Fourth, creating multiple places within a place strengthens themes. At the now-defunct Discovery Zone, almost every corner of the place was visible from any other vantage point. See-through nets separated one section from another, with the so-called ball pit attraction often at the center of activity. Even if this setting was meant to help parents keep track of their youngsters' whereabouts, it called to mind Gottdiener's fortress architecture and surveillance theme more than a place for imaginative exploration and play. Consider instead the American Girl Place. The merchandise is secondary to the overall experience, which is wonderfully staged by offering multiple places within the place. A visit starts with the library, where all the books written about each doll are displayed. A dozen or more animated screens display each doll's character. The restaurant, simply called “Cafe,” provides yet another place, and its doors remain closed until the appointed seating times for brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner. A photo studio provides a place for girls to have their pictures taken for customized covers of American Girl magazine. The studio comes complete with a separate area to receive a preparatory make-up session. Then there is the hair salon, where girls can have their dolls' hair styled or, for older dolls, restored to its original condition.
Finally, a theme should fit the character of the enterprise staging the experience. In 1947 Chicago developer Arthur Rubloff coined the three-word phrase “Chicago's Magnificent Mile” to describe the famous stretch of commercial property along greater North Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. It is a magnificently constructed theme, enduring for generations because it befits not only the walking that shoppers must do to shop and eat there, but also the luxury and opulence on display. Rubloff later formed The Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, which was instrumental in hosting “Cows on Parade” in 1999. Chicago was the first U.S. city to import this cow parade concept from Switzerland, commissioning local artists to paint three hundred life-sized cow statues that were placed throughout the city. The public art exhibit accounted for hundreds of millions of incremental tourist dollars as people flocked to Chicago to see and to be photographed with the cows. The cow theme was ideal, given Chicago's mid-nineteenth-century history as the only rail distribution hub for transporting livestock from the West to the rest of the nation. Other cities copied the themed exhibition, with mixed success (guitars in Cleveland, flying pigs in Cincinnati, and so forth) depending largely on how well the theme tied to the character of the city.
An effective theme must be concise and compelling. Too much detail clutters its effectiveness in serving as an organizing principle for staging the experience. The theme is not a corporate mission statement nor a marketing tagline. It needn't be publicly articulated—just as the term “Trinity” appears nowhere in the texts of Scripture—and yet its presence must be clearly felt. The theme must drive all the design elements and staged events of the experience toward a unified storyline that wholly captivates the customer. That is the essence of the theme; all the rest simply lends support.
Harmonize Impressions with Positive Cues
The theme forms the foundation of an experience, but you must render the experience with indelible impressions. Impressions are the “takeaways” of the experience—what you want customers to have topmost in their minds when they leave the experience. The congruent integration of a number of impressions affects the individual and thereby helps fulfill the theme. Thinking about impressions begins with asking yourself how you would like guests to describe the experience: “That made me feel …” or “That was …” Schmitt and Simonson again provide a useful list, this one delineating six “dimensions of overall impressions”:
Time: Traditional, contemporary, or futuristic representations of the theme
Space: City/country, East/West (to which we might add North/South), home/business, and indoor/outdoor representations
Technology: Handmade/machine-made and natural/artificial representations
Authenticity: Original or imitative representations
Sophistication: Yielding refined/unrefined or luxurious/cheap representations
Scale: Representing the theme as grand or small.15
Experience orchestrators can use these dimensions to think creatively about the many possibilities for rendering a theme with indelible impressions. The connection to space-matter-time is obvious.
Yet this list only begins to tap the relationship between impressions and the theme they support. For what may be the most comprehensive list of impressions imaginable, no source can exceed Peter Mark Roget's synopsis of categories. Roget's International Thesaurus (fourth edition) offers 1,042 categorized entries from “Existence” to “Religious Buildings” across 8 classes and 176 subclasses and, should you want the detail within the Thesaurus itself, 250,000 words and phrases.16 It's the richest possible source for exploring the exact words to denote the specific impressions you want guests to take away from the experience.
Words alone obviously are not enough to create the desired impressions. Companies must introduce cues that together affirm the nature of the desired experience for the guest. Cues are signals, found in the environment or in the behavior of workers, that create a set of impressions. Each cue must support the theme, and none should be inconsistent with it.
Joie de Vivre ( JDV) Hospitality of San Francisco employs a brilliant technique for harmonizing impressions with positive cues when it themes its portfolio of hotels, restaurants, and spas. Founder Chip Conley began his hospitality business by purchasing a cheap, rundown motel in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Conley wanted to create a unique hotel experience, but he didn't have the money—beyond that necessary to buy and remodel the property—to conduct market research to identify who might be attracted to the venue. So he seized on an industry that could provide such insights—magazines—and themed his Phoenix Hotel after Rolling Stone magazine. He pored over back issues to determine five impressions that the rock 'n' roll rag imparted to its readers: adventurous, hip, irreverent, funky, and young-at-heart. Conley then redesigned the entire place (much of it cosmetically and therefore inexpensively) to bring these impressions to life as a consistent, coherent, and compelling whole wrapped around the magazine theme. JDV turned the swimming pool into a “dive-in” for partying, colorfully decorated the guest rooms (including that little old place, room 3-2-1, as the “Love Shack”), and slapped bumper stickers from local rock bands on the housekeeping carts. “Listening posts” were set up for staff to pick up ideas from guests for additional cues that might enhance the experience. Note that JDV did not name the hotel after the magazine, advertise the connection, nor even tell guests the theme. Rather, it introduced cues to create the desired impressions, and, amazingly, without revealing its theme, the Phoenix Hotel became the happening place to stay in San Francisco for touring bands and their road crews. JDV Hospitality uses this same “pick a magazine” technique for each of its dozens of California venues.
Different kinds of experiences, of course, often rely on radically different kinds of impression-forming cues. At East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, CEO Peter Betts (now retired) and his management team redesigned the hospital around the impressions of warmth, caring, and professionalism. The hospital conveys these three key impressions by means of having team members wear easily read name tags that list professional titles and degrees, and they knock before entering a patient's room, among other things. The hospital designates any area accessible to guests—including not only patients but also family members, clergy, and any other visitors—as onstage and all others as offstage. It then confines unpleasant activities (such as transporting blood) and “hall conversations” to offstage areas and carefully crafts all onstage areas with appropriate cues that enhance the experience. Toward this end, painted murals cover the ceilings of rehabilitation rooms where patients frequently exercise on their backs, and different kinds of flooring identify distinct locations (lobbies are carpeted, paths to dining a
reas are slate, and paths to conference rooms are terrazzo).17
Lewis Carbone, chief experience officer of Minneapolis-based Experience Engineering, developed a useful construct for engineering preference-creating experiences. Carbone divides cues—or “clues,” as he calls them—into “mechanics” and “humanics,” or what might be called the inanimate and the animate. The former are “the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and textures generated by things, for example, landscaping, graphics, scents, recorded music, handrail surfaces, and so on. In contrast, 'humanics' clues emanate from people. They are engineered by defining and choreographing the desired behavior of employees involved in the customer encounter.”18
At Disney, to avoid any possible association with rowdy local carnivals or run-down amusement parks, management set the impression of cleanliness as a cardinal principle. The designers translated this concern into two key cues: the mechanics of making sure a trash receptacle is always within sight of any guest, and the humanics of assigning a large number of cast members whose sole role is to pick up any trash that does not make it into a receptacle. Well, not quite the sole role: they're also to make eye contact and smile whenever they're within ten feet of any guest to reinforce the “happiness” impression.
The cues trigger impressions that fulfill the theme in the customer's mind. An experience can be unpleasant merely because an architectural feature has been overlooked or underappreciated or is not coordinated with the overall theme. Unplanned or inconsistent visual and aural cues can leave a customer confused or lost. Have you ever been unsure of how to find your hotel room, even after the front-desk staff has provided detailed directions? Better, clearer cues along the way would have enhanced your experience.
Eliminate Negative Cues
Ensuring the integrity of the experience requires more than layering on positive cues. Experience stagers also must eliminate anything that detracts from fulfilling the theme. Guests at most constructed spaces—malls, offices, buildings, or airplanes—find them littered with meaningless or trivial messages. While customers sometimes do need instructions, too often service providers say it poorly or choose an inappropriate medium, such as the sign we encountered on a chair in a Wyndham Garden Hotel room some years ago: “For your comfort, this chair reclines.” (The better cue of having the chair reclined upon arrival would have rendered the signage unnecessary.) Cognitive psychologist and industrial design critic Donald Norman gives a “rule of thumb for spotting bad design: Look for posted instructions.”19 In other words, any instructional signage is a sign of poor design. It serves only to form a poor impression.
Seemingly minor cues can impair any experience. At most restaurants, for example, a host droning, “Your table is ready” cues customers to expect the usual meal service. That phrase is now so familiar it forms no impression. At a Rainforest Cafe, however, the host sets the stage for what lies ahead by proclaiming for all to hear, “The Smith party, your adventure is about to begin!” Should the Smith party fail to appear after the third call, the host informs the other guests that the Smith's “safari has left without them.” After we stated “Three, please” to a host at Ed Debevic's in Chicago, he snaked our party in and around tables until we finally inquired about our table. His smart-alecky response: “Oh, you didn't say anything about a table.” (Ed Debevic's harmonizes its cues around a set of impressions that can best be described as nasty, rude, mean spirited, obnoxious, and ill tempered; it works because of how well the company humorously harmonizes the cues. Our party should have picked up on the initial cue: our host sported a name tag bearing the stage name “Smiley.”)
To avoid giving cues at odds with its good-tempered themes, Disney cast members always act their parts, never stepping out of character while onstage. Only when offstage, in an area prohibited to customers, can cast members talk freely among themselves. Many historical villages, such as Old Sturbridge Village and Plimoth Plantation, both in Massachusetts, also require employees to stay in character (eighteenth-century farmers and the like at Sturbridge; Pilgrims and Indians at Plimoth). Others, such as Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown in Virginia, significantly diminish the integrity of their experiences by allowing period-costumed employees to talk the talk of their present-day guests.
The idea of “role-appropriate” clothing and behavior can also apply to people with workaday jobs. At East Jefferson General Hospital, all team members must personify “the EJ Look”—a set of dress standards that eliminates potentially negative cues. Not allowed, for example, are casual shirts without ties on men, extra-long fingernails and certain shades of polish on women, and strong colognes or perfumes on either. The EJ Look helps the staff create the hospital's desired impression of professionalism and has proved so effective that people they meet out and about in the community often immediately identify them as being from East Jefferson.
Presenting too many cues, particularly when put together haphazardly—such as overservicing in the name of customer intimacy—can also ruin an experience. As a writer for Fortune put it in extolling the virtues of staying in chartered homes instead of hotels while traveling, “There are no check-ins, no checkouts, no bills to puzzle over, no inflated telephone charges (you dial direct and an itemized list of calls is sent to you later), and only a two- or three-night minimum. Even better, no service-industry intrusions: no bellman waiting to be acknowledged or tipped, no maids lurking in your room watching TV, no agents sneaking in at night to hide chocolates in the bed.”20 Lest they slowly lose their clientele to the better experience of an away-from-home home, hotel chains should work harder to eliminate negative cues: stop cluttering end tables, dressers, and desktops with tent cards and other service communication; assign offstage personnel to answer phones so that front-desk staff won't have to interrupt face-to-face conversations with paying guests to field telephone calls; make sure bellmen and maids perform their tasks unobtrusively; and so forth. Only then will their guests be made to feel truly at home.
Mix in Memorabilia
People have always purchased certain goods primarily for the memories they convey. Vacationers buy postcards to evoke treasured sights, golfers purchase shirts or caps with embroidered logos to recall particular courses or rounds, and teenagers collect T-shirts to remember rock concerts. They purchase such memorabilia as tangible artifacts of the experiences they want to remember.
Such items are often among people's most cherished possessions, worth far more to them than the manufacturing cost of the artifact. Take something as simple as a ticket stub, a natural by-product of many an experience. Perhaps you have some tucked away in the bottom of a jewelry box (with other valuable items), or your children have some carefully mounted and displayed in their bedrooms. Why do we keep these torn scraps of paper? It's because they represent a cherished experience. Your first Major League baseball game, a favorite musical, a meaningful date at the movies—all events that run the risk of fading away without a physical reminder.
Of course, that's not the only—perhaps not even the primary—reason we purchase memorabilia. Greater still may be our desire to show others what we have experienced to generate conversation and, not a small factor perhaps, envy.21 This factor provides more food for the thoughtful experience stager. As Bruno Giussani, European director of TED Conferences, related to us, “Memorabilia are a way to ‘socialize’ the experience, to transmit parts of it to others—and for companies entering the Experience Economy, they are means to entice new guests.”
People already spend tens of billions of dollars every year on this class of goods, which generally sells at price points far higher than those commanded by similar items that don't commemorate an experience locale or event. A Rolling Stones concertgoer will pay a large premium for an official T-shirt emblazoned with the date and city of the concert. That's because the price point functions less as an indicator of the cost of the goods than of the value the buyer attaches to remembering the experience. In addition to gaining a premium over run-of-the-mill T-shirts, the
Hard Rock Cafe induces guests to make multiple purchases simply by printing the location of each particular cafe on its T-shirts.
Selling memorabilia associated with an experience provides one approach to extending an experience; giving away items inherently part of the experience is another. Mixing the memorabilia into the experience to be used by guests affords a richer opportunity to attach a memory to the physical artifact. Thus hotels print artwork on electronic key cards and design alternative slogans for “Do Not Disturb” signs. Some forgo text altogether, as the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa has done; its door hanger is simply a pink flamingo with no text, harmonizing with the pink flamingos that grace the grounds. The Cafe restaurants in American Girl Place venues provide an exemplary illustration. Rolled napkins are placed inside hair scrunchies (colored black-and-white, either striped or polka-dotted, to harmonize with the room's décor). Once these perks are discovered, the young patrons immediately inquire as to whether they may keep them—only to be assured that the complimentary item is theirs to take home. (American Girl also sells memorabilia for its Cafe experience: dolls sit in twelve-inch-high chairs called “treat seats” during meals; they sell for $25!) Thomas Keller's French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, California, also mixes in napkin-holding memorabilia in the form of an embossed clothespin.
Companies should get creative and seek to develop wholly new forms of memorabilia. When the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Florida, installed a new computerized safety system with key cards, management decided to give away the old doorknobs to past guests instead of selling or tossing them out. Each of the 463 knobs was engraved with the classic Ritz-Carlton lion and crown insignia, converted into a distinctive paperweight, and given to those guests—among the more than six thousand people who requested one—whose story of an experience at the Ritz most touched the hearts of the associates who read each appeal. The limited-supply doorknobs became a tangible reminder of a memorable stay, and, Ritz-Carlton certainly hoped, a cue to relive that experience in the future. The sense of obligation created within guests was worth far more than the Ritz would have gotten by selling the doorknobs.
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