear a story, regardless of medium or format, it is imperative that they see themselves in the story. It doesn’t matter if they see their aspirations or even see their flaws or their demons; they just need to see some aspect of themselves in the story. That is the power of story. You, as a business or brand, simply cannot make a more powerful connection than to literally become part of your customer’s story. It’s really that simple.

Experience-Based Differentiation vs. Product Differentiation. Clients generally come to us from one of two camps. Camp 1 recognizes and subscribes to the power of experience-based differentiation as a competitive advantage. Camp 2 arrives because of their concern regarding the ability to remain competitive and meet consumer expectations; they want to find or leverage a product or service edge over competitors. When working in camp 2, we seize the opportunity to delve into research that will help us best understand a particular consumer’s expectations and behaviors. In this camp we also get to help consumers envision their shift into focusing on experiences. Sometimes we find consumer expectations actually exceed current possibilities. As an example, today customers of a retail chain would expect that if they purchased a product from an online store, they would certainly be able to drive to a physical store, walk inside, and return that product. This seems like a perfectly logical expectation for a customer to have. “Isn’t this the same company I dealt with online?” they would ask themselves. The reality of operationalizing this simple customer expectation within that retail chain could be monumental. The retailer may need to connect things such as inventory systems together that were never designed for this. Who gets credit for the sale? The manager of the store or the woman responsible for the company website? How do you keep track of inventory across locations? A simple customer expectation could actually create havoc in their world. Some companies see these efforts to connect experiences as non–revenue generating and deprioritize them. Others see it as an expense that is a “necessary evil” in order to keep up with what other retail chains are doing and move forward with little urgency. The smart ones understand that creating great experiences can often offer you the competitive edge you are looking for.

Now jump back over to camp 1. These folks look for differentiated experiences that can be used to leapfrog the competition and lead the relevancy curve. A brand can lose its luster and need to be reinvigorated, which is more often than not something that’s handled through advertising. But a business can also start becoming irrelevant when the product or the experience around the product or service becomes irrelevant. The example here is the Disney versus Hanna-Barbera story. One brand said it was in the business of family entertainment.2 If this brand had just stuck with Mickey Mouse cartoons but never evolved into being the Disney of today, it could never have made that leap or that evolution. But when a similar brand defines itself as an animation company, then you can see the missed opportunities Hanna-Barbera had.3 This context clearly displays an important distinction for how big brands are becoming irrelevant. Think about Blockbuster. There was one on every corner, while many mom-and-pop video rental places went out of business. In its heyday, they may have felt as though they took over the world. And now? If they would’ve just seen what else was changing, Netflix, Roku, or Hulu could’ve been their idea. All they had to do was ask customers about their worlds and pay attention. They didn’t have to be geniuses; they just had to study consumers. This is why our focus on experiences, differentiated experiences, takes you into ethnography, social anthropology, product development, experience design, and innovation—it takes you into a world that gets deeply informed. People’s behaviors and expectations change, and they change fast; look no further than technological innovation as the biggest catalyst to those changes. Pay attention to consumer tech evolution if you want to predict consumer behavior. If you’re just in the business of making ads, you’re more like Blockbuster, just trying to wrangle more people into that store on the corner. You lose the plot. You lose your place. You lose your relevance. You lose your business.

Technology Is an Enabling Tool. Technology affords us lots of supercool things in this life. When you boil it all down, many of these supercool things would probably be found under the heading of “wants” versus “needs.” However, rampant expectations means that the needs list drafted a major player with its addition of mobile banking. We now have the ability to take a photo of legal tender, a check, and send that photo up into space. It then comes back down, lands on a computer monitor, and that’s good enough for the bank to say, in an authentic drive-through teller voice, “Okay, we’ll add this amount to your account and update your balance accordingly.” Sheer brilliance based on practicality. This technology certainly provides a convenience value and the comfort factor of no longer having to interact with the process-oriented, transaction-based bank teller. Who would have ever imagined the almighty dollar being used in such a way? And now that we can deposit a check by taking a photo of it, our world crumbles that moment when the mobile banking software hiccups and will not take our deposit. What do you mean the photo doesn’t work today? Are you serious? I have to get in the car and drive to a branch. They are sooooo going to hear about this when I get there! Power to the people. Of course, it is not technology alone that allows this virtual transaction. Behind the curtain, there exists another form of creativity, one that requires “systems thinking,” a keen understanding of the human experience and the imagination to reinvent or reimagine how the world could or should work. That said, these ideas have little value unless you can make them real, which requires some tools. Technology is the new paper and pencil that drives this.

Clearly, the platforms of delivery have gotten a whole lot more interesting, vast, fast, kinetic, and kinesthetic with the recent advancements in technology. Technology enables connection of individuals on a mass scale, so affinity and community can be established more easily and faster than ever before. As a result, the speed of adoption and innovation can be faster and niche groups can be large scale. We have been preaching about the powerful emotional connections that can be made between brands and their customers though experience, but you may ask, “What’s so emotional? What’s so personal about technology? Zeros and ones are not exactly warm and fuzzy, right?” Well that’s exactly the point of this book. In the conventional world the storytellers are entrusted with crafting communications, and the product or operations folks are charged with developing the products and systems. We believe those barriers need to be demolished. Any good chief marketing officer (CMO) wants some influence on the product experience. You can’t run BMW and be out there telling the world, “This is the Ultimate Driving Machine”4 but then make a crappy car. That’s not going to work for long. In his book Designing Business, Clement Mok wrote about how the experience is the brand. We wholeheartedly believe that as well.

We all need to recognize that in this digital storytelling era—a brand now has the power to create an experience with its customer, who then wants to be part of the story, as opposed to just being told your brand story. This is an important distinction, and whenever any of us recognizes this opportunity, we should opt for creating immersive and memorable experiences more often. Having an experience with your brand is the connection that consumers desire and expect. And remember, actions speak louder than words; experiences are more powerful, and there’s no substitute for the real thing. Make your experiences authentic.

After reviewing marketplace and expectation changes, it’s easy to agree that consumers seek interaction, engagement, and participation with brands. And although experiences are the opportunity, they cannot exist in isolation. To create brand value and meaningful relationships, experiences cannot afford to be isolated; they need to be part of the brand story line, but more than that, they need to be part of a Story System. Therefore, our focus should be on more than just the power of story, and more than the power of experience: You need to begin creating worlds.