Comparing (Brand) Engagement with Value of Time

Chapter 1: What is Experience Strategy?

So, we’ve covered We’ve covered How will a Company Grow?; What Makes the Business Model Compelling?; and How to Describe a Need. The final section in chapter 1 focuses on the question regarding how value is maintained over time.

Once a company has identified the situational needs that represent the best opportunities and developed a point of view on what the customer will want, they need to execute. For the strategist, one more question needs to be answered. How do you ensure that your investment will continue to be valuable? Can you create something that will endure?

How is Value Maintained Over Time?

Why do companies invest in brand management? Because, rightfully, the brand that stands for things and delivers consistently encourages people to return. Brands with lasting power maintain value for the customer and the company over time. I once read a story that made this point.

According to Bernard Arnault, the incredibly successful leader of LVMH, Steve Jobs called him shortly after the launch of the iPhone to ask his advice. Jobs wanted to know his secret for success. Arnault responded, you have to build brands that will last 200 years. ‘Steve,’ Arnault said, ‘will the iPhone last 200 years?’ Jobs didn’t know.

Certainly there are lots of brand related things that a company can do to build a 200 year product’s value. But the experience strategist sees one element that few marketers pay attention to: time value.

Comparing (Brand) Engagement with Value of Time

If a brand can get a customer to believe in what the company stands for, then the customer is likely to prefer the company, buy more, and buy more often over a long period of time. To engage the customer and encourage belief in the brand, the strategist employs a number of tools: storytelling, imagery, causes, emotional associations, innovations, environments, experiences, and people. The goal of the engagement is to get customers to feel like they are a part of something that matters, especially to them. And that they are special.

This form of engagement does create value for companies, but only if the experience gets the job done for the customer. No amount of storytelling, imagery, causes, or emotional associations can overcome the inability to get the job done for the customer. Business strategists today recognize how important jobs to be done is and feel heavily invested in experience strategy because they need a strong JTBD program to build brand strategies on.

But the question at hand is how to maintain and grow value over time.

And for that, experience strategy starts, again, from a different vantage point. The key indicator that the customer will stay with the company, buy, and buy often, is not the brand association per se, rather it’s whether the customer values the time that he or she spends with the company. Disney is at risk of losing the family in Kansas, not because they don’t have positive associations with the brand—they’ve dedicated their basement to Marvel movie posters—but because they are reevaluating how they should spend their time to get more meaning.

The companies that are most successful understand that meaningful experiences can only be created if the customer values the time that they spend with the company. The most precious, non-renewable resource that people have is how they spend their time. They want to spend their time on things that have meaning to them, help them become better, and empower them. 

Therefore, the way to maintain growth is to understand what kinds of experiences create the most time value for customers. A common and dangerous mistake that many companies make is to eliminate all time spent with the customer in hopes that customers will value convenience. There is no way for the customer to value the time spent with the company if the customer never actually spends any time with the company. Not only will eliminating time with the customer affect the experiential value of the offering but it will eliminate any preference for the brand as well. Without creating time value as a part of its strategy, a company risks reduced engagement, which negatively impacts brand associations, experience value, and ultimately growth.

Value of time thinking helps the company to create value by

1.     Eliminating activities that are Time Wasted.

2.     Turning situations where customers want to save time into Time Well Saved.

3.     Identifying and creating experiences that customers value as Time Well Spent.

4.     And, in some cases, identifying and creating experiences that customers value as Time Well Invested.

The experience strategist identifies opportunities for engagement that are coded for time well saved, time well spent, or time well invested, and helps the company to rally resources and innovate to maximize the impact of that type of time for the good of the customer and the profit of the company.

The term ‘Time Well Spent’ is shorthand for all three strategic activities. Our research has shown that what people (customers and employees) pay attention to are:

·       your ability to get the job done

·       how engaged they actually were with the experience you produced

·       how much value they place on the time they spent.

There is much more to talk about regarding creating time value, developing a point of view, understanding situational markets, and getting the whole job done. We have a chapter on each.

But let us end this chapter by saying that companies cannot expect to keep using business models and business theory that were developed sixty years ago to create value. It’s time that we abandon the thinking of the old CX movements, the old brand strategies, and the old business models. Now is the time for companies to embrace the original premise of the Experience Economy: value creation comes from experiences.

Companies need to chart a bold, new pathway toward growth.

As leaders of companies, you need new ways of seeing markets, needs, solutions, and technology to innovate.  You need a strategy that is based on a better foundation.  It’s time to jump in.

Here’s what I’ll include in Chapter 5.

1. Introduction

   1. Brene Brown: Time is the great non-renewable resource

   2. We all have an abundance of experiences and limited time

   3. Dave’s story of discovering time well spent

2. Too Many Experiences, Not Enough Time

   1. Companies create a lot of experiences

   2. People orchestrate their lives to prioritize the experiences that fit their life systems.

   3. Companies need to study the value of their customers’ time

3. Value from Time

   1. People primarily express value through time spent

   2. The success of a solution can be measured by satisfaction, purchase behavior, likelihood to purchase, size of basket, etc.

   3. But the best indicator of value is whether or not real value has been created

   4. Don’t engineer away time value

4. Framework for Time Value from Joseph Pine

   1. Time wasted

   2. Time transactions are time well saved

   3. Happenings are time well spent

   4. Defining moments are time well invested

5. Measuring for Time Value

   1. Evaluating services for time well saved

   2. Evaluating experiences for time well spent

   3. Evaluating transformations for time well invested

6. Experience Strategy and Time Value

   1. A focus on meaningful experiences for innovation and design

   2. A shift from customer experience to smart situations

   3. Channels/tools that focus on context, holistic view, and situation

   4. Measurement that emphasizes JTBD, engagement, and time value

7. New Strategy Skill: Time Value Creator

   1. Strategists need to be able show the relationship between time spent by the customer and value to the customer and the company

   2. Time to move away from customer experience

8. Closing

9. Reflection Activity

Click here for book outline with links to posts

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You are invited to be a member of the 2024-25 Collaboratives, where we will focus on value creation in experience strategy.

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