The Experience Strategy Book Project
An Outline of the Writing with Links
Dear Friends,
I created this post to keep track of my progress. Each time I complete an installment for the book, I’ll update it here. And you can see the outline for the chapters that haven’t been written yet too!
The Outline
Chapter 1: What is Experience Strategy?
Connecting your customer’s situation to value creation
Jason works for a tremendous brand. And every Monday, he starts his week by gathering all of the different reports, news, data, and dashboard information he needs to do his job as an experience strategist for this amazing brand. He is one of many employees at this company who use the data the company provides to create value for both the customer and the company.
Unfortunately, for all of the tools at his disposal, he sees almost nothing that really matters to future value creation. His company, like most companies, is relying on the same decades-old tricks to support their customers.
The Experience Strategy Book Project
Chapter 2: Principle 1—Growth comes by Capturing Situational Markets
The endless opportunities derived from customer situations
Your company has a business model. And unlike many business models of yesteryear, your company understands how important it is to be customer focused. My goal for this chapter is to provide you with a principle that will turn your business model into a growth model. Growth comes from creating value for customers. Yet, we live in a time of abundance. People today have access to almost everything they need, instantly. How does a company grow today? And what role does experience strategy play in a company’s growth?
The Thing that Blinds Companies from Seeing Situational Markets
The New Strategy Skill: Identifying Situational Growth Markets
Chapter Three: Principle 2—To Be Compelling Requires a Strategic Point of View
What’s more important that branding? Having a point of view
The key assumption made by brand strategy is that a business builds value by being unique and compelling. Per Peter Drucker, differentiation attracts new customers and keeps current customers. What compels customers is when they identify with a company in a way they cannot with any other company.
Experience strategy approaches building a compelling business model from an entirely different place. The customer wants new and compelling experiences that evolve and get better over time, not to be delivered the same stories and tactics everyone else is using.
Brand Differentiation is Not Enough
How a Point of View Shapes a Business Model
New Strategy Skill: Aligning Business Silos Around a Point of View
Chapter Four: Principle 3—Customers need the Whole Job Done to Get Done
Look at everything the customer does.
While many companies have embraced innovation, problem resolution, and needs-based solution making—and they understand the threat of disruptive innovation to their companies, they struggle to get the whole job done for the customer. In this chapter, I delve into the root causes for why companies can’t deliver on the full need of the customer. Then, I share frameworks and tools to help you get the whole job done.
The Size of the Job to be Done Depends on the Customer and the Company
What Exactly do Customers Mean By a Functional, Emotional, Social, or Aspirational Job to be Done?
The Difference between the Innovator and the Experience Strategist
Chapter Five: Principle 4—Value is in Time Spent
There is no value creation without time well saved, spent, or invested.
What Brene´Brown Said About Time is True for Experience Strategists Too
Expand Your Meaningful Experiences Toolkit to Create Time Value
Adjusting Your TWS Metric to Your Company’s Situational Needs
SECTION 2: How Human Behavior is Changing; And What Strategists Can Do to ‘Win’ Customers
Section 2 Overview
In the first five chapters of this book, I presented the four principles that companies need to focus on for value creation. The following chapters focus on different challenges that companies will face in the future—from customizing experiences to determining how much intelligence to include in an experience—how to think about those challenges, and how to develop a successful experience strategy to address them. Each chapter is built around over a decade of research conducted our team at Stone Mantel while working with thousands of consumers.
I will present to you four Points of View (POVs) for how human behavior will change in the near future. You can take the insights I share and apply them immediately to your company. The insights are as follows:
1. People will spend most of their time in modes
2. Life systems help people to create balance
3. People want genius experiences that give them superpowers
4. People want one channel: their own personal data ecosphere
5. In the transformation economy, the value for people’s time goes up
Chapters NOT YET Written
Chapter Six: POV 1—People Spend Most of Their Time in Modes
Experience strategists focus on moments, but people get into modes
a) POV: As technology progresses, people get into more modes
b) There is more time value in modes
c) Stories and examples of modes
d) Modes explain situations and provide context
e) How people experience modes
f) How companies can support modes
Chapter Seven: Life Systems Help People Create Balance
Meaningful experiences come from the systems people create for their lives
a) POV: People today create systems for their lives. Companies who understand those systems can get the whole job done, understand situations, and be meaningful.
b) What journey maps don’t do
c) Stories and examples of people’s life systems
d) Insights by industry
e) Life systems and modes work hand in hand
f) Implications for business models
Chapter Eight: People Want Genius Experiences that Give Them Superpowers
Even smart solutions can degenerate into stupid experiences
a) The impact of intelligence on solutioning
b) The evolution of the automobile
c) What is smart
d) What is genius
e) What is dumb
f) What is stupid
g) How to talk to customers about AI
h) Genius platforms create superpowers
i) How to do data experience design
j) How to do situational analytics
Chapter Nine: People Want One Channel: Their Own Personal Data Ecosphere
Customers don’t ask for seamless channels, they want you to understand context
a) POV: As more channels become smart, they create a ‘personal data ecosphere’ for the customer. Companies need to understand digital context to support customers.
b) The Netflix Problem: Greater personalization does not lead to better recommendations.
c) The contextual consumer. Why people share data with companies
d) The personal data ecosphere
e) New business models: B2I2C and C2I2B
f) The four principles of experience strategy create trust
g) Context roadmapping and modeling
Chapter 10: In the Transformation Economy, the Value for People’s Time Goes Up
a) This chapter focuses on what comes after the Experience Economy and how strategy will need change in the future.
SECTION 3: APPLICATION, FRAMEWORKS AND ACTIVITIES
Chapter 12: Processes, exercises, and worksheets for each chapter in the book.
SECTION 4: APPENDIX
Primary research conducted that supports concepts discussed by chapter.
Vic I agree with the aim that you've described: that we are continuously trying to solve the problems they have in better ways. The company's challenge is that the wrong paradigms are affecting the way we see the customers problems. We think only certain customers have certain problems (chapter 2) because of how we see our customers. We think that what creates value is the stories that people tell themselves about the brand (chapter 3). And so forth. We cannot be strategic until we change the paradigms that undergird our assumptions about value creation.
Experience strategy sounds like a much better approach than the traditional brand strategy.
I have a question about the point of maintaining value over time. The comparison table says that experience strategy does it through new and unique experiences.
I can see how experience adds value. However, isn't value truly created by solving a problem for the user? Subsequently, it's maintained by continuing to solve that problem in better ways and via better experiences.
If this is the case, wouldn't the goal of experience strategy be to define the choices we need to make that continuously improve how the problem is being solved? Curious to hear your thoughts.