Will Customer Experience Design Replace Marketing

white paper Will Customer Experience Design Replace Marketing?

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ne has to feel sorry for "marketing". It (He? She?) is constantly being threatened with replacement by new disciplines, new channels, and new management theories (two years ago the question was: Is the CMO becoming obsolete; Just yesterday I attended a webinar that asked the question: “Is Big Data replacing Marketing?”). Ultimately "marketing" continues to survive and thrive, and perhaps that's for a reason.

The quick answer to all of these ruminations is, “obviously not!” However, the question "Will experience design replace marketing?" begs a deeper look into the role of customer experience design as a discipline and as a management approach.

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The term customer experience (CE), as it applies to a rigid approach to designing experiences for customers, really evolved, strangely, from online marketing. Website designers (and their successors, app developers) found it increasingly necessary to focus on user friendliness, which morphed into user experience.

The necessity to ensure that site users, online customers, social media subscribers, and so on, had a decent, comprehensible, successful experience was somewhat novel to the techies that dominated the digital marketing world (after all, it was hard enough to get the thing to work reasonably well most of the time, let alone think about how the user felt after using it). But, as competition heated up and grownups (actually digital marketers) started infiltrating the techie world, it became apparent that if the user experience was mis-

erable, miserable users would go elsewhere, and there were countless other places these consumer could go. So digital marketers spent their ample time focusing on user experience.

The rest is history. Within the blink of an eye these online customer experience experts applied their expertise to the overall world of customer experience. To them, and their intimidated bosses, the idea that customers in the real world had experiences, was novel - in fact, they believed they had made a new and important discovery. And, in a somewhat distorted logic, they determined that this real-world customer experience could only be examined through complex, extensive and wide ranging analysis of digital information covering on and offline (but mostly on, for obvious reasons) behaviours of consumers.

Excerpted from the article by Protean Managing Partner Laurence Bernstein first published in Hotelexecutive.com (http://hotelexecutive.com)

“Digital marketing, like a slow growing virus inhabiting

the body marketing, is poised to take over marketing. However, it will not succeed be-

cause, at the end of the day, digital marketing, like promotion and distribution, is a function of

marketing, not marketing itself.”

It was as if a biologist discovered the existence of a species called "elephant" by identifying cells in a microscope; and then determined that the way to study elephant behaviour was to examine each cell...in a microscope! Some luddites might have suggested that finding out where the elephants were and watching them might give a more nuanced and insightful understanding of elephant behaviour. These postmillennial biologists might also have found out that contrary to their great eureka moment, elephants had been in existence forever and, more importantly, most people knew about them, and scientists had been learning about them for hundreds of years (pretty much since mankind itself was invented).

It is exactly the same for customer experience. Presumably much to the surprise of any of these CE experts, customers have been experiencing stuff forever, and the study and examination of these experiences has been the foundation of business since the serpent gave Eve that "welcome to our property" apple in the Garden of Eden Resort (an experience that did not work out well for Adam, the serpent or Eve).

The realisation is now coming to the fore that customer experience is not a "big data" outcome.

And, while statistical analysis of customer behaviour is useful, it is not the route to the real insights that lead to differentiated, relevant experiences. A tacit understanding of this was expressed in a presentation at a recent Sitecor Symposium titled: “Great Customer Experiences: Moving beyond digital marketing to build the ultimate customer experience.”

The tacit admission here seems to be that “ultimate” customer experiences, which are necessarily more engaging than "best” customer experiences, cannot be built by digital marketing. While this is no surprise, what is surprising, and not a little disturbing, is the idea that for many experts "customer experience" is, or

was until this moment in Las Vegas, a function of digital marketing.

If this is the case, that except for the rare instance of moving beyond, customer experience is a function of digital marketing, then there is indeed some possibility that it will replace Marketing as we know it today. Digital marketing, like a slow growing virus inhabiting the body marketing, is poised to take over marketing. However, while poised, digital marketing will not take over marketing because, in spite of what pundits may think and say, at the end of the day digital marketing, like promotion and distribution, is a function of marketing, not marketing itself.

But CE is not a function of digital marketing (in reality). There are many factors that transcend recorded (i.e. big data) and reported (i.e. customer survey based) descriptions of behavior (and even attitudes). Understanding how your service is experienced by customers is complex and requires "soft" insights into both the nature of what you do and the customers themselves.

It is fundamental to the end result of great customer experiences that we understand this simple proposition: we do not ‘deliver’ experiences; if we "deliver' anything it is sets of activities, sensations and associations that result in experiences by the other person. And this experience, importantly, is both conscious and unconscious, and the combination of both is what determines the customer's response -- their judgement of what we are (brand), and their determination of what to do about it (choice). Ultimately we want our customers to like us and determine we are the kind of people they want to do business with; and to choose to stay with us again, tell their friends about us, recommend us on TripAdvisor and so on.

But there is more to this than simply triggering a constant barrage of well received experiences.

As behavioural economists point out, Page 2

“Our task as experience ar-

chitects is to design experiences that become remembered experiences; our task as great cus-

tomer experience architects is to design remembered experiences that reflect, encom-

pass and amplify the brand�

of the 2,000 experiences we have each day, we remember very few. So our task as experience architects is to design experiences that become remembered experiences; our task as great customer experience architects is to design remembered experiences that reflect, encompass and amplify the brand. It’s a lot to ask, and it is a task that requires, as we have said, deep insight into who these customers are and how they view the world. Not to mention who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

Which brings up the question: is customer experience a function of marketing? Forgetting for a moment the myopic idea that customer service is a function of digital marketing (it is not and never has been), then does the responsibility for engineering these remembered experiences rest in the discipline of marketing, or somewhere else in the organization?

It has long been our belief that experience is the outcome of a well and consistently delivered brand; in fact, we have said that the way the brand is experienced -- customer experience, as it were -- is inextricably imbedded in the brand.

Further, we believe that the experience defines the brand, and the brand defines the business. The agglomeration of the remembered experiences, as noted above, determines the brand experience (the Figure 2 clarifies, the brand is the business. So, in our view, experience, brand and the business itself are all one interwoven "thing".

Great brands -- which can be defined as brands that are consistently credited with great customer experiences -- can draw a straight line in their strategic development

from the mission to the customer experience (see Figure 1) Ultimately, customer experience fits into the business strategy as a component of the virtuous circle (see Figure 2) With this in mind, the ques-

Figure 2: Virtuous Brand-Business Circle

tion ceases to be whether customer experience is a function of marketing (it's a function of wherever the brand is being championed), but rather whether the brand is a function of marketing, or, as the diagram illustrates, does the brand transcend one department? In well managed consumer centric businesses the brand is universal -- every department, every person is challenged with the responsibility for delivering on the brand promise, internally and externally.

But it is the marketing department that is responsible for the management of this, for ensuring that every activity in the organization is, for lack of a better word, "on brand," and ensuring the manifestation of the brand (the brand experience) is continuously tweaked to meet changing customer needs.

So we can see that customer experience design is really not a dis-

Figure 1: Drawing a straight line from mission to experience Page 3

“... is up to the marketing department to ensure that

every associate understands the brand, the brand experience�

creet discipline: it is the result of everything that is produced by everybody in the organization; and to that degree, everybody in the organization is responsible for experience design. This is especially true in a cocreation service industry such as the hospitality business, where there is no product without immediate experience. In the case of interactions with hotel associates (e.g. front desk associates), the co-creation involves responses, and responses to responses -- a complicated dance that is directed by the associate and that must ensure, at the end, that the interaction is experienced in accordance with the brand. While every individual in a co-creation situation is responsible for instantly designing and tweaking the customer experi-

ence, it is up to the marketing department to ensure, together with the operations and, most importantly, human resource groups, that every associate understands the brand, the experience and the fundamentals of how to ensure every interaction results in the desired experience for the customer.

Clearly in this scenario customer experience management cannot displace marketing. In fact, marketing becomes even more universally important and needs to understand its larger role as champion of the experience internally and externally; and this universal role of marketing needs to be embedded deep in the organization, championed by the CSuite and embraced by everyone else.

Protean Hospitality is a boutique brand strategy advisory firm focused on helping our hospitality clients drive growth. We combine our business/category expertise with tenacity, balancing rigor and creativity, to uncover new opportunities for hotels, resorts and hospitality brands.

For further information on this and other Protean Hospitality studies contact: Laurence Bernstein, Managing Partner, 416 967-3337 x 101; Bernstein@proteanstrategies.com Www.proteanhospitality.com Page 4