What's so fantastic about The Fantastic Tavern then? Maybe it's the Tavern - the last event saw us at The Roebuck - a fine old London hostelry . Or maybe its the ale - certainly plenty was consumed by some of the guests! Thanks to EMC Consulting once again for sponsoring the event and to Michelle Flynn for organising.
No, for me its the people that are part of this rapidly growing community and the opportunity we have to debate significant themes that affect the businesses we are in or the business we service as agencies and consultancies - outside anything too formal or structured. This was true of The Twitter Effect debate and even more so of our latest endeavor - to understand together what Total Experience Design is - or could be and to debate how it might be undertaken with clients.
We gathered a fantastic group to debate the subject this time - brands were well represented and happily equaled by agency and consultancy folk. I had a set of questions and a final panel to begin to debate the answers. Nathan Williams is the Head of Digital at The Partners. He was joined by Paul Dawson, EMC Consulting's finest and Matt Marsh, founder of First Hand Experience. Finally, we had the pleasure of being joined by Gary Ellis, a User Experience Architect from Virgin Media. Gary is exposed to TED every day, afterall he lives, breaths and works for a singular brand.
Total Experience Design has been discussed and described often before. Its almost as if its the antithesis of what design and branding agencies should be all about and perhaps always should have been. But can you name an agency that deliver this? I'm not sure I can. I'd picked the subject intentionally - I am genuinely interested in the discussion about what TED is - not just for self interest but because I think it genuinely is a future opportunity for brands and agencies (some that is) alike. But what I really want is for us to get practical - to offer and deliver it. The session was tailored to anticipate how we could.
I'm not protectionist with any strategy for a company that genuinely believes they could offer this service. Perhaps that appears a little naive? No, for me it’s a bit like pursuing automotive strategy - there really is only one. The question is only who has the resources, the where-for-all and the bloody-mindedness to actually deliver it. For me, TED is the strategy. But could we collectively determine how to deliver it?
The first question was always going to be the most fundamental and frankly we didn't get too far beyond this - I'd invited an audience to discuss an area that is generally poorly defined.
What is Total Experience Design?
Total Experience Design, as it evolves, has a heritage in total customer service design, brand experience and multi-channel strategy. It recognises that every point in a customer's experience of a brand should be designed in detail. I guess it also assumes some simple principles like customer recognition, empathy and intelligence. This is easy to write but very challenging or almost impossible to deliver across touch points. One of the key issues is that clients don't tend to go out and try and 'buy' TED - they buy creative work in silos. They do of course want to buy good creative work and want it to be 'on-brand' - they ask us to 'make great stuff' in the channel or channels where we have expertise. And there lies one significant point - is there any agency or consultancy that has expertise across several channels or 'enough' to be truly capable a TED agency?
While one definition of TED could be as wonderfully simplistic as to say "it’s breaking down of internal silos; to design without boundaries", it’s also true to say that the definition itself is without credence - "I have no idea what it is".
Of course, we have had 'the big idea' before - a single proposition, the big idea. This was the haven of the advertising agency, who flirted it to clients and used it to patronize other agencies. The Big Idea – essentially a campaignable concept – could be applied to every communication medium and hey presto – consistent experience. Unfortunately branding was never that simple-minded and delivery of a brand’s essence had to go beyond the patina of a campaign.
As on one of the panel suggested, the basic premise of relationship building may not have fundamentally changed – it’s awareness to engagement to acquisition to retention right? Well maybe – that’s a different debate. But accepting it, it is without doubt so very much more disrupted – across networks, media and channels. Few agencies – if any – can adequately service clients across all this landscape so it is left to then to manage customer experience.
One department within an organization rarely owns Total Experience. The role of those involved in it – service teams (to some extent), brand teams and marketing are awkwardly forged together to make the best attempts to manage the definition, processes and implementation of TED. There is very little real advice to offer these teams. However what is surely true is that they should take a step back and ask themselves again what real issues real customers have and how to eradicate those issues – even delight customers as they do.
It may be true that brands with multiple customers and multiple touch points have the greatest challenge. Indeed some of the very best brands at TED or anything resembling it have narrow offers to narrow audiences. Take Apple. Generally speaking it services a limited audience with a limited range of products. Its greatest branding challenges come when it takes on new marketplaces –music and mobile for example. And when it does, it fails or succeeds by considering every single detail of the user experience. Moreover, brands like Pret-a-Mange run their business by rules and conditions related to their brand. They know how customers want service across very narrow time periods in a day and they let their own staff select new recruits who can deliver that experience appropriately after trials.
Successful brands understand that they have to let their values and personality permeate deep into their enterprises. So why have do many brands been muted by their own inability to overcome their internal bureaucracies? Are they silenced because they lack courage and conviction to enter new dialogue? If they could start with a blank sheet of paper, what would they do? Isn’t that quintessentially total experience design is? A blank sheet of paper on which a new relationship can be written?
Watch out for details on the 4th TFT where we shall be discussing Multi-Variant Testing.