Following on my last framework post on “The Four Realms of Transformation”, this post brings our THEMEing framework from Chapter 3 of The Experience Economy into play for staging transformative experiences – and creating transformation businesses. The four realms are about designing, creating, and staging robust experiences through hitting the sweet spot; THEMEing is about cohesive experiences.
Joe
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Theming often gets a bad rap because of fantasy themes such as at Walt Disney World and other theme parks, as well as in-your-face themes as with theme restaurants. But a theme is simply the organizing principle of an experience. It serves as a two-edged sword for determining what is in the experience and – perhaps even more important – what is out. You then design all the components of the experience – physical, human, and digital (or PHD as it’s often labeled) – so they unite together to keep guests engaged with the experience. With a great theme, your experience becomes cohesive. Without it, experiences so easily devolve into “everything but the kitchen sink”.
The question is whether you design your experiences intentionally or not.
Whether you determine a theme for your experience or not, it ends up having one,[i] for your guests will surmise the organizing principle from their own encounters in your place, consciously or not. The question is whether you design your experiences intentionally or not.
THEMEing
In The Experience Economy, Jim Gilmore and I delineated five design principles that enable you to intentionally design, create, and stage cohesive experiences. It begins with the theme and proceeds with the most appropriate mnemonic possible:[ii]
Theme the experience
Harmonize impressions with positive cues
Eliminate negative cues
Mix in memorabilia + media
Engage or evoke the five senses
I won’t go into the details of THEMEing here, but these principles apply equally to transformative experiences as they do to merely memorable experiences.
But since most transformations happen not at once but with a series of experiences that lead aspirants from where they are today to what they want to become, your THEMEing needs to encompass each experience in the series. Since these experiences may be very different from each other, you very well may benefit from a different theme for every experience.
Which in turn means you may need a meta-theme for your overarching transformation offering. The meta-theme in turn must unite all the sub-themes and experiences into one cohesive whole, creating a unified journey for aspirant transformations.
You may need a meta-theme for your overarching transformation offering
In a health & wellbeing example, a number of years ago Heartland Health of St. Joseph, Missouri, embraced as its meta-theme the three-word phrase “Live Life Well”. It didn’t want to just treat symptoms and conduct procedures, but wanted its patients to be able to live life well, their family members to live life well, the entire community to live life well, and – core to the whole endeavor – its caregivers to live life well, so out of that abundance they could care for all the rest. In other words, it wanted everyone it encountered not to be treated as impersonal cogs in the wheel of healthcare, but to individually flourish as human beings. Live Life Well became so important as the meta-theme of the enterprise that CEO Dr. Mark Laney, now retired, renamed the company Mosaic Life Care, transformed the organization to enact that theme, and as one example of what resulted, completely changed how it designed new offices and clinics as well as the health & wellbeing experiences that happened within them.
Meaningful Purpose
Such meta-themes become the meaningful purpose of the enterprise. This is its corporate raison d’etre, its reason for existence, the why the business exists beyond making money. (Making money should never be the purpose of any enterprise; rather, it is the measure of how well you fulfill your purpose.) As Jim and I wrote in chapter 7 of Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, “Purpose gives work meaning, defines why the enterprise is more than an accumulation of processes and an aggregation of employees, and points workers toward a common goal.”[iii] We defined it this way:
Sense of Purpose = Intention + Interest
Purpose brings together the interests of employer, employees, and customers while defining the intention of the enterprise. It constructively guides, inspires, and unifies those affiliated with, contributing to, and impacted by the enterprise. Your meaningful purpose should be inspirational, aspirational, and timeless, providing ongoing stability even as everything else – including your own economic offerings – may be shifting around you.