(Limor Peer)

Almost ten years ago, Pine and Gilmore wrote The Experience Economy. In that book they argue that companies should compete in the experience arena, not the product or services arenas. As an example, they describe an airliner with a commodity mindset - it might see itself as "merely performing a function... transporting people from point A to point B." But by going beyond function and competing on experiences, the airliner might want to use "its base service (the travel itself) as a stage for a distinctive en route experience." This latter strategy, they contend, is where success lies.

Amazon is a company known for its regard for "customer experience." In a New York Times story, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is quoted as saying on the Charlie Rose show that people care about,

...having the lowest prices, having vast selection, so they have choice, and getting the products to customers fast... And the reason I'm so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.

"Anybody who has spent any time around Mr. Bezos," the article asserts, "knows that this is not just some line he throws out for public consumption. It has been the guiding principle behind Amazon since it began." And what Amazon has done is use these insights to add value to their product by incorporating recommendations and ratings, which many people see as great customer service.

But for many news organizations, content - the product - is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about improving the experience of their own readers, users, or viewers. Yet as we all know from personal experience with all kinds of brands, that it's more than the content - quality, design, functionality, etc. It is also the price, the ads, the marketing, the overall brand perception, the customer service, that all come together to form our relationship with that brand.

That's why experts in integrated communication say all these aspects need to be integrated and coordinated to communicate the same message. As Tom Collinger, here at the Integrated Marketing Program at Medill, says,

Whoever you are - whether you are Campbell Soup, Orbitz or The New York Times - every brand experience is a reflection of that brand. You can't segregate things out like customer service. It's not separate from the experience. It's entirely integrated as part of the brand's experience.

So let's talk about what this means. Having a great product does not guarantee loyalty, satisfaction, or engagement - recall the well-publicized Dell debacle and the effect it had on their customers. On the other hand, having great customer service does not guarantee a good experience with the product or the company.

So here's what it comes down to - to have an integrated strategy that will communicate to your customers the same message across the board, you need to get everyone in the organization on the same page. As Mark Hurst from Good Experience said before:

Changing the organization is the most difficult and most important part of user experience work. Said another way: You can give the smartest answers in the world, make the most brilliant recommendations; but if the organization doesn't actually change the user experience, it's all worthless.

How do you do that? It is, of course, a complicated question, but we would recommend you begin by developing an "audience orientation" in the organization - an outbound outlook (or dare I say, philosophy?) that focuses on the needs of the audience.

The Readership Institute has done previous work with a similar concept, "readership orientation," and a new report will come out in the next couple of weeks. In our work, we have found that there are four components of "audience orientation":

Learning - You begin by talking to people, listening, observing, studying them. The mobile phone industry, while not the only one, is a leader in this area. Ehtisham Rabbani, LG's vice president for product strategy and marketing, recently quoted in a New York Times article as saying, "our job is to be behaviorists and psychologists... we constantly have to be reminding ourselves that we tend to be geek types and our customers are not." And Nokia's Jan Chipchase, a well-known anthropologist, has the mandate from his company to lead research on how people use technology and "developing new applications, services and products that, if I do my job right, you'll be using 3 to 15 years from now."

Sharing - Once your research yielded some findings, you have to share what you learned with the company as a whole. The challenge is to create an integrated infrastructure that can seamlessly share information across departments and silos, so they can have a flow of real time information to learn about (and later accommodate) audience preferences.

Planning - Planning a course of action has to involve the organization as a whole in every way possible. What kind of decision-making processes are in place at your organization? Are these processes streamlines? Do they allow for easy cross-departmental communication? For quick turn-arounds and assessments? For constant input?

Implementation - The real test. Now you have to put it all together, in all aspects of the company. Apple is often touted as a great example of a company focused on the customer experience. But for Apple, it is not just the product that has to stand up to customer needs and desires, it is the whole experience, including the Apple store. Another company that understands its customers, and translates that into a great customer experience is Zappos. It's not the first place online where you can buy shoes, it may not the best designed site, but it has excellent customer service with the motto "we are a service company that happens to sell."

In sum, to make this all work, the organization as a whole has to "buy into" the idea that an audience orientation is a central guiding principle. Can you share examples from your organization of any of the components of "audience orientation"?


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.