Experience orchestration has become as much a part of doing business as product and process design. The evidence is everywhere. In restaurants and retail stores, classrooms and parking garages, hotels and hospitals, leading companies set the stage for others now joining the Experience Economy. No longer in the embryonic phase of development, pioneering experience staging has resulted in practices that provide the starting point from which still further refinements will surely emerge. Elvis has left the building, and it's showtime!
Theme the Experience
Just hear the name of any theme restaurant—Hard Rock Cafe, House of Blues, or the Medieval Times, to name a few—and you know what to expect when you enter. The proprietors have taken the first, crucial step toward staging an experience by envisioning a well-defined theme.1 A poorly conceived theme, on the other hand, gives customers nothing around which to organize their impressions, and the experience yields no lasting memory. An incoherent theme is like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, California: “There is no there there.”
Of course, such theming can take diversely clever forms. Darden Restaurants, the world's largest full-service restaurant company, operates a vast array of differently themed chains: Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, Capital Grille, Bahama Breeze, and Seasons 52, each with its own distinctive design inspiration. The Darden restaurant brand Seasons 52, most notably, simply leverages the calendar as its theme. The chain offers a “seasonally inspired” menu that changes four times a year; it runs specials fifty-two times a year (unlike daily specials, weekly specials are more likely to encourage diners to later recommend a dish to family and friends), and desserts (“mini-indulgences”) contain only 365 (or so) calories. Independent fine-dining establishments often employ even more sophisticated theming. Chef Homaro Cantu's postmodern Moto Restaurant, located in the meatpacking and produce district of Chicago, offers themed platings and wine pairings, among other technology-driven gastronomic fare (for example, one literally eats the “edible paper” menu). Well-orchestrated themes do not exist in name only (as did old high school proms in the gym) but instead act as the dominant idea, organizing principle, or underlying concept for every element in the experience.
Retailers often offend this principle. They talk of “the shopping experience” but fail to create a theme that ties disparate merchandising presentations together into a cohesively and comprehensively staged way. Home appliance and electronics retailers, for example, show little thematic imagination. Row upon row of washers and dryers, and wall after wall of refrigerators, merely highlight the sameness of different companies' stores. Shouldn't there have been something distinctive about an establishment called Circuit City? (Its array of merchandise took its thematic footprint from headstones at a cemetery, adumbrating its eventual demise.)
One retailer in the forefront of leveraging the experience of shopping was Leonard Riggio. When the Barnes & Noble CEO began to expand the chain of bookstores into superstores, he hit on the simple theme of “theatres.” Riggio realized that people visited bookstores for much the same reason they go to the theatre: for the social experience.2 So he changed everything about the stores to express this theme: the architecture, the way salespeople acted, the decor and furnishings. And of course he added cafes as an “intermission” from mingling, browsing, and buying. With online bookseller Amazon.com now the dominant force in the industry, offering reader reviews and forwardable e-mail confirmations, yet more needs to be done to turn the bookstores (still merely selling goods) into true book-recommending and book-reading venues (selling experiences). The rise of e-readers only intensifies the need to invent yet new themes in physical space if bookstores wish to successfully compete.
Consider the history of Forum Shops in Las Vegas, a mall initially conceived by developer Sheldon Gordon (of Gordon Group Holdings) and developed along with Indianapolis-based real estate company Simon Property Group. Triggering the rise of retailing as a new revenue stream for Vegas resorts, the Forum Shops opened in 1992. The mall displays its distinctive theme—an ancient Roman marketplace—in every detail, fulfilling this motif through a panoply of architectural effects. These include marble floors, stark white pillars, “outdoor” cafes, living trees, flowing fountains, and even a painted blue sky with fluffy white clouds that shifts from day to night every hour. Every mall entrance and every storefront, no matter the brand, must conform to the overarching theme. One telling detail we think brings it all together: the channels lining both sides of the hallways, a few feet from the store entrances, as if the shopkeepers cleaned their stores every morning with water buckets and then threw out the water to make its way to the Adriatic Sea. The theme implies opulence, and after a 1997 phase II expansion doubled the mall's size, sales grew to more than $1,000 per square foot (versus less than $300 at a typical mall). A phase III expansion in 2004, which added a four-thousand-seat “Colosseum” for show performances as well as four spiral escalators, continues the theming tradition.
Walt Disney's idea for Disneyland grew out of his dissatisfaction with amusement parks—themeless collections of rides, games, and refreshments geared to the young. As he related to biographer Bob Thomas, “It all started when my daughters were very young, and I took them to amusement parks on Sunday. I sat on a bench eating peanuts and looking all around me. I said to myself, dammit, why can't there be a better place to take your children, where you can have fun together?”3 And from these first thoughts Disney conceived the original idea of Disneyland—in his words, “a cartoon that immerses the audience.” It developed into a cohesive orchestration of theme rides—such as the King Arthur Carousel, Peter Pan's Flight, and the Mark Twain paddleboat (each “like nothing you've ever seen in an amusement park before”).4 These rides operated within theme areas—such as Fantasyland and Frontierland—within the very first theme park anywhere in the world, what its first brochure called “a new experience in entertainment.”5 What was the overarching theme of the Disneyland experience? Disney's 1953 proposal to potential financial backers begins with a very simple and engaging theme and then goes on to elaborate the meaning of this theme in very real, and soon realized, terms:
The idea of Disneyland is a simple one. It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge.
It will be a place for parents and children to share pleasant times in one another's company: a place for teachers and pupils to discover greater ways of understanding and education. Here the older generation can recapture the nostalgia of days gone by, and the younger generation can savor the challenge of the future.6
“A place for people to find happiness and knowledge” conjured such a wonderful image that Disney quickly found financial backers. In less than two years the themed park opened to far more visitors than anyone had imagined.
As a model, consider an often-used theme in novels and films: crime doesn't pay. Three simple words say it all. Or consider the television tavern Cheers, “where everybody knows your name.” Companies that stage experiences must seek equally crisp thematic constructions. Of course, businesses wishing to impart very different experiences require very different themes. The Geek Squad serves as a powerfully simple and appropriately geeky name for the Minnesota-based computer support business. It might appear that, like many theme restaurants, the Geek Squad's theme is stated right in its name. Not so. Rather, founder and Chief Inspector Robert Stephens says the organizing principle for everything the business strives to fulfill is “comedy with a straight face.”7 Using this theme allows “Special Agents” to maintain a straitlaced demeanor (as if they had walked off the screen of a modern-day episode of Dragnet) while engaging clients with Geek-based humor (as when flashing an identification badge: “Hi, I'm Special Agent Seventy-three here for your computer … Step away from the computer, ma'am”). They still perform the necessary installation or repair, but the costuming and props—white short-sleeve shirts, black clip-on ties, black pants, and company-issued shoes, VW beetles painted as black-and-white squad cars dubbed Geekm
obiles—direct the enveloping geek performance.
The Geek Squad also provides a study in the difference between a theme and a motif. Dictionaries treat the two words nearly synonymously. Think of a motif, however, as the outward manifestation of a theme. The motif and theme can be one and the same (as is typically the case with Disney, when it explicitly uses movies or updated fairy tales as themes for its rides) but need not be. The Geek Squad's motif evidences itself in its name, logo, vehicles, badges, and attire; it all winks at the notion of law enforcement. But this motif is only the means through which the underlying theme tells a story. Indeed, at its best, theming means scripting a story that would seem incomplete without guests' engagement in the experience.8 As designer Randy White of White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group says, “Storyline-based themes are powerful. They draw guests into a fanciful, imaginary world and have the potential to touch the eye, mind and head of visitors.”9 Such theming can be scaled; in an otherwise mom-and-pop service industry, thanks to its 2002 purchase by Best Buy the Geek Squad has grown to more than twenty-four thousand agents in its “24-Hour Computer Support Task Force.” It did so by treating each customer interaction as an opportunity to (comically) tell the Geek Squad story (with a straight face). Any number of other highly fragmented service industries—car washes, dry cleaners, landscapers, nail salons, even funeral homes—represent opportunities to similarly build scalable businesses through theming.
Developing an appropriate theme for such experiences is certainly challenging. One place to start is with general categories of themes. In his insightful, albeit academic, book The Theming of America, sociology professor Mark Gottdiener identifies ten themes that often materialize in the “built environments” that he calls staged experiences: (1) status, (2) tropical paradise, (3) the Wild West, (4) classical civilization, (5) nostalgia, (6) Arabian fantasy, (7) urban motif, (8) fortress architecture and surveillance, (9) modernism and progress, and (10) representations of the unrepresentable (such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall).10 Marketing professors Bernd Schmitt and Alex Simonson, in their instructive book Marketing Aesthetics, offer nine more “domains” in which themes can be found: (1) history, (2) religion, (3) fashion, (4) politics, (5) psychology, (6) philosophy, (7) the physical world, (8) popular culture, and (9) the arts.11
Of course, these general categories only point out possible directions for discovering a specific theme. The Library Hotel in New York City, for example, took as its theme another classification system (and a set of domains far exceeding Gottdiener's or Schmitt and Simonson's lists)—namely, the Dewey Decimal System. In this architecture of theming, the hotel organizes each of the ten guest room floors based on one of ten major Dewey Decimal System categories: Social Sciences, Languages, Math & Sciences, Technology, The Arts, Literature, History, General Knowledge, Philosophy, and Religion. Rooms on each floor break down each category into different topics, with corresponding room numbers. For example, the six rooms on the seventh floor (“The Arts”) are numbered 700.006 (Fashion design), 700.005 (Music), 700.004 (Photography), 700.003 (Performing arts), 700.002 (Paintings), and 700.001 (Architecture). Each guest room's bookshelf is stocked with its own collection of topic-specific books, a corresponding coffee table volume, and topic-inspired artwork.
Every experience has a theme. Whether or not themed intentionally, whether or not designed well, and whether or not executed thoroughly and rigorously, a theme always emerges. Discovering a suitable theme is central to experience design. No matter what list or category prompts the discovery, the key lies in determining what theme will actually prove to be compelling and captivating. Five principles are paramount in developing such a theme.
First, an engaging theme must alter a guest's sense of reality. Each of Gottdiener's themes alters a dimension of the human experience, be it temporal age, geographic location, environmental condition (familiar/foreign, risky/safe), social affiliation, or self-image. Creating a reality other than the everyday—for doing, learning, enjoying, and being—underlies any successful theme and is at the heart of establishing a sense of place.
Second, the richest venues possess themes that fully alter one's sense of reality by affecting the experience of space, matter, and time. Parking garages are a space we've all experienced. Typical parking lines occupy space in one dimension and serve only to identify a stall—usually when drivers pull in, more than when they return. Signs provide a two-dimensional view, helping one see where one has parked. The themed design of the Standard Parking garage at Chicago's O'Hare airport, however, offers a place to experience parking spots in full 3-D perspective. Indeed, the intent is to bring energy and motion into the process of locating one's car. As a result, returning guests do not waste time wandering around looking for their cars.
Time feels different for children (and more than a few parents) at Disneyland's revamped Tomorrowland, which seeks to alter one's sense of the future. The same altered sense of the future can be experienced in various B2B settings, such as through the parade of five- to fifteen-minute talks at a TED Conference, with its three-word theme: technology, entertainment, design. The Hard Rock Cafe attempts to manipulate the past, as do many museums and corporate briefing centers. In an interesting twist of the clock, The Little Gym (decorated in a primary color motif ) overcomes any risk of dissatisfaction with its gymnastics instruction for small children by theming time itself. Rather than present lessons as themeless repetitions of tumbling drills, climbing exercises, and other apparatus use, it themes each program (such as “Funny Bugs”) as well as each class (e.g., “Upside Down Week”); the aim is to hold gymnasts' interest week-to-week while essentially going over the same underlying routines. Google themes its very own logo on its home page based on events that happened on this particular date in history. And in Southern California, the Cerritos Public Library bills itself as “the world's first experience library,” employing the theme of “journey through time” to alter the décor and furnishings of each room. In a town of fifty thousand residents, the library averages more than three thousand visitors daily.
Likewise, matter can be neither slighted nor ignored in the formation of a compelling theme. Themes may suggest alternative sizes, shapes, and substances of things. Cabela's and rival Bass Pro Shops' outdoor themes display the objects of an outdoor enthusiast's desire, through taxidermy and other backdrops, and in the process bring the hunter closer to the hunted. Marriott Vacation Club International places a large pirate ship, complete with water-firing cannons and waterslide planks, in its resort pool at its Horizons resort in Orlando. It supports the pirate motif and the underlying theme of “stuff in pool” by offering all sorts of things that work together to enhance the family experience, from “Captain Horizon” leading squirt-gun fights on the hour to VIP welcome packages placed in rooms as treasure chests. In a more adult setting, Marriott's joint venture with Ian Schrager, the new Edition “lifestyle” hotels, opened its first venue in late 2010 in Waikiki Beach. The resort includes an outdoor movie theatre, surfing and swimwear “boot camps,” and a hidden lobby bar accessible to guests only through a secret passageway.
And space matters. Billion-dollar airlines typically take few steps to alter the sensation of crammed space experienced by the coach traveler. Mike Vance, creativity expert and former dean of Disney University, relates in speeches how he travels with personal items in a bag he calls his “Kitchen of the Mind”—family pictures, pieces of paper, and assorted knickknacks that he uses to decorate his seat back, tray table, and window shade, especially on long flights. Flight attendants look at Vance as if he, and not the themeless airline, has a problem.12 Thus travelers welcomed the arrival of Virgin America to the United States, with its mood lighting and entertainment system that create a foreign feel for its version of domestic U.S. air travel. One feature that should not be overlooked is its contribution to this radically designed cabin space: the wall that hides the flight attendant jump seats and food prep areas has been eliminated, placing flight
attendants in full view throughout the entire flight. As a result, the dynamic between passengers and crew has been vastly improved, largely because the crew now must act onstage, all the time, as a unified ensemble.
Third, engaging themes integrate space, matter, and time into a cohesive, realistic whole. To see how, consider a work of theology. In his apologetic for the Christian faith, Henry M. Morris states, “It is not that the universe is a triad of three distinct entities [time, space, and matter] which, when added together, comprise the whole. Rather each of the three is itself the whole, and the universe is a true trinity, not a triad. Space is infinite and time is endless, and everywhere throughout space and time events happen, processes function, phenomena exist. The tri-universe is remarkably analogous to the nature of its Creator.”13
Therein lies the power of storytelling and other narratives as a vehicle to script themes. Great books and good movies engage their audiences when they create completely new realities, altering every detail of the reading and cinematic experience. Lori's Diner, a small chain of restaurants in San Francisco, creates an authentic-looking 1950s diner, complete with vintage jukeboxes, pinball machines, booths, waiter and waitress uniforms—occasionally even a Fonz-like character outside who beckons passersby to enter into this past world.14 So why not borrow this principle for bank branches and car-rental shuttle buses, conference sessions, and other B2B marketing events?
The Experience Economy (Updated Edition) Page 9