Service Innovation

Here is your chance to vote for the word of the year in 2007 (link) courtesy of the Australian National Online Dictionary. Its fun looking at the terms that are suggested, but it also offers an interesting insight into the global Zeitgeist.
Here are some of my favourites:

flog – a blog which is contrived for marketing purposes. [f(ake) + (b)log]
lifecasting – live broadcasting on the internet on a personal web channel of one’s daily activities videoed on a webcam. [life + (broad)cast + -ing]
lamestream – the traditional media providing news and entertainment, viewed as lacking the originality and daring of the blogosphere.
advergaming – the marketing strategy of using video games in which products, brands, logos, etc., are placed in the game context to build familiarity with them. [adver(tising) + (video) gaming]
infomania – the tendency to give immediate attention to incoming messages such as email, text messages, etc., resulting in constant distraction and a corresponding drop in the recipient’s attention levels and work performance. [info(rmation) + -mania]
–infomaniac, noun –infomaniacal, adjective

The picture that is painted by these words is one of sophisticated people with online lives, broadcasting themselves continually, living just-in-time lives, yet with a savvy understanding to see through the marketing tactics that are used to gain their attention. As an infomaniac, it has given me plenty of food for thought, and made me realise how many companies are lamestream today.

There is still time to vote for your favourite word so mosey on over to the Macquarie dictionary and cast your vote.

Tags: Trend, Zeitgeist

Following on from the previous post about CD Baby I wanted to show how Puma manages to add a bit of personality to its brand through packaging details. I use an old Puma shoe box as storage for stuff at home, and I always like to open the box to remind myself of the small details they have employed to get the Puma personality accross.

Firstly, the shoe size scale on the bottom give comparisons to other real world items (see image) such as “Your foot is as long as a… standard house brick (Euro size 34), a bottle of wine (Euro size 47), a gangsters gold chain (size 52). Having feet somewhere closer to a small french stick (42) than a bottle of wine gives me some comfort and a smile.

Secondly, inside the box, they have crafted the box hinge to form a heart. A small detail that you notice when you have taken the shoes out of the box. Its nice, and confirming and is another one of those small things that make us happy. Its also a nice piece of package engineering. They exceed our expectations, they add personality and they make the brand stand out. It makes me realise too that packaging is an important touch point and often a neglected one.

Think how much extra you can give through small touches from your brand?

Tags: Brand, Experience

A recent post on Daily fix brought up the issue of brand personality recently. They focussed upon the e-mail confirmation a reader received from CD baby for some CDs that were ordered (link). There then ensued an interesting discussion about the way companies formulate texts to customers. Heres the original text from the letter:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, November 18th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.

Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year.’ We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little store with the best new independent music

Working together with an insurance company, as we do in AT-ONE, the question of familiarity and personality often crops up and this discussion interests me a lot.

A brand should be considered as having a personality, and tone of voice should therefore base itself upon the brand personality. An established insurance company has a totally different personality to a geeky CD store and should therefore use wording that fits. However, a challenger could take a different personality and use this to advantage to cut out the stuffiness of insurance, which risks being outdated these days. At AHO we have developed what we call the megaphone model of brand expression. This basically focusses upon defining the company DNA, then giving this DNA a personality which is then carefully broadcast to all touchpoints through behaviours. The human model is a good analogy and allows for tone of voice to take the important role it has.

Tags: Brand, Experience, Personality

Heres a nice article from Business Week about Service Prototyping (link).

The article shows how prototyping helps understand the holistic experience that a service gives:

Think of GM’s (GM) On-Star in-vehicle security and communications system. A physical model of the blue OnStar call button doesn’t begin to convey the relief a lost or injured driver would feel on hearing the operator’s voice. Marketing departments get this, it’s why an OnStar ad focuses on the customer rather than the button, yet the distinction is too often overlooked in the development process.

Services generally are simple to prototype but can be very costly to implement. This is why in the AT-ONE project we focus upon creating prototypes early in the design process and encourage companies to implement a strategy of continually creating new concept prototypes.

Evidencing is a kind of prototyping that is often even cheaper to produce. The AT-ONE project is focussing upon developing guidelines for evidencing services. Evidencing aims to produce tangible evidence of a service at an early stage. Not the whole thing, but just enough to experience what the service does and how it feels as a user to utilise the service. I will be writing about evidencing later in a seperate blog post.

Tags: Evidencing, Experience, Prototyping

A recent crop of news items about Virgin Galactic have caught my eye.

Firstly, the logo for Virgin Galactic is designed by Phillippe Starck. Link

Secondly, the interior for the Virgin Galactic ship is designed by SeymourPowell. Link

Thirdly, the Virgin Galactic Spaceport is to be designed by Foster and Partners. Link

It is clear that these are not anonymous designers, they are all high quality, known designers with respected track records. Design is therefore a prioritised discipline at Virgin Galactic, but not only design of tangible elements, I think that Virgin has managed to combine Service Design and Design leadership.

This got me thinking about the design of the user experience for space travel and managing expectations. It seems that the expectations Virgin Galactic want to satisfy are ones of fulfilling a science fiction dream. The designs are a mix of interiors from Kubricks 2001 and exteriors from Alien and Star Wars. Such experiences require careful design management and the focus upon design at the strategic level. Does this imply that Virgin Galactic are a design-centric company? I dont know, but I think that they are well on the way to this. We will only know when we get a chance to look at all of the touch-points and how well they are aligned towards the Virgin Galactic user experience.

But, WOW!, what a project. Service Design for Virgin Galactic. I would love to use the AT-ONE method for that one.

Update: I found this article, specifically discussing the expectations and user experience for space travel. Link This adds a new angle to the experience economy and tourism.

Tags: Design leadership, Experience, Touch-point

Although this is old news, I think its still worth a comment. An IPhone user made news by uploading to YouTube a video showing her first IPhone bill, all 300 pages of it. Link

This just highlights to me the distance between the total user experience that Apple has strived for through the integration of product, service and interaction and the lack of thinking within AT&T regarding the billing experience that fits with the IPhone. This also highlights the importance of the bill as a service Touch-point.

AT&T, obviously embarrassed by the attention this gave them started sending out sms messages to IPhone users, highlighting the option to receive shorter bills. Link

Tags: Experience, Touch-point

Interesting to see that EBay is now attaching great priority to the customer experience. Link
I think that this is an area they have neglected for a long time. Interesting to read that the reasoning behind this is:

“EBay needs to evolve the user experience to be more competitive and differentiated”

Reading between the lines, I think they mean that users prefer the experience that Amazon.com gives them, and that they want to stop the strong migration of sellers from EBay to Amazon. While Amazon has had a focus upon user experience for some time, and has finely tuned this (to great success), I think EBay has a lot to do before they can define the ‘right’ experience. In fact, the Amazon experience is part of their offering, and has been thought through. Amazon strives to offer the experience of reading a good book or seeing a great DVD, and has placed emphasis upon giving this experience as soon as possible (collaborative filtering, look inside, listmania etc). I don’t think it has ever been considered as part of EBays offering, which is why I think they have a long way to go. I think EBay need to ‘rethink’ the EBay experience rather than ‘evolve it’

Tags: Experience, Offering

Fredag 21.09.2007

Kick-off for the AT-ONE project at Villa Stenersen