by Kate O'Neill
So it’s worth noting, in thinking about meaning in marketing, that for all the knocks on marketing as a profession, there are moments when something that is genuinely a force for good, or at least a force for joy, is able to connect with more people as a result of some clear alignment and relevance. To accomplish that kind of meaningful marketing still requires segmentation and strategy and messaging and all the other tools and disciplines of marketing overall. So the tools can’t tell us anything about merit; those are shared by everything from noble causes to sleazy scams. Merit can only be assessed by the objectives and the outcome.
To achieve the meaningful and memorable integrated experiences we strive for requires a sincere effort to reconcile the capabilities of technology with the insights of marketing. Anything short of true partnership between these areas will ring hollow.
Meaning follows us and morphs from role to role in our lives. We are our professional selves, where we intentionally create interactions with others, just as we are ourselves in our roles as consumers, users, patients, guests, students, visitors, and so on; we have our own aspirations and motivations, and these guide our actions. The entities that engage with us do well to recognize and respect our life journeys independent of our interactions with those entities; otherwise their messages and their offerings fall flat.
In my estimation, there is no question that we stand to benefit societally, individually, and within our businesses by paying more attention to the layers of meaning.
How We Make Meaning
There’s a premise I learned while studying linguistics in grad school that I have since found applies in a useful way to marketing, and generally to creating experiences. The idea is that, fundamentally, there are three parts of communication: what the speaker intended, the message itself, and what the listener received.
The overlap between these three components is where shared understanding has been communicated. It could be said this is where the meaning is.
There’s another facet worth considering, though, and that’s context. In what context does the communication take place? How much shared history did the speaker and listener have to begin with? What was the nature of their relationship, and how much does this message build on their previous attempts to communicate?
That last part is important when we apply this model to marketing or any communication that takes place online. So much of the quality of how the customer or user receives the message has to do with the context of that interaction, much of which has to do with where they are physically: what their physical capabilities and limitations are in terms of, say, the device they’re using, and so on. This takes us right back to the importance of place.
The Intentional Design of Human Experience
The integrated world is coming at us fast and furious. Connected devices and always-on data sharing are becoming the norm, and the ways we as consumers interact with the “built environment” and the ways we as experience designers build that environment are becoming increasingly multifaceted and complex.
You can tell this is true by how many terms there are to describe the work that relates to this field: user experience, customer experience, service design, usability, interaction design, content strategy, information architecture, and so on.
These terms and the job functions they describe have mostly been around for twenty years or more, but they have been evolving rapidly in recent years and are still evolving, perhaps even more rapidly. It’s never all that easy to talk about one without invoking some of the others; there’s considerable overlap between them in terms of the skills practitioners have in these fields, the objectives they seek to fulfill, and the output they produce. But there are subtle differences between the focus of each of these kinds of design, and it’s worth clarifying them.
Bear in mind that any time one steps into the field of semantics, one is risking quibbles over minutiae. After all, we’re discussing subtleties that are subjective to some extent, perhaps colored by the specific definitions in use in specific environments. So the way I describe these disciplines is only in contrast to the usefulness of the idea of “human experience” and is not intended to be a definitive summary of each discipline. They’re all useful in their own respects.
User experience (or UX, as it’s often abbreviated) is primarily concerned with on-screen interactions—as the name suggests, circumstances in which a person is the “user” of a product or service. It differs from service design primarily in scope: It is not typically thought to encompass holistic, online/offline interactions, although it will no doubt increasingly have to do so.
Customer experience (CX) deals with elements of the brand that pertain to the purchase path, from beginning to end or ongoing. It is human-centric in the sense that it characterizes interactions around the motivations of the person who is acting as a customer; but in framing the person as a “customer,” it centers the person’s role in terms of their interaction with the company, and tends to ignores their life journey apart from the customer-specific touchpoints they may have. This limitation is helpful in framing the scope of the tools and methodologies, but CX can overlook meaningful moments in the person’s life that bring them to a point of considering relevant purchases.5
As an aside, the analyst firm Gartner has predicted that by 2017, 50 percent of consumer product investments will be redirected to customer experience innovations.6 So this category is certainly understood as valuable.
There are more—such as service design, interaction design, user interface design, usability, and so on. Every one of these disciplines is valuable and important, but for the purposes of discussing a holistic approach to designing integrated experiences for humans without bringing over any implicit preconceived notions about how to do that, throughout this book I’ll continue to talk about human experience and human experience design.
Moreover, I want to step away from framing the human beings we interact with as users or customers only. The opportunity to look holistically at people’s lives and their surroundings can open up possibilities to align our organizations’ motives with the motives of the people who engage with us. If you operate within user experience, customer experience, interaction design, or any other related discipline, you can always apply the tools of your trade to the issues presented here to solve the challenges of integrated experience in a way that works for you.
Experience and Meaning
If we want to understand how to use meaning to frame our strategy and approach, and if we want to reliably create meaningful experiences, we have to think beyond how we perceive meaning and think more deeply about how we make meaning.
For experiences to resonate, they need to have meaning. And in order to understand what people really experience when they interact with brands, products, devices, and so on, we’ll need an understanding of the framework of meaning. “Meaning as framework” in this sense will include: what message is intentionally or unintentionally being conveyed; the metaphors and mechanisms being used; in what context the message exists; and what lasting impressions that experience leaves.
The Wikipedia entry for experience points out that “the word ‘experience’ may refer, somewhat ambiguously, both to mentally unprocessed immediately perceived events as well as to the purported wisdom gained in subsequent reflection on those events or interpretation of them.”7 I love that overlapping definition. The more experiences (events) a person goes through, the more experience (wisdom) they have.
In a parallel way, meaning has not only multiple meanings—semantic, intentional, existential, cosmic, and that’s skipping quite a few—but also meanings that layer upon each other, even within the scope of marketing. The more meaning a brand message is able to convey to a customer, the more meaning the interaction has, and the more it aligns with the customer’s meaning in the broadest sense. I don’t know if you caught it on the first read-through, but if not, try looking again: Those are three different levels of meaning.
It’s useful, too, to t
hink of this kind of layering taking place as you design experiences. Everything that a customer encounters, from hearing about a company through word of mouth, to purchasing a product, all the way through maintenance issues and service interactions, and eventually through repurchase or abandonment—all of these are experience points or potential experience points.
Each of those interactions—those experiences—between a person and a brand entity contributes to the person’s overall perspective of, or experience with, that entity.
In marketing and in experience design, meaning is a dimension of experience. It occurs where purpose and value are aligned in the transaction. Experiences can be meaningful on a variety of levels: how well it fulfills a given intention or purpose, how well it aligns with what a person values, how memorable it is, how lasting an impact it has on a person, and so on.
We need these layered and interdependent definitions of experience and meaning, because we need the context that reminds us that the immediate interactions we design for our users and customers contribute to a larger collected sense of the brand. We also need to be reminded that there are implications of meaning within data, both in terms of how we look at data meaningfully (as in how it informs our decisions and interactions) and how we see meaning in data (as in how we recognize patterns that tell us if people value what we’re doing).
Because if analytics are people, as I stated early on, it stands to reason that transactions are relationships. The macro view of the relationship helps foster a sense of accountability in the micro. And when we’re dealing with people’s personal and sensitive data, we need to be reminded of that accountability.
Also, in the age of social media, memorable experiences tend to be shareable experiences. If you offer me a remarkable moment, whether visually, emotionally, or otherwise, I’m likely to share it. If the remarkableness translates, it’s likely to be re-shared. Word of mouth marketing, of course, is strong advocacy for a brand, so these remarkable/re-shareable experiences are the benchmark to which we’re all aspiring.
There’s a range of ways to accomplish a memorable connection with your intended audience, and they range from both low-technology to high-technology and from low context awareness to high context awareness.
The technology actually matters less than the context. Consider a low-tech but context-aware outreach mechanism, like billboards on the side of a country road with message fragments that only make sense in succession as you see each one. There’s nothing high-tech about it, but it’s very in tune with the context of the majority of its viewers, and because of that shared context, it stands a good chance of being memorable. It isn’t necessarily more important to be memorable than relevant, but consider that a memorable message is still memorable even when it isn’t relevant, and it is certainly memorable when it is relevant.
In terms of memorability and differentiation, we also talk about the experience economy, which is a term that’s been in use for almost twenty years. Coined by Pine and Gilmore, the term pertains to differentiating the experience of the brand.8 Examples include Starbucks, Walt Disney, Nordstrom, and many more.
The term and idea has taken on new depth with the rise of the “sharing economy,” with companies like Uber, Airbnb, and so on competing for market share in an access versus ownership model based on differentiated experiences. (See the section on “Ownership Versus Access and Privately-Owned Public Spaces.”)
The goal in any case is to decrease friction, to make things easier—but easier in a way that moves people naturally toward an outcome they’ll enjoy and from which the company will benefit. That’s the best chance of achieving meaning in experience.
Your customer is happily going about life, and you’re happily going about your business, when suddenly your paths cross. Your customer’s needs meet yours. It’s an interaction, and an opportunity for meaningful interaction.
When people talk about what is meaningful to them, they often say that it “matters.” “To matter” implies a certain level of importance, perhaps even cosmic importance, or at least contextual importance. More to the point, it implies a certain alignment with purpose.
That’s perhaps the easiest way to distill what makes something (especially an experience, in this case) meaningful: the ease with which it fits into our idea of purpose and aligns with what is relevant to us.
The key here, from a marketing perspective, is: It isn’t meaningful if it only fulfills your purpose. It likewise isn’t meaningful if it only fulfills your customer’s purpose. A meaningful experience is one that fulfills an intersecting set of purposes in alignment.
So the more crisp your understanding of your purpose is (see more about this in the section on “Intentionality, or Purpose”), and the more disciplined you are about how to follow through with it, the more effectively you can measure your efforts toward achieving meaningfulness—which may be all you really need.
Senses in Place; Sense and Technology
During my last year as an undergraduate, I lived in an off-campus apartment in Chicago’s Little Italy with two roommates above an Italian restaurant. When I think back to that time and place, what almost always comes to mind first is the pungent but pleasant smell of garlic roasting every morning as the kitchen prepared food for the day. What’s more, when I smell roasting garlic, I often find myself thinking about that apartment.
Our sensory input about a place is a key part of how we experience the place, what we associate with it, what we remember about it, and ultimately what the place means to us.
We have a lot of bandwidth for processing visual information, as popularized in a TED Talk by David McCandless about data visualization. Basing his talk on the work of Danish physicist Tor Nørretranders, McCandless explained:
He converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms . . . Your sense of sight is the fastest. It has the same bandwidth as a computer network. Then you have touch, which is about the speed of a USB key. And then you have hearing and smell, which has the throughput of a hard disk. And then you have poor old taste, which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator. And . . . 0.7 percent, that’s the amount we’re actually aware of.9
Our senses help us create meaning. Our sense of sight clearly takes in a lot of data fast, and we process a lot of the world that way. What we see is a big part of what we think we know. What we hear is even more of it.
It stands to reason that sensory stimuli offer big opportunities for design.
Touch is, of course, a big part of interface design. The kinesthetic sense is often overlooked, but this includes gesture, which is a big part of emerging interface design, too.
And then there’s extrasensory perception: what we seem to be aware of, but we can’t identify. How does this intuition figure into how we go through connected space? On the other hand, how much of what we think of as intuition is actually our kinesthetic sense?
Our kinesthetic sense, and how it encompasses movement through space and place, is part of our larger framework of meaning-making. It’s a very relevant piece of our framework in considering the overlay of technology on place. That overlay has brought us GPS and Google Maps among many other innovations, yet have you ever wondered whether using Google Maps inhibits our sense of direction and our ability to navigate on our own?
Several studies have indeed shown that using GPS diminishes our ability to reconstruct the directions we took to get from place to place. Separate studies have also shown that the “ego-centric” experience of GPS mapping, when the map re-orients based on one’s location, leads to fewer mistakes for the navigator in getting where they’re going; but it also diminishes the navigator’s ability to recall landmarks they passed to get there. (See also the section on “Humanlike Nuances” for an example of an app that gives directions like a human would.)
Does that mean we shouldn’t use on-demand mapping? Or does it imply an opportunity to develop a new kind of navigation experience that might empower us with the confidence of accurate nav
igation while letting us stay connected—or connecting us more deeply—with our surroundings? This is where thinking about the meaning of a person’s experience can lead us to wonderful possibilities. For example, what if you could get directions and optionally turn on a program that would give you architectural history as you walked? What if you had a rough day and wanted a prettier drive home from work?
“Why don’t we offer the choice to go slow, to take the least polluted route to work, or the scenic way home?”
—Marcus Foth10
This is also where augmented reality has the chance to shine.
Think back to video games that forced the player to navigate top-down in the game’s place, like Pac-Man. The rise in popularity of what are known as “first-person shooter” and other first-person perspective games creates an expectation of feeling immersed in the game’s world. It’s the perfect set of training wheels for an integrated experience environment that involves augmented and virtual reality, which we’ll explore further in the chapter “Augmented Reality Games.”
Cues, Triggers, and Metaphors: Sensory Experience Design
Since we know that our senses help us make meaning, we can recognize how placemakers in the physical world have long used sensory cues to establish certain associations for customers and visitors. These are common in retail and tourism, among other industries.
