Holistically planning of experience strategies
Five experience strategies should be taken into account simultaneously, not independently in the planning stage to create the synergy. We suggest the following issues to follow when managers plan their experience strategies. First, experience managers should identify experiential value promise in the form of five Strategic experience modules specifically for the subsequent focus of experiences delivered by certain experience providers (Schmitt 2003). Second, experiential grid can identify timing, experience providers, and experience types of all touchpoints, which helps a lot for all the planners knowing the basics (Schmit 1999). Third, experiential wheel can be used as a tool to the sequence of experiences for a certain experience providers. The point should be the evaluation of the fit among different kinds of experiences. Fourth, experience blueprint can help evaluate whether there is a fit among different
experience providers, inclusive of the enclosed experiences (Carbone 2004). The aforementioned tools can help experience planners think holistically. Fifth, after completion of the planning of experience strategies, customers are to be invited to experience the new design. Experience managers should seek customer feedback on whether there are any conflicts among experiences or any violations of experience value promise. Sometimes, mystery shoppers can work the same as an introspective method to learn the effect of experience strategies (Smith and Wheeler 2002).
The effectiveness of experience strategies
Experience planners should take into consideration the influence of holistic experience strategies on customers’ cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses toward the brand. Also, the relationship among holistic experiences, brand equity
dimensions, and brand affect should be understood for the accumulation of experience knowledge-a strategic asset used for creating competitive advantage (Carbone 2004).
More experience knowledge can help arrange holistic experience strategies and design and further the effect of holistic experience strategies.
In this study, experience strategies can improve perceived quality, brand
awareness/association of brand equity directly. However, experience strategies can not attain brand loyalty, the final goal of brand equity or experience management, directly but indirectly by the enhancement of brand affect. That is, without a final enhancement of brand affect, more experiences appealing to cognitive dimensions or behavioral dimension toward the brand are futile.
In the different routes to attain brand loyalty, efforts should be directed toward the enhancement of brand affect in the experiential hierarchy. Companies should enact 2 or 3 affective endnotes known from the tracking of customers’ affect toward the brand to better the effect of experience strategies on brand affect. In our study, specific brand affect justifies candidating such affective endnotes as fun, exciting, delightful, thrilling and enjoyable. Zaltman metaphor elaboration techniques (ZMET) can extract real components of affect toward the brand from customers. It is noted that selected hedonic affect should comply with real affect from ZMET. Transformational ads can work here to show customers ways to experience the brand or product of the company and to attain the corresponding affect toward the brand. In addition, efforts should be directed toward the enhancement of brand awareness/association or perceived quality
brand associations, companies should encourage customers to share experience stories on the brand online communities to build more experience knowledge and integrate extant knowledge with the new experience knowledge (McWilliam 2000). Also, fit between the new and old knowledge should be examined by image analysis. To improve perceived quality, setting the standard of performance in every touchpoint is required. However, the standards set should follow the opinion of customers.
Argumentary ads are appropriate for delivering functional benefits brought by the brand to customers. The product offered should satisfy functional benefits. Given the nature of experience strategies is customer-led, the improvement of these complete mediators should follow customer insights and be tracked on a long run basis. Most importantly, under experience contexts, consumers prefer both functional and symbolic meanings (Padgett and Allen 1997). Also, our research findings indicated it was
possible for experiential and standard learning hierarchies to attain brand loyalty.
Therefore, narrative ads carefully reflected the theme of the company can be set forth to communicate experiences to customers effectively, with more weights on affect, less on functions. In terms of the content and format of narrative ads, brand journalism can apply. The different routes for brand loyalty in this research can be used to edit the plot of the experience show to consolidate goal attainment. In addition, brand-centered festivals can be acted out according to the different routes and serve as live shows for loyal customers to participate in. The plot of the narrative ad or the show should appeal to the brand affect of consumers or appeal to the brand awareness/association, in turn perceived quality and then affect of consumers or appeal to the perceived quality toward the brand, in turn corresponding brand affect, and finally brand loyalty.
However, the former is better than the latter two if there is only one appeal adopted. As for the arrangement of experiential clues, now that experience hierarchy dominates in the attainment of loyalty, compared to functional clues, more people, mechanic clues
are suggested to deliver the planned holistic experiences to customers. For example, employees in McDonald’s should be equipped with the ability to convey authentic brand affects to customers (Thorsten et al. 2006). In this research, the impact of experience strategies is mostly reflected on the affective dimension toward the brand, which in turn produces brand loyalty. Hence, implications such as lower promotion activities, lower cognitive retrieval cues in the point of purchase, more planned obsolescence, and more mechanisms for triggering word-of-mouth (WOM) are proposed. Experience stagers should ensure the affect promised is more than or equal to the affect perceived (Desai and Mahajan 1998). Due to the smaller effects of standard learning hierarchy and zero effects of low involvement hierarchy, campaigns appealing to rational thinking alone may fail. In this way, systematic analysis or marketing heuristics are less adopted by consumers, indicating experience stagers lower their think strategy resources on appeals to consumers’ convergent thinking but more on their divergent thinking.
The efficiency of experience strategies
As for McDonald’s, it is important to manage five strategic experiences
holistically but discriminate resources according to their importance. The result of the Chi-square difference test indicated two possible ways of resource allocation. We discuss them below. The first way indicates relate experiences rank first, followed by equal importance of feel, think, and act experiences, and sense experiences in the least.
For experience stagers, they can adjust their weights of experiences strategies to reflect customers’ perceived ones, and attain efficiency of customer experience management.
experiences, and sense experiences in the least. In this case, weights are 21.40 percent equally for relate, feel, and think strategies, 18.88 percent for the act strategy, and 16.93 percent for the sense strategy. The two ways all indicate relate experiences ranks first. More weight on relate strategy corresponds to the fact that relate is the most important strategic resource that requires large and long-term investment (Schmitt 1999). Now that the company has attained the effectiveness of holistic experience strategies, an improvement of relate strategy can make internal and external customers bond to the brand. Based on Understand/ Provide/ Dialogue/ Relate (UPDR) model proposed by Schmitt (2004), McDonald’s has to offer mechanisms to allow for more dialogues among employees, between customers and employees, and among customers.
Customer deep insight delved from dialogues can help the attainment of relate in the end. As for dialogues among employees, internal shows integrated with experience value promise can be utilized. Cascading technique is well-suited for companies with plenty employees just like McDonald’s when important roles in each store are selected and experience the show. Later, they come back to share the show with other partners.
McDonald’s has done this with its experience camp. In terms of dialogues between customers and employees, interactive show-and-tell, product play, and just dialogue can be considered. The latter two involve more human interaction when employees share the new product or activities with customers without hard sell or just talk about the glory to be one of the employees of the company. Given the importance of people clues discussed above, they can be added to the current show. As for dialogues among customers, companies should motivate them by incentives corresponding to experience value promise. In addition, enterprise operators should choose a way of strategic resource allocation that can mostly follow the effectiveness of experiences strategies in that only when effectiveness is attained can we pursue efficiency. In this manner, we should choose the second allocation because feel and think experiences can mostly
attain the effect of experiential marketing in this study.
Implications for customer experience management(CEM) systems
The largest effect of experience strategies reflects on brand affect. Therefore, every step in customer experience management system should center on brand affect of consumers. In experience goal-setting, other than brand loyalty, brand affect is to be considered because it serves as the possible antecedent to brand loyalty. However, affective goals toward the brand have to base on ZMET result to reflect the true affect consumers have with the focal brand. In experience exploration, gap between the actual brand affect of customers and the real one should be filled. Also, if there are exemplars of similar brand affect, company should benchmark their practices to learn more about the experience knowledge of brand affect and to improve the subsequent effectiveness of customer experience management. In the experience strategy formulation,
positioning is to contain the implicit components of brand affect, experience value promise is to include the specific components of brand affect in addition to the other forms of experiences, and the overall implementation theme is to be the city affective tone. In experience design, planners should put more emphasis on people and mechanic clues. Music can integrate all clues and reflect the overall implementation theme if it is carefully selected. All the clues cannot deviate from the affective endnotes we
mentioned before. When organize experience design teams, more people with a drama major are required because their profession of endnotes can help ensure no deviation of experience design from real brand affect. In experience implementation, top managers should lead by example, and perform transformation leadership and management by
brand affect should be included in the role specification. In addition, role specification must be put where prospective internal customers can have easy access. In the selection phase, companies can choose people who deliver desired brand affect by role playing under situation simulation. In the education phase, companies can equip employees with the ability to express brand affect authentically by deep acting, not surface acting.
Specifically, once the real components of brand affect are identified, employees can recall their emotional memory related to the brand affect and have better ability to deep act the desired brand affect. Relevant deep acting techniques can refer to Russian director Constantin Stanislavski (1965). Also, experience camps in which games designed for brand affect can be an interesting tool to educate people. Notably, if there are good performers who deliver brand affect well, their deeds of delivering brand affect can be publicly shown on any communication media to make others follow suit. In the retention phase, managers should extol good affect performers, or allow them to participate in the experience design for the delivery of brand affect. Needless to say, activities rich in desired brand affect will motivate those who are proficient in
delivering the same affect, which corresponds with experience-based motivators. In the experience control, the extent to which employees convey the desired brand affect should be taken into account in the performance evaluation. Also, to maintain the most effective route of experience strategies, important customers found by net promoting scores are to be invited (Keiningham et al. 2008). In turn, customers should identify the most influential touch points regardless of positive or negative ones by experience event grid (Lasalle and Britton 2004; Hogan et al. 2005). Once influential touch points are identified, companies have to examine whether in any of the touch point there are deviation from the desired brand affect promise. The aforementioned are recommended practices if the most powerful effect of holistic experience strategies reflects on the affective response of customers toward a brand.
Chapter 6. Conclusions
Theoretical confirmations
We empirically tested an experience-based brand equity framework developed by integrating relevant theories and propositions in experience, brand, and consumer psychology fields. The framework filled the gap presented in the atmospherics, brand experiences, and customer experiences arena and followed the recent trend in JM and JR about customer experience management. We also empirically clarified the
relationship among relevant dimensions. Findings indicated experience strategies brought about the growth of enterprises in terms of brand loyalty through routes of experiential hierarchy and standard learning hierarchies. Most importantly, we stressed the role of affect toward the brand in this framework in attaining the final goal brand loyalty. Therefore, other than cognitive variables, subsequent researches on
experience-based brand equity framework should include affect toward the brand to avoid loss of important information. We proposed the importance to analyze the synergy rather than marginal effects of holistic experience strategies. We verified the second order nature of holistic experiences in which strategic experience modules were significantly reflected, making a basis of the operationalization of the construct for subsequent researchers. We suggested integrating more intervening mechanisms to fulfill the complicated influence of experiences on customers’ responses. Taking the view of cognition-emotion theory or emotion-cognition theory alone is not sufficient as the appropriate intervening mechanism in the examination of relevant dimensions of
the active role of customers to perceive various forms of experiences in response to the proposition that the point is what customers subjectively perceived. In this manner, customers correspond to roles defined in the experience economy. The study differed from past in the view of strategy effect. Experience-based strategies are effective only when they are perceived well by customers. That is, the effect of holistic experiences planned by the company will be known from the customers’ perception. Finally, we stress managing experience-based brand equity a continuing process in which we begin with experience motifs from customers, make customers perceive the holistic
experiences, and end with customers’ loyalty to our brand. Yes, the focus will be and will have been on external and internal customers, not company or competition before we can win their loyalty.
Practical contributions
The main contribution suggested practitioners holistically planning experience strategies to attain goals effectively and efficiently. In terms of holistically planning experience strategies, five Strategic experience modules should be taken into account simultaneously. Experience-based brand equity framework which served as an
assessment tool for effectiveness and efficiency of experience strategies was presented for practitioners’ use. The tool is, to be brief, all about whether experience value promise chosen can increase the brand value. Also, the tool can inform experience planners of possible routes for the attainment of effectiveness, and of the most effective one. Both the effectiveness and relationship among relevant dimensions of customer responses toward the brand under experience strategies are to be understood by practitioners for cultivation of experience knowledge-a competitive advantage for the focal company. The knowledge makes internal customers know their role in the customer experience creation and lay the foundation for subsequent experience
stewardship. We presented a more complete system of customer experience management for practitioners to follow in the literature review. Understanding the steps and key issues of the system can help experience stagers attain the effectiveness of their experience strategies. In addition to the effectiveness, a resource allocation way that can enhance efficiency was presented. The research target was McDonald’s Corp. of fast food industry, which worked as a paradigm of experiential stagers just like Disney of recreational park. The relationship of experience strategies on the creation of brand equity for McDonald’s cannot be replicated by other companies, but can serve as the reference as a successful experience stager for companies in the same or different playing grounds.
Limitations and future research directions
Though we examined the relationship among relevant dimensions in experience-based brand equity framework, it is suggested that futuristic efforts exploring the creation process of experience-based brand equity. More researches on the determination of experience value promise were suggested to help experience stagers have a right focus, later attaining the effectiveness. We chose McDonald’s as research target. Therefore, findings may not be generalized or copied to players even in the same industry. To increase external validity, futuristic efforts can extend the
experience-based brand equity framework to other industries, choosing respective exemplar experience stagers. Although the result of the study indicated
cognition-emotion theory or emotion-cognition worked worse as an intervening mechanism in our framework given experience hierarchy in the model, some
context. Future goers can apply holistic experiences to the creation of brand relation, with brand meaning working as complete mediators. As shown in 2009 literature, future goers can develop scope-based scale of holistic experience based on known conceptualization, and further test our framework. Brand experiences scale was developed with high validity, reliability, and parsimony, making it possible to further explore our framework in terms of brand experiences, not holistic ones. To satisfy the systematic brand model of antecedents and consequences, future goers can extend current model to include real purchase variables, and financial performance variables in the model. Given that brand equity is the front end of marketing efforts whereas customer equity is the back end, it is suggested that researchers extend our framework to customer equity to incorporate a more long-term effect (Leone et al. 2006). It is glad to see more and more concepts on customer experience management or related
concepts being developed in marketing- and retailing-related journals. With more scales developed, hopefully more empirical researches will be conducted to gain more insight in best practices. Gap between theory and practice can be filled.
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