Design Social Experiences Or Get Disrupted By Them

There is a fundamental shift from individual experiences to social experiences. This shift has become highly relevant for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies due to their existing consumer base. There lies a significant opportunity to design and scale social experiences within this existing consumer pool. However, if they miss this opportunity, they could become vulnerable to new businesses that target specific segments of their consumer base and develop tailored social experiences to meet their needs and interests. Let’s delve into the magic behind social experiences, discern their distinctions from individual experiences, and explore how to initiate the process of designing them.

A social experience occurs when consumers not only have the means to accomplish tasks individually — such as investing or food delivery — but also when they become integral parts of a broader social experience, like participating in social trading or receiving food deliveries from local chefs in their neighbourhoods. Social experiences redefine how we capture and create value. As a result, they shape the way we design businesses of tomorrow:

• Travel > Hotel > Airbnb Experiences
• Fitness > Gym > Peloton
• Music > Spotify > Tiktok
• Education > Udacity > Reforge
• Money > Barclays > Etoro
• Media > The Guardian > Substack
• Commerce > Amazon > Instagram Live Shopping
• Workplace Communication > Email > Slack
• Commercial Real Estate > Office > Wework

The fundamental difference in social experiences is that people assume various roles, such as host/traveller, coach/tribe, pro/beginner, rather than simply being individual consumers. Roles depend on the intention and scale of social value. Helping an elderly or disabled person to manage their HMRC taxes is between two people. A team of five in a Counter Strike game tries to neutralise the enemy team. Hundreds of people invest in new startups with community rounds at Wefunder. Regardless of the case, when people embrace a social experience, everyone involved gains more value in return. Not necessarily financial, but invariably social.

Someone can choose to stay in an Airbnb room and not socialise, as if staying in a hotel. However, an unparalleled Airbnb experience occurs when intriguing conversations and social activities transpire between hosts and travellers. After a few days from the trip, we forget the amenities but not the social memories. It’s not merely the convenience of booking and staying, but the social moat around travel that prompts our return. Take Peloton, it’s not the £1,500 bike in a flat but 5.5 million people hyping on exercising all around the globe. Consider the concept of carpooling, which reduces the significant challenges of public transport, is less expensive than a taxi, and more sustainable (check the Turkish dolmus).

My point is, with social experiences, often there are financial benefits for people involved, but more importantly, there is social value such as peace of mind, new life experiences, meaning, synergy — you name it. We all look for them, but we can’t quantify them.

Co-creating these social values within social experiences is exceedingly challenging to build and scale. This is exactly why we should design to facilitate such social experiences. Because there is always the cheaper, the faster or the more for less alternative. But what about the more social, the more humane, and thus the truly unique? Our focus should be on designing on how people socialise, rather than attempting to organise them in a manner that causes them to pay more than what we invest.

HERE’S HOW TO ACHIEVE THIS

Think through a business model where they provide individual experiences, articulate key underlying assumptions. For example, a retail bank’s business model is based on the assumptions:

1. People want to store their money securely
2. They will have personal checking and saving accounts
3. The main offering is personal loans (e.g. mortgages, credit cards) and so on

Then think of these assumptions within a social context, to be used by multiple people. Then change these assumptions, either by reversing them or radically altering them. For example:

1. Parents want financial education for children, and family safety features
2. They will have family checking accounts and location sharing
3. The main offering is better financial spending and children safety, not just assets

Greenlight is a recent example betting on assumptions mentioned above. They redesign the individual banking experience into a family banking experience. We shouldn’t look for logic while designing social experiences, but explore how people organise and the underlying reasons behind. Another example I enjoy is the fitness experience Supermonkey. A 24-hour self-served gym which exists on WeChat connects gym-goers, lets them book gym classes, resell spots in upcoming classes, share playlists, recipes, and build offline relationships. A community of gym-goers on a super app, raised $60M funding and is disrupting how people in large cities of China exercise. We adopt social experiences into our daily lives because they are facilitated in a way to create more social value for us compared to the individual versions, which are the traditional gym membership or banking as a vault in these examples.

Once you identify your new assumptions you can start experimenting to learn more and turn the idea into a sustaining model. If you don’t know enough about a model or an industry to start with, you should speak to people who know more than you do in that area. For instance in terms of fitness, speak to personal trainers, long term gym goers, etc. If you can’t find people to speak to, look for new ventures and what new assumptions they are betting on, like the examples mentioned above.

To sum up, today we are in a phase where the whole world is being rewired with ever evolving technology and the role of social experiences is becoming more influential. Be on the disrupting or sustaining side, the ability to identify and scale social experiences has become a key area to play. It’s time we shift our design thesis from consumer centred to social centred. The world is full of assumptions we accept and consume individually, all waiting to be challenged and redesigned socially. For a better future.