Retailers like Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), and Cabela's sell goods as equipment for use in these types of experiences, and they lead the way in making their retail space an experience itself. Bass Pro Shops brings the outdoor environment indoors, REI provides a fifty-five-foot mountain in many stores so that customers can test its climbing gear, and Cabela's displays a thirty-five-foot dioramic mountain filled with taxidermist-stuffed wild animals. Manufacturers, too, must explicitly design their goods to enhance the user's experience—essentially experientializing the goods—even when customers pursue less-adventurous activities. Automakers do this when they focus on enhancing the driving experience, but they must also focus on other non-driving experiences that occur in cars. For example, many women are still waiting for a carmaker to accommodate purse storing in their vehicles. And certainly in-car dining could be enhanced for the millions who daily buy fast food via drive-through lanes.
Executives in the appliance industry already think this way. Former Maytag executive William Beer once told Industry Week, “The eating experience is now wherever a person is at the moment. We have people eating in the car on the way back and forth to work, in front of the TV.” This leads Beer to deduce that “people may need a refrigerated compartment in an automobile or in the arm of a chair,” innovations that would greatly enhance various eating occasions but would never surface within the framework of the industry's old mindset, which focused on how appliances perform rather than on what users do when eating.31 The Maytag brand is now part of Whirlpool Corporation, which has embraced this experience perspective in its companywide innovation efforts. Its Duet washer-and-dryer system focuses on making the set good-looking in the laundry room (like parking a luxury sports car in a garage). For garages, Whirlpool invented Gladiator GarageWorks, a set of appliances for garage-organizing. And its new Personal Valet offers a “clothes vitalizing system”—a device that is neither dry cleaning nor drying clothes on an outside line, but somehow feels like both. Innovators conceived of all these new inged things by rethinking the experiences consumers had while using appliances (and rooms) in the home.
Many goods encompass more than one experiential aspect, opening up multiple areas for differentiation. Apparel manufacturers, for instance, could focus on the wearing experience, the cleaning experience, and perhaps even the hanging or drawering experience. (And, like Guttman, they should not be afraid to make up new gerunds whenever needed.) Office supply businesses might create a better briefcasing experience, wastebasketing experience, or computer-screening experience. If you as a manufacturer start thinking in these terms—inging your things—you'll soon be surrounding your goods with services that add value to the activity of using them and then surrounding those services with experiences that make using them more memorable—and therefore make more money.
Any good can be inged. Consider duct tape. ShurTech Brands of Avon, Ohio, employs a number of exemplary methods to turn duct-taping into a more memorably engaging experience via its Duck Tape brand. It does this first by embedding the goods in an experiential brand.32 The brand sports a duck mascot named Trust E. Duck. More than a logo, the duck serves as an all-encompassing motif for organizing almost every customer interaction with the inged brand. This embedding even extends to (or arguably begins with) the brand's interactions with employees: ShurTech's corporate offices, dubbed “The Duck Tape Capital of the World,” represent a themed office that does to office parks what Disney did to amusement parks. The company also emphasizes that it is producing goods experience stagers need. The website for Duck Tape provides a place for the company and its customers to share ideas for various “Ducktivities” that show how the goods can be used in staging various experiences. For example, you can find instructions on how to make a stylish Halloween bag entirely out of Duck Tape.
These kinds of experience-supporting insights are enabled by first sensorializing the goods. This represents perhaps the most straightforward way of making goods more experiential—by adding elements that enhance the customer's sensory interaction with them. Some goods richly engage the senses by their very nature: toys, cotton candy, home videos, music CDs, cigars, wine, and so forth. While the very use of these goods creates a sensory experience, companies can sensorialize any good by accentuating the sensations created from its use.33 Doing so requires being aware of which senses most affect customers (but are perhaps most ignored in the traditional design of goods), focusing on those senses and the sensations they yield, and then redesigning the good to make it more experientially appealing. One way ShurTech does this is by colorizing the goods, offering Duck Tape in twenty colors and challenging customers to “Show Your True Colors.”
The company then allows customers to show off their Duck Tape creations by forming a goods club. Members of the “Duck Tape Club” share tips and tell stories about their adventures using the goods (Duck Tape hammock-swinging, anyone?) as well as gain access to exclusive promotional offers. The company itself gets into the inging action by making some goods scarce. For example, ShurTech made the “world's largest roll of Duck Tape” and sent the one-of-a-kind product on a tour of select retail outlets for fans to get a special look (and feel) of the thing.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the company keeps busy staging goods events. Each year, the brand sponsors its “Stuck on Prom” contest, in which high school seniors win college scholarships by donning their tuxedos and gowns—made entirely out of Duck Tape—at their proms and then submitting photographs to ShurTech for judging. Similarly, a “Duck Tape Dad of the Year” contest finds many duct-taping fathers vying for accolades. And ShurTech helps host the “Avon Heritage Duct Tape Festival,” held each June in the company's hometown. The goods event features, among other inged things, a parade of Duck Tape creations.
Many manufacturers stage their own goods events—although these experiences generally exist as a sideline—when they add muse ums, amusement parks, or other attractions to their factory output. Hershey's Chocolate World—where else but in Hershey, Pennsylvania?—is perhaps the most famous, but there are others, including Spamtown USA (Hormel Foods, Austin, Minnesota), Goodyear World of Rubber (Akron, Ohio), The Crayola Factory (Binney & Smith, Easton, Pennsylvania), LEGOLAND Billund (Denmark), The Guinness Storehouse (Dublin, Ireland), and the Heineken Experience (Amsterdam, The Netherlands).34 Not every manufacturer can turn extra space into a ticket-taking museum, but any company can recast production as a miniaturized plant tour, thus turning the everyday acquisition and consumption of a candy bar, toy, drink, or any other good into a memorable event. The goal is to draw the customer into the process of designing, producing, packaging, and delivering the item. Customers often value the way in which they obtain something as much as the good itself: witness the great feeling Volkswagen engenders when customers pick up their new cars at the company's Autostadt theme park, next to its plant in Wolfsburg, Germany.
The purpose of inging anything is to shift the attention from the underlying goods (and supporting services) to an experience wrapped around these traditional offerings, forestalling commoditization and increasing sales of the goods. Consider the Gumball Wizard machines found outside untold numbers of retail stores around the world. Put in a coin and the gumball spirals around and around before being dispensed, clickety-clacking as it goes. The device offers the same old goods—while, arguably, providing worse service because it takes longer to deliver the gumball. But the gumball-spiraling experience, atop the goods and service, drives increased sales.
The First Principle of Experience Staging
Staging compelling experiences begins with embracing an experience-directed mindset, thinking not only about the design and production of things but also about the design and orchestration of experiences using these things. Achieving this mindset begins with thinking in terms of ing words. Consider this ing thinking the first principle of effective experience staging.
This principle furnishes a powerful first step in
helping businesses and industries shift from goods and services to experiences. For example, thinking in ing words led to the formation of the Go RVing Alliance—composed of the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, the Recreational Vehicle Dealers Association, and other industry groups—to collectively promote the pleasures of RVing in lieu of individual manufacturers being left to pitch the features and benefits of competing RVs.
Wholeheartedly embracing the “ing the thing” principle can even lead to the launch of new experience-based businesses. Consider Build-A-Bear Workshop. Instead of just creating new teddy bear goods, founder Maxine Clark envisioned a special place where “kids aged 3 to 103” could create their own stuffed animals. The experience consists of eight stuffed animal-making stations: Choose Me (with kids choosing from some thirty animal skins), Hear Me (for recording a message or selecting a prerecorded sound for an inserted sound chip), Stuff Me (helping stuff the animal and then hugging it to test for the right amount of stuffiness), Stitch Me (including making-a-wish and then heart-inserting), Fluff Me (where kids enjoy hair-brushing and pampering their new creations in a spa treatment), Name Me (naming the animal and receiving a birth certificate), Dress Me (dressing the animal to show personality), and finally Take Me Home (instead of putting the animal in a shopping bag, housing the custom-made animal in a “Cub Condo Carrying Case,” a home-shaped box doubling as a coloring book—make that a coloring house). Online, the company posts ideas about housecationing while enabling virtual playing in Build-A-Bearville.
Ing One and Ing Two
You can uncover two types of experiences in the process of thinking about how to ing. The first category consists of those ing words that exist in your company's everyday lexicon but are neglected as an experience in its offerings. Addressing these dormant opportunities can yield immediate experience enhancements. Consultant John DiJulius, for example, works with retailers to turn mundane store greetings into engaging encounters. You know the typical drill: the store associate says, “Can I help you?” only to have customers respond with “I'm just looking.” To ing the greeting at JoAnn Fabrics, DiJulius suggested asking, “What are you working on?” Most customers enjoy talking about their craft projects enthusiastically, so the new welcoming experience creates greater opportunity for sales floor staff to make suggestions about possible supplies. Almost every retailer stands to gain from rethinking its greeting. Similarly, almost every airline could stand to ing the intrusive reviewing of in-flight safety instructions by flight attendants over the plane's loudspeakers. Southwest Airlines, of course, ings the thing by allowing staff to sprinkle these announcements with humor and even song. Virgin America rivals this with animated cartoon characters reviewing procedures on the entertainment system screen mounted on each seat.
Some neglected ing words provide fodder for significant innovation. Recognizing milk-drinking as an opportunity, cereal restaurateur Cereality invented a new utensil called the sloop. “The spoon that sips like a straw” has a hollow core running from the curved spoon end to the tip of the handle. Chick-fil-A saw store openings as a neglected experience. Whenever the Atlanta-based company opens a new location, it offers free chicken for a year to the first one hundred customers. These people always show up twenty-four hours in advance to camp out overnight on the store grounds. Chick-fil-A hosts ongoing games and other events in the parking lot throughout the gathering. CEO Dan Cathy typically joins the festivities in the evening to give a motivational speech and play his trumpet at key moments (“Revelry” as the morning wake-up call, and horse racing's “Call to Post” when the store officially opens). Many customers post pictures and videos online as well as blog about their experiences.
In Simsbury, Connecticut, kitchen and bathroom remodeler Mark Brady of Mark Brady Kitchens seized on the selecting of appliances, cabinetry, fixtures, paint, wallpaper, and other renovation accessories as an opportunity to create a “shopping cruise” for prospective customers. Brady books a stretch limousine and chaperones customers (usually couples) on a tour of more than a dozen supply houses, guiding them through a workbook he prepared for fostering discussion between stops. The shopping cruise not only saves time (customers no longer have to navigate their way to all these outlets in the industrial parts of towns), but it also doubles as a great date (the limo driver opens doors and offers snacks, and Brady himself proposes a Champagne toast at the end of the tour). Customers not only make all the necessary selections for their room but also get to know Mark Brady and get comfortable with him as their contractor. (Brady also offers to apply the $750 cost of the shopping cruise to the price of his proposed work.)
So ask yourself, What ing word is being most neglected within our enterprise? Once you identify the opportunity, make it your focus for creating an engaging experience for your customers.
But go one step further. A second category of ing words consists of newly created words—like puffin birding, cross-golfing, noboarding, and housecationing—coined to describe new-to-the-world experiences. (Of course, any new and therefore unfamiliar ing word and its corresponding experience, once popularized, become familiar and therefore “existing” in the sense used here; think of bungee-jumping, which was once a foreign concept but now is enjoyed in almost every resort city in the world.) This approach focuses on inventing new experiences suggested by made-up ing words. The emergence of new ing words arises naturally whenever a truly new good serves as a prop or a new service sets the stage for a new experience. Think about how Apple's iPod (a good) and iTunes (a service) gave rise to podcasting—now familiar to most of us—and podjacking—not yet so familiar: it refers to two people exchanging iPods to check out each other's playlists. (Of note: the spell-checker associated with the software used to write this chapter recognized the former pod-based ing word but not the latter.)
Although the objective—experience innovation—remains the same with either mental model, people often find it easier to imagine new experiences emerging from new words. U.K.-based TopGolf, for example, operates facilities on multiple continents that go beyond mere improvement on the driving range (generally designed only for practicing for subsequent eighteen-hole golf course experiences). Instead, TopGolf offers a self-contained golfing experience in and of itself. With microchips embedded in each golf ball and landing areas that detect which person hit what ball where, it scores buckets, with results for each round posted on computer monitors—a kind of everyman's leaderboard tracking for those topgolfing at any particular time. Or consider zorbing. New Zealand-based Zorb places people inside three-meter-diameter transparent plastic balls—they're actually spheres within spheres—dubbed zorbs, and then rolls them down a hill!
Chicago provides the scene for two other examples of creating new experiences that no existing ing words suffice to describe. Call the one “cow-parading” and the other “bobble-buzzing.” The Greater North Michigan Growth Association hosted “Cows on Parade” in the mid-1990s, commissioning local artists to decorate three hundred bronze cows imported from Switzerland and, once they were completed, placed the finished art pieces throughout the city to promote tourism. The event proved so popular that untold cities followed suit, using other objects ranging from guitars (Cleveland) to flying pigs (Cincinnati) to Peanuts characters (St. Paul, Minnesota) to huge resin ducks (Eugene, Oregon, home of University of Oregon Ducks sports teams).
The other Chicago experience was a B2B marketing experience. Well, actually, it might be better described as an A2A experience, conducted by the Association Forum of Chicagoland, a professional society for directors and managers of other associations based in the greater Chicago area. After years of struggling to recruit members from the ranks of readily identifiable nonmember associations, the group conceived a new inged approach. Rather than conduct yet another direct-mail campaign to thousands of prospects yielding only a handful of new members, the society sent bobblehead dolls of the association's executive director and volunteer president (customized at whoopassenterprises.com) to only the
thirty most active members. Each bobblehead was packed in a “Care and Nurturing” kit that included postcards of the figures photographed at various Chicago landmarks (for mailing to friends in other associations), instructions for displaying the bobblehead for visitors to see in the members' offices, and, most pertinently, applications for membership. As a result of the bobble-buzzing experience, more than three hundred new members joined the Association Forum of Chicagoland, representing a tenfold return on mailings versus the less than 1 percent success rate associated with previous efforts.
So ask yourself, What new ing word could be the basis of creating a wholly new experience? Once you have articulated the word, explore the elements that would help turn the new term into a wildly successful experiential reality.
The Progression of Economic Value
As the placard Rebecca Pine once gave to her father for his birthday says, “The best things in life are not things.” Consider a common event everyone experiences growing up: the birthday party. Most baby boomers can remember childhood birthday parties when Mom baked a cake from scratch. Which meant what, exactly? That she actually touched such commodities as butter, sugar, eggs, flour, milk, and cocoa. And how much did these ingredients cost back then? A dime or two, maybe three.
Such commodities became less relevant to the needs of consumers when companies such as General Mills, with its Betty Crocker brand, and Procter & Gamble, with Duncan Hines, packaged most of the necessary ingredients into cake mixes and canned frostings. And how much did these goods cost as they increasingly flew off the supermarket shelf in the 1960s and 1970s? Not much, perhaps a dollar or two at most, but still quite a bit more than the cost of the basic commodities. The higher cost was recompense for the increased value of the goods in terms of flavor and texture consistency, ease of mixing, and overall time savings.
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