Pixels and Place

by Kate O'Neill

  Whole Foods and the experience of “fresh”

  Martin Lindstrom wrote in Brandwashed that Whole Foods is a great example of “priming.” Their fine control of sensory cues throughout the store signals “freshness” and evokes the folksiness of farmers’ markets.11

  The entrance for most grocery stores opens right into the produce section, but upon entering a Whole Foods store, the shopper is greeted with racks of cut flowers—not because they’re the highest-margin items, but because they symbolize freshness. Imagine if the first thing you saw when you walked into the store was a big stack of canned tuna. (Or a display of plastic flowers.)

  Within the produce department, the shopper encounters not only display walls of produce, but large islands in the center of the aisle featuring stacked-up wooden crate displays of seasonal produce, like something like you might see at a farmers’ market.

  And like many grocery stores, they spray produce with a mist of water, suggesting crops in a field, even though, ironically, it appears this actually makes them rot faster. But no matter: The fine mist gives the appearance of freshness.

  Disney and the multisensory experience

  Disney theme parks are masterful with multisensory marketing with scent—where certain rides or areas of the park have distinct associated smells, like Pirates of the Caribbean and its slight mustiness, or like Main Street USA with its vanilla—and with audio reinforcement of beloved (and/or annoying) childhood songs. Castle mock-ups even have small entrances to make visitors feel larger-than-life.

  But now technologies like wearables and 3-D printing are rich with possibilities for both physical placemakers as well as for the digital design of “place.” In 2014, Disney made a billion-dollar investment in MyMagic+, a “next-generation technology-fueled customer experience that transforms the way its guests play, stay, and pay at the ‘most magical place on Earth.’”12

  You can use the Disney World app to reserve not only a table but also your whole meal at a restaurant called Be Our Guest. If you’re wearing your Disney MagicBand when you arrive for your reservation, you’ll be greeted by name and invited to sit anywhere. And like magic, your pre-ordered food shows up to your table.

  The MagicBands make use of long-range radio, with a transmission range of more than forty feet. They create a seamless experience from before the trip ever begins to after the trip concludes. They’ve made considerable efforts to contain and control every aspect of the experience.

  Few brands would have as much control over their visitors’ or customers’ experience, but it’s certainly worth considering how some of these ideas could help create meaning, and in turn create more meaningful relationships between customer and brand.

  The Selfish Perk of Meaningfulness

  I’d like to believe that everyone is motivated by the idea of offering something of value in the world and doing more meaningful work. But maybe you’re not entirely convinced, or maybe your boss is not entirely convinced.

  So here’s where I tell you a big secret I’ve learned in my years of working with Fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups: Meaningful marketing is more effective marketing. Designing experiences from a human point of view rather than a company point of view leads to a greater chance of getting it right, and getting people to buy. Maybe without pushy and gimmicky tactics you miss a few people who would be gullible or weak, but those people were never going to be your fans anyway. They were never going to be truly happy with their purchase, and they were never going to recommend you to their friends.

  After all, this is about your relationship with the person on the other side of the transaction. We don’t have to pretend that there’s not a profit motive for companies, but even from that standpoint, doing it right matters because it’s expensive to acquire customers. Data collection is expensive. Paying marketers and designers and analysts is expensive, and you want them to have the best material to work with. Businesses can’t afford the cost of being haphazard with experience design or sloppy with data collection; and they can’t afford the risks that come with playing fast and loose with experiences created after data analysis.

  Offering relevant messaging and experiences demonstrates a kind of respect for the person you’re interacting with—your customer, user, whatever their role—and their interests, their time, their concerns, and so on. Delivering relevance while also walking the line of discretion, without creeping out the customer, is another part of that respect. Doing all this right breeds trust and loyalty.

  Which, of course, ultimately pay off in profit for the company.

  So it doesn’t really matter which philosophy motivates you most. Both an altruistic passion for creating more meaningful experiences and a profit-centric drive end up in the same place: using data about and empathy for the context of the human you’re interacting with to improve their experiences, and doing it with respect to relevance and discretion.

  Your customers are researching you online, they’re on your competitors’ websites in your store, they’re looking for contextual cues that you understand how their lives are increasingly both physical and digital. They’re using apps to order coffee; they’re using smart fitting rooms; they’re posting pictures of your merchandise, your food, your waiting room online. The more you ignore that, the more you risk losing them to competitors who understand it and work with it.

  For me, though, and maybe for you, the benefits of more meaningful experiences have as much to do with being engaged in my work, feeling good about what I do, and wanting to leave the world a little better, not a little worse.

  Measuring Experiences Meaningfully

  Part of the challenge is not just to measure, but to measure meaningfully.

  In a city, it might be tempting to look at rising parking costs as an indicator of inaccessibility, whereas in another context, it might make more sense to evaluate a downtown’s overall accessibility by how many means of getting there exist. Rising parking costs might be a healthy way to discourage people from driving into downtown, relying on higher volume public transportation instead.

  Digital experiences and physical experiences alike tempt us with meaningless metrics. “Vanity” metrics like visits, followers, and likes aren’t usually the best indicators of success. What we can take away from that into the physical environment is that the most obvious and superficially satisfying metrics won’t necessarily be the ones that illustrate anything worthwhile or actionable.

  To measure meaningful experiences, then, we need some sense of this framework, and a delta of someone’s emotional state before and after they interacted or transacted with our brand or product.

  On the low-tech side, surveys may be useful for this purpose. The closest proxies we have for meaningful measurement are things like satisfaction or Net Promoter Score. Which is fair: We can hypothesize that if someone finds an experience meaningful, they will likely be satisfied with it.

  But other things can affect satisfaction, such as the relief one feels at the completion of an arduous task. That doesn’t necessarily hint at the value that may have been created or transacted in the process.

  More sensitive metrics are in development. Biochemical reactions can be tracked using wearables, and facial expressions that reveal mood and reaction can be determined using recognition algorithms. The opportunities for a much more accurate assessment of emotional state are increasingly possible.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Convergence and Integration

  Did you ever imagine you’d be alive in a time when your refrigerator could do your grocery shopping? I didn’t. Maybe I just didn’t watch enough episodes of The Jetsons when I was growing up, but the convergence of connected technology with my physical surroundings has both surprised and delighted me.

  But as a digital marketing consultant and advocate for meaningful human experiences online, I also hear frequently from clients and audiences that they’re overwhelmed. And as anyone using these technologies knows, there’s often a shortfall in delivering
on the full promise of the opportunities this convergence creates.

  It’s not merely that we’re falling short of marketing potential. It’s that we’re too often exploiting customer data in shortsighted and, frankly, greedy ways without fully considering that our own data will fall into that trap as the net grows wider. We have to be mindful of the precedent our work sets. It’s hardly hyperbole to say that nothing short of the future of humanity depends on it.

  So while we do have smart refrigerators and smart thermostats and smart clothes and smart cities and even smart toilets, and before long the mainstream use of driverless cars, we’re falling down on building smart experiences into our own businesses. The lines between online and offline are blurring more and more, yet we often ignore the context of the user’s physical environment or device limitations as we expect them to interact with our brands, our products, and our services. And too often we collect customer data we don’t use, which could help create more relevant experiences.

  Until recently our experience of physical space was pretty distinct from our understanding of digital space, but the connected landscape is blending the layers more and more. The online and offline worlds have increasing overlap, and that overlap happens through us, the human beings who experience it and whose experience of those worlds is tracked and mined.

  Remember what an experience is. (As discussed in the earlier section, “Experience and Meaning.”) For our purposes, it’s any discernible interaction with or impression of an entity, a place, a brand, a person, or a community.

  As we have these interactions just about everywhere the physical world and the digital world converge, the connective layer is the data captured through human experience. The key point here is that, much of the time, we are the pivot point through which these layers connect.

  Let me say that again: Almost every one of the points where the physical world and digital world meet is through us.

  Our human experience facilitates the bulk of the connections where the physical world meets the digital world. Our purchases and shopping patterns, our visits to our favorite websites from our favorite easy chairs, our obsession with tracking our steps and our other fitness data through wristbands and watches and phones and other wearables, our check-ins on social media, our location-tagged travel photos, our tracked movements via sensors, and more. So much more than we tend to think about; and all of it creates a data trail of our experiences.

  Almost every one of the points where the physical world and digital world meet is through us.

  Everything truly interesting about the Internet of Things is interesting because of how it affects our lives as humans. Even when you think about data that seems arcane or abstract and removed from human interactions, like the data around improving the operational efficiency of factories, or server logs in some government agency, or financial data from the depths of Wall Street, it’s all still optimized for improving human lives in some way. It’s only a step or two removed from human experience.

  We use phones, watches, tablets, chatbots, voice command, and more to move through the world, provide for our needs, and control our surroundings. More and more our world is not divided into online and offline: We’re simply ordering a coffee, listening to music, planning our route to a meeting, booking travel, making plans with friends. And more and more of these interactions need to move seamlessly from one mode to another and back again.

  Two problems: First, the gatekeepers of experience—brands, cities, institutions, etc.—haven’t necessarily kept up with expectations, so those interactions often don’t flow seamlessly from one mode to another as they should. Second, these interactions and experiences are increasingly served up by algorithms as part of workflows that are subservient to revenue agendas and profit motives.

  Now that’s evil not in itself; it’s just complicated. Profit motives introduce ethical dilemmas when it comes to protecting people, and when the data that tracks people’s movements, behaviors, moods, preferences, habits, purchases, conversations, finances, and so on is involved, we definitely need to be concerned as a society about protecting people. For-profit healthcare has struggled with this duality: How can providers improve patient outcomes, increase their efficiency, and decrease costs, all while protecting patient data?

  Now, because of data tracking, personalization, and integrated experiences, that dilemma is showing up in nearly every industry. How can you offer a timely, relevant experience that satisfies some human need or motivation, make money while doing it, and protect your customer’s or user’s data at the same time?

  So our opportunity is to think humanistically about the way these are coming together—because these layers are converging in ways that are experimental and interesting and innovative, but not yet intentional about facilitating a more meaningful human experience.

  And they need to be, because we are the ones at the center of them.

  Balance Versus Integration

  You know how people talk about “work-life balance”? The goal is to closely manage the time, attention, and energy you give to your work life so that your personal life can also benefit from your time, attention, and energy.

  You’ve probably noticed that voices of wisdom often talk instead about work-life integration—when you make thoughtful choices about the design of your work life so that it enriches your personal life, and so that your personal life can help you achieve a more fulfilling work life. Work-life integration is also about making your overall life experience richer and more meaningful.

  Similarly, we can each make intentional choices about integrating our physical and digital lives so that each will benefit the other.

  But there’s a limit to what any given individual can accomplish. We’re dependent on the data models that surround us. We’re dependent on the experiences that have been created for us in those spaces. The capacity for integration has to be more universally available; it has to be part of the design of our surroundings, part of the ecosystem we live in. When we think about designing a physical space, such as a retail store, or a hospital, or a university, or a public space in a city, we also need to be thinking about how the people who use this space will experience it as their other selves. What digital experiences will people have in that physical space? We should think about how to facilitate that digital experience and how to make those experiences seamless.

  The capacity for integration has to be universally available; it has to be part of the design of our surroundings, part of the ecosystem we live in.

  All the while, let’s keep in mind the very real needs of the human beings who have these interactions with us.

  On the digital side, we can prepare for integration as we create e-commerce environments, or when creating online banking, or online healthcare services, or any website or any mobile app or any API or data system or really anything that is going to serve up a digital experience meant to be consumed by humans. We can develop digital systems in human-integrative ways by dismantling the monolith of the systems’ perspective; instead, customer motivations and needs must drive system functions, and in turn each function of the system should blend as frictionlessly as possible with the likely physical environments and contexts that people may be in as they experience them.

  A clothing brand and its e-commerce site, for example, can’t expect every interaction to lead to purchase if they want to allow for more frictionless integration. They have to plan for customer curiosity, self-discovery, aspirational browsing, and so on, and each of these may take place just about anywhere.

  After all, an integrative experience may not always be a meaningful one, but a disjointed experience is far less likely to ever be meaningful.

  We make this effort knowing, of course, that the environments and contexts people are likely to be in will vary more and more all the time; we can’t just think “mobile” and mentally substitute phones. Tablets and wearables like watches make up a substantial portion of people’s on-the-go consumption, and those are two very
different interfaces that complement very different usage scenarios and require a different set of data to interact appropriately with them. Integrated messaging and notifications may also have good reason to appear on screens and devices around us in our homes, our vehicles, our workplaces, and where we eat, shop, and visit. They may be reminders, alerts, and even offers, if they’re genuinely relevant. But the data required to gauge how effective these integrative interactions are will differ: Whereas a notification displayed on a watch can rely on gesture feedback to optimize the experience—when the wearer turns their wrist to see the watch face—the data that can track the effectiveness of a notification on a digital display in a store may have to do with proximity.

  Mind you, there’s a very real risk of overstepping the line where people are most comfortable. No one wants to feel targeted, but most people do want to be shown an appropriate level of attention. If the interaction is integrative and respectful, it can be helpful and successful. If it’s intrusive, irrelevant, compromising, or gimmicky, it will ultimately fail.

  Perhaps the Golden Rule is the best way to think about all of this: the data we collect about others is going to be collected about us, too. The experiences we create for others will set the standards for the experiences others create for us. Overall, if we’re mindful of how we design data-rich experiences, we can make those experiences more helpful, more enjoyable, more memorable, and more fulfilling.