Experiences for (lots of) individuals
At Wolff Olins we’ve always believed that individuals — not just leaders, but customers, employees, partners, creators, consumers, everyone — are the force that positively propels organisations and society forward.
Technology has put incredible power in the hands of individuals to disrupt at scale: to change how others think and behave; to change established systems; to force organisations to change. Dramatically. Fast.
An individual’s experience of a brand determines how they think about it. How they talk about it. Whether they want to have anything to do with it in future.
People experience an organisation in so many ways. Mediated through different contexts, cultures, channels and devices. Directly through partners and existing customers. Never isolated, always part of a wider journey. The simple, single customer journey ‘funnel’ beloved of traditional marketing is devoid of context and an abstraction too far.
What determines how that experience goes is the person — their needs and context; the extended organisation behind it — their business, culture, systems and partners; and the medium through which the experience is occurring.
So we try to understand people from all angles. Starting with the individual. We work with the research partner and play with vast troves of data to visualize the scale and differences. But we also meet the people. Farmers in Guadalajara. Retail assistants in carrier stores. Skype users in their bedrooms. News readers on their smartphones. We talk to them in their environment. And we bring them into ours. The whole team gets to know them — not just the research partner.
But it’s naïve to suggest that we can simply ‘put the customer at the center’ and expect all to be hunky dory. That usually leads to a lovely design that looks great in a case study but is never used by a paying customer. To actually reach people we need to determine the right balance between what the organisation could be capable of delivering and the needs of individuals.
We help organisations decide what they really want to be good at for that individual. And what can come later. Poor parts of the experience can be improved by best practice. But to really delight someone, the great parts of the experience should be the heroes.
To design a coherent whole, we have to understand the whole system that can affect people’s experiences. Marketing. Retail. Sales. Engineering. Legal. Product. Customer Service. Partners. Suppliers. Creating a new event stand, Facebook page, or advertising campaign isn’t going to cut it (although they might be part of the answer).
Then we help organisations change their internal behaviours, culture and processes to deliver these new experiences. For example, introducing new measurement systems that encourage people to take responsibility for the customer experience, and launching beacons of change that show the organisation what direction to head in.
For the individual this means ever-improving experiences that add up to a clear and coherent idea of what an organisation, their products and services, are going to be like.
Our clients often touch billions of people’s lives. They operate in all the cultures in the world. We try to have a lasting impact for everyone, everywhere, over many years.
This post was originally published on our blog by Tom Wason. We invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section and — as always — to get in touch if you’d like to talk to us about bringing creativity to your party.
