The Value of Experiential Design: "That's PR You Can't Buy"

May 09, 2012

Around the world, major corporations are not only creating free experiential events such as the live Angry Birds event in Barcelona, they are also creating exciting destinations where customers will actually PAY to experience their brands.

Volkswagen AG believed in this philosophy and hired JRA and a number of other architects and designers to create their own branded destination. Spread over 40 acres across from the company’s manufacturing plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, the resultant Autostadt theme park features a unique way for customers to pick up their purchased vehicles, along with several history museums, an interactive science center, a variety of restaurants and retail and a Ritz-Carlton hotel – all set within a beautifully landscaped park featuring stunning architecture.

The results of Volkswagen’s $500 million dollar investment? Attracting over 2 million people per year, Autostadt has turned the small city of Wolfsburg into one of Germany’s top destinations and has spurred the development of a number of other attractions. Perhaps even more indicative of the success of the project is how the local community has embraced the development – treating it like a town square that hosts a number of events (such as this temporary toboggan run), festivals and even a number of weddings each year. That's PR that you can’t buy.

Most importantly, VW believes that Autostadt has helped them create customers for life. Even if this is only a fraction of the 2 million guests per year, think of the financial value of that proposition.

Examples such as Volkswagen’s Autostadt illustrate the marketing value that experientially designed venues provide corporations.

But forward thinking firms also use experiential design to attract the best and brightest employees, a subject we’ll explore in next week’s blog.
 

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The Value of Experiential Design: Differentiation and Cutting Through the Clutter

May 03, 2012

As we discussed in our previous posts, the value of experiential design can be purely economic, or it can also provide marketing, social, cultural or educational value. Let’s take a look at a few examples at how experiential design can aid in product differentiation and in cutting through the clutter of marketing messages.

Marketing Value: Differentiating from Competitors

Sometimes experiential design is used to simply differentiate an offering from the competitive landscape.

For those of you who might have been to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, you know that there seems to be a massive, high-end mall on each street corner. All of them are exquisitely designed with the best materials and feature all of the top luxury brands, from Gucci to Prada, Louis Vuitton and on and on.

The problem is, after a while, they all look the same, so what might make a millionaire Emirati choose one mall over the next?

The Mall of the Emirates chose experiential design as a way to differentiate itself from the competition. With the opening of Ski Dubai, a 225,000-square-foot indoor ski resort in November of 2005, not only could shoppers pick up the latest handbag, but they could also go for quick run on one of the resort’s five slopes, including the world’s first indoor black diamond. There’s also snowboarding, a toboggan run, a snowball shooting gallery and a place to make snowmen. And since Dubai is located in the desert, all winter clothing, ski and snowboard equipment is available to rent.

If you don’t want to venture in the cold, you can sit and relax in the adjacent lodge and sip a hot cocoa. However, if you want one of the prime window seats overlooking the resort, it’ll cost you, as there is a minimum purchase requirement.

Because of the popularity of Ski Dubai, while the Mall of the Emirates is pretty similar to all of the other malls in Dubai and features all of the same retail stores, it has now become one of Dubai’s premiere shopping destinations.

Marketing Value: Cutting Through the Clutter

It is estimated that consumers are bombarded by over 5,000 marketing messages everyday – from television ads, ads on the radio, billboards, internet pop-ups, mailers and so on. To say it is a crowded and cluttered environment is an understatement.

More and more corporations have found that experiential design allows them to cut through that clutter and customers in a memorable way.

How many of you have played Angry Birds?

For those of you who haven’t, it’s an extremely popular video game in which you launch a variety of birds from a slingshot and try to knock down evil pigs hiding within various structures. It’s become a worldwide phenomenon, as it’s so addictive, and you can’t get the theme song out of your head.

Well T-Mobile, had kind of a similar idea last year in Barcelona, where they created an innovative event to promote their various smart phones.  Have a look.

Innovative. Surprising. Interactive. Story-based. Unique environment. Multi-sensory. All of the components of experiential design.

They not only provided passersby with a great time, but they also provided T-Mobile with off-the-charts PR value around Europe and throughout the world through YouTube (with over 12 million views).

We hope you've enjoyed this look at how experiential design can help you set your product above the rest and cut through the jungle of marketing messages.  Next week, we'll discuss how one of the world's leading auto producers used experiential design to position itself not just as a car maker, but as a company that has enjoyed a fascinating history and a profound impact on world culture.

 

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The Value of Experiential Design: Dollars and Sense

April 26, 2012

Again we bring you VP of Marketing and Business Development, Shawn McCoy who's going to teach us about the dollars and cents (or sense) of experiential design through a visit to a very special hotel.

Does experiential design offer any real value? As we’ll see over the next few blog entries, the answer is a definitive yes. Experiential design offers a great deal of value to both guests and the providers, from a wide variety of standpoints – including economic, marketing, educational, training, recruitment, even social.

Let’s begin with economics, where the formula is pretty simple: Experiential design helps to not only differentiate a venue from its competition and create consumer preference, but also encourages repeat visitation. This increase in initial and repeat demand provides economic value.

Let’s look at a quick personal example. Over the years, our studio has had number of client meetings and conferences in London. And every time we go to London, I stay at the same hotel – The Athenaeum in Mayfair.

One of the main reasons that I think I continue to select this hotel, besides it being a nice hotel, is the fact that every time I go there (whether it’s been two weeks or two years since my last stay) as soon as I get out of my cab and arrive at the hotel, I’m greeted by the doorman who always says “Welcome home, Mr. McCoy, glad to have you back.”

While I know that he probably doesn’t really remember me (as the cynic in me thinks that they probably cross check reservation arrivals with physical descriptions), it’s a nice gesture and it is one small reason that makes me consistently choose this hotel over equally nice, and often less expensive, hotels.

That gesture alone has generated a bit of economic value to the hotel, as it helped to create my preference for the hotel, which has resulted in repeat bookings. When you think about the cumulative value brought to the hotel from other guests who also repeatedly choose the hotel based in part by this gesture, the economic impact of experiential design really starts to become clear.

The hotel certainly understands that an experiential design philosophy can help to differentiate itself from the competition. Recently, the Athenaeum introduced a new experiential service called Granny Nannies, where the hotel provides professional nanny services for guests on evenings and weekends, so that parents can enjoy a romantic night out on the town.

After the hotel advertised for the position, a panel including a six year-old and a twelve year-old interviewed a variety of potential nannies, asking them a variety of questions, such as “how would you persuade me to go to bed” to “how fast can you run?”

The three winning nannies – Angela, Andrea and Deborah – are pictured here with their selection panel (and our favorite doorman Bill).

Creative initiatives such as these are what make The Athenaeum so special and that make me come back time after time.

Next week, Shawn tackles the value of experiential design as it relates to marketing, both in creating differentiation for your product/service and cutting through the clutter.  Thanks for reading!

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The Value of Experiential Design: The Experience of Innovation

April 18, 2012

Welcome to Part 4 of The Value of Experiential Design, brought to you by JRA's VP of Marketing and Business Development, Shawn McCoy.

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Experiential design is also about innovation, and not being afraid to push the envelope about what can be done. A good example of experiential design as it relates to innovation is the Sky Walk at the Grand Canyon – which allows you to walk over the canyon on a glass bridge.

Another example is the temporary slide at the Tate Modern in London, which provides guests with an artistic, experiential option to travel from the top floor galleries down to the lower level. This functional sculpture/ride was not well received by museum purists who found it trivialized the visitors’ experience, but it was warmly embraced by a majority of guests and got the museum a ton of free PR.

Experiential design can be applied to innovation on the most mundane of operational details, such as delivering food to tables.

At Foodloop, a restaurant found within Europe’s Europa Park, guest sit down at various tables and order their drinks or food from the touchscreen, then watch the item as it’s delivered to them via a Rube Goldburg-esque contraption.

Foodloop, and the other examples above, are simple, innovative, operationally efficient and effective, and a great experience for guests.

So, we’ve seen how experiential design is about innovation; it’s about paying attention to the details along each step of a guests’ journey, treating them as if they are the audience and our experience is theater. But besides providing interesting guests with great memories or cocktail stories, does experiential design offer any real value? If so, how? We’ll answer that question in next week’s post.

 

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The Value of Experiential Design: Creating Experiences for Everyday Life

April 11, 2012

For Part 3 of The Value of Experiential Design, Shawn takes us out of the theme park and into - a car wash? 

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Now obviously Disney and Universal are masters of experiential design, and they have resources and budgets to provide the types of world-class experiences that have come to define their various parks.

But experiential design isn’t just about multi-billion dollar theme parks and fantasy. Great experiential design is also about the little things, and you can find it all around on day-to-day basis.

For example, right near my house there is a branch of a carwash called Mike’s Carwash Express, with only about 34 locations in Indiana and Ohio. They are consistently ranked in the top 1% of the over 30,000 car wash outlets in the United States. They accomplish this by following experiential design principles.

One of the first things you notice as you drive into a Mike’s is that all of their associates are sharply dressed, always wearing a tie. They greet you in a genuinely friendly manner, walking you through the various wash options via their easy-to-read graphics. They then either take your cash payment or process your credit card quickly via the electronic processing units worn by each associate. Customer service is key to Mike’s success, and the company’s website states that they only hire about one out of every 50 resumes received.

I went to the wash earlier this week as a sort of field trip. I have a three-year old son and a five-year-old daughter, who used to be scared of carwashes, as are a lot of younger children. Anticipating this, Mike’s features a variety of stuffed animals along the route to calm the kids and give them a point of focus.

As you enter the wash, you see those characters again, who not only provide entertainment for your young passengers, but also help to market various promotions.

Now if you’re like me, if you spring an extra couple of bucks for the wheel wash, you want to make sure you got the service. Mike’s thought of this as well, and a sign lights up to show you what service you received.

Finally, where this particular car wash is located, if you turn left you will come to stop sign and may have to wait several minutes to enter or cross the busy intersection. But if you turn right, you’ll drive to stop light which provides easy access to either direction, which a sign conveniently informs you.

I realize that all of these design details are very small, but that’s the point. Most carwashes don’t think about each step of your journey like’s Mike’s does – from operational signage, to uniforms, to payment processing, to graphic design, to helping to alleviate the fears of your younger passengers. Every aspect of your experience has been scripted. It’s this attention to detail that makes the difference. And it’s why even though this other car wash is much less expensive and right next to my home, I travel a little bit further and spend a little bit more to go to Mike’s.

Another quick example, for those of you who travel as much as I do, can you think of what small but very impactful experience that Doubletree Hotels provide at check in?

That’s right. A warm chocolate chip cookie. And I tell you, after you’ve been traveling for several hours by plane, train or car, and may already be missing home, that little gesture goes a long way to making you feel just a little more welcome and comfortable. So experiential design is about the little things.

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Next week, Shawn continues by teaching us how experiential design and innovation go hand-in-hand. 
 

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