A map to classify your customers experiences
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- Is an experience defined solely by how easily one accomplishes a task (as with Google or Craig’s List)? Is all else just nonsense?
- What about the “entertainment experience” that Pine and Gilmore describe, when they say we’ve moved beyond a services economy into a new experience economy?
- What about advertising? While companies can no longer rely on image alone to sell products, there is an undeniably powerful role that advertising can—and does—play in affecting our emotions and possibly even our perceptions of a thing.
- Packaging—is it or isn’t it part of the experience Is it even possible to separate the ‘packaging’ from the product when evaluating a person’s satisfaction with a given thing.
- And what of our backgrounds and perceptions. We can have a great product that suffers due to personal issues, such as buyer’s remorse. Or conversely, a merely ‘good’ product where people tolerate faults because of cognitive “confirmation bias”. Or even great products that are generally ill-received due to unfavorable branding.
Intent on resolving these various perspectives, I began exploring how it is that these different elements work together to complement each other. The resulting framework structures all the elements that contribute to a good (or bad!) experience, and provides a context for the various activities (both internal and external to an organization) that play a role in defining a person’s perception of a product or service.
Check it out! Let me know what you think:
Sorting, Classifying, and Labeling Experiences poster (pdf, 3 megs)
One caveat: This IS a poster. A very large poster. So while it is viewable on a monitor, it won’t exactly print very well.
UPDATE: As promised, here is the much smaller, printable version of the ‘Classifying Experiences’ model:
Sorting, Classifying, and Labeling Experiences letter sized (pdf, 450k)
Unlike the poster, this version builds narratively offering a more detailed explanation of the model.
Just dug up this old post on: "sorting, Classifying, and Labeling Experiences." It's not the holy grail, and a bit outdated. But for companies looking to take an experience creation viewpoint, it is a great road map.
(make sure to download the PDF files)
