This post continues filling out a chapter I’m currently calling “Creating Transformative Experiences”. Its focus will be the Delta Model, which will show how to turn memorable experiences into meaningful ones, then go from meaningful to transporting, and even to transformative experiences. These experiences can then be sequenced together to create full transformations, including metamorphic ones that change aspirants’ identities. (While the link above shows and discusses the Delta Model, it still needs a full write-up.)
As transformations are built atop experiences, it’s imperative then to understand how to design and depict experiences, the subject of The Experience Economy. In the new Preview to the 2020 re-release of the book Jim Gilmore and I summarized this task as one of creating experiences that are robust, cohesive, personal, dramatic, and even transformative.[i] So transformative experiences must be robust, the subject of the post “The Four Realms of Transformation”. They must be cohesive, the subject of “Being Intentional”. They must be dramatic, the subject of “The Hero’s Journey” and it’s follow-on, “ Applying the Hero’s Journey”. And they must be personal, which is the subject of this post.
Joe
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As discussed in Chapter 1, customizing is a route up the Progression of Economic Value. It turns experiences into transformations when you determine and guide them to be exactly what customers need at this moment in time, based on who they are and what they want to become. While experiences are inherently personal, transformations again are fundamentally individual, changing us from the inside out based on the experiences we undergo. You can shift from simply personal to deeply individual by customizing experiences, ideally mass customizing them to efficiently guide customers uniquely.
The Key to Mass Customization
Modularity is the key to mass customizing anything. Think of LEGO building bricks. What can you build with LEGOs? Anything you want, because of the large number of bricks with different sizes, different shapes, and different colors, and because of the linkage system that snaps them together. That’s what modularity is – modules + linkage system – and you can effectively use it to mass customize not only physical goods such as LEGOs but service activities as well (often by modularizing processes) and of course experiences.[ii]
Modularity is the key to mass customizing anything
LEGOs use what’s called sectional modularity, but for experiences – from memorable to transformative – the more useful type is bus modularity.[iii] The term interestingly comes from transportation buses, where differing people get on and off a bus at different times, so between (most) every stop there is a different configuration of people. The term is also used in the computer industry where the “backplane”, or bus, is a panel into which circuit boards and devices may be plugged to vary CPU speeds, memory size, disk drive space, and so forth, enabling customized configurations.
With experiences, time is the bus. Time – unspooling moment by moment – is the linkage system on which different experience segments (or even service activities that build up into an overarching experience) can be placed, creating a mass customized journey through time, the dramatic arc of the experience.
With experiences, time is the bus.
For example, Princess Cruise Lines, a unit of Carnival Corp., designs a mass customized itinerary for each guest using its Princess MedallionClass. The program is centered around an IoT device dubbed the Medallion, which enables not only Princess overall but every onboard employee to identify each individual guest. Based on responses to a pre-cruise query about favorite experiences and pre-embarkation bookings, the company puts together a personal itinerary for every guest, which then can be modified in real time. This itinerary covers the entire time while on board, representing the “bus” of time each guest has across the cruise. Guests can access and update it through the Princess Cruises app on their phone, tablet, stateroom TV, or public monitors throughout the ship. As Carnival learns more and more about the guest – through direct responses, how well they rate their experiences, and even such external factors as changing weather – it sends Personal Experience Invitations to individual guests that match their interests and the time they have available. Crew members can even presciently deliver a drink to you, using MedallionClass to remember that when you are on the pool deck with your kids your favored drink is an iced tea with no lemon; when you’re in the bar with your buddies it’s a mojito; and when you’re in a restaurant with your spouse it’s a glass of shiraz.
Each potential experience on- and off-ship are modules that MedallionClass links together on the bus of time in order to mass customize guest experiences. And “mass” is a key element of it: Princess is able to offer a much more personal offering, while lowering costs and increasing efficiencies across its total offering. As President John Padgett likes to say, “MedallionClass allows us to take the service delivery burden off our crew members so they can do what they do best – make our guests happy.”
Experience & Transformation Platforms
Princess is in the experience business, offering time well spent in a highly personal manner through what I call an operational experience platform, or XPlatform.[iv] Walt Disney Company’s MagicBand is another such operational platform – which is no coincidence since Padgett was one of the core five members of the team that innovated it at Disney[v]. Many others include Grip for events, Like Magic in hospitality, and Briq Bookings for attractions.
Similarly, there are operational transformation platforms, or ∆Platforms. These incorporate XPlatforms, but go beyond time well spent for guests to yield time well invested for aspirants. Each experience also must be appropriately customized, each one also learning about and responding to personal preferences, but each built atop the previous ones to yield the desired transformation.[vi] This means focusing individual experiences on mass customizing transformative journeys across time, customizing to individual aspirations, whatever it takes to get there (including handling backsliding or other obstacles with experiences yielding remedial, rousing, and/or recommitment effects).
operational transformation platforms, or ∆Platforms, go beyond time well spent for guests to yield time well invested for aspirants.