[MUSIC] And I mentioned in the video that started this module that it's sometimes difficult to extract the kind of information we want about the experience, maybe the more emotional aspects of the experience from our customers. Because these are really narratives, they go on over time. Because the aspect, of course, of an experience is, it's an experience over time, and it unfolds in many ways. Now, digital technology is also helping us bridge that divide. Going back again to my days at MIT, one of my friends Rose Picard, she's at the media lab, at the Affective Computing lab. And what she realized is actually we touch devices, like let's say your computer, much more than we touch each other. So, when you talk to a sales person, you're not really touching them, but you're touching the mouse. And there is lots of affect and information I can get from your skin conductance. So, we talk about the galvanic skin response. The computer also has a camera, and it can look at your facial features, it can see if you're confused. And so what she's really invested in is understanding how we can measure the customers emotional state based on how they interact with the machine. And there are companies like Affectiva who came out of that space for using the mobile phone for example, to unobtrusively estimate the emotional state of your costumers. So, they might have you watch an ad on the mobile phone, observe your facial features to really, unobtrusively, try to estimate your response. Very often when we're trying to talk to market researchers, we're very cognitive, we're really thoughtful. We're trying to give them answers that sound right. But what we really want to know is how customers actually feel. So even in that space, the digital capability is allowing us to look deeper inside of our customers. We started this video by thinking about: is the internet the digital environment is it commoditizing the experience? Is it really going from experience to efficiency? Quite the opposite is true because of the capability that internet has. To customize, to personalize your products and experience. So think about the retail environment, if I walk into a store, that store is the same for me as for any other customer. But when I open my Amazon homepage, that store is actually customized based on what they know about me. What I normally buy. They can also adapt that based on time of day. I might go to that store, they know I go to that store for different reasons during the week, maybe because I want to buy business books. Then, I go on the weekend, maybe it's because I want to buy presents or gifts for somebody. So they can host different content. It really is my store. And it makes that experience better for me, and of course, also more successful for Amazon, they can sell me more stuff, but it's a win win both ways. If you think about the challenges of managing a brand globally, I can also adapt that store globally. So a company from Germany Zalando. And they have learned that people are quite different around the world. So, the Swiss are quite different from their neighbors, the Germans. They, for example, like to get their services about one hour early in the morning, so customer service in Switzerland we'll start an hour earlier. The French, even though this is state controlled, sales are state controlled in France, they love their sales. In Spain, there is a real preference for cash on delivery. So each country, each market, really has their own preference. Even the interface in the Nordic countries, they prefer much cleaner interface. So I can adjust all those aspects online and really deliver my brand in a consistent way around the world. And working with some of the big newspaper companies in the world, if you thing about your newspaper, well, why should I get it in paper format like everybody else? They know a lot about me. They're going to give me the newspaper exactly how I like it. They also know am I somebody who likes to read the summary first or last. They can see that preference and they can actually adapt the newspaper based on my personal preference if I'm a subscriber. So the world is really moving towards this idea of that digital is not a force commoditization. It really is one that enriches the experience. And this is something that really dawned on me. I mentioned the business program I launched at MIT. Well around the mid 90's, 1990s. I had Michael Dell in my class. And it became very apparent to me that this old tradeoff we saw in the retail world, it's a tradeoff we had between richness and rich in some ways. And there was this real tradeoff, this line between those, and the more rich the experience, so for example in the retail store it's most rich, on the phone it's somewhere in between. And maybe on a catalog, it's not very rich at all, it's static images in the old days. Well that's the richness I mentioned and you sort of had this trade off, the richer it was, the less rich I had. So if I had a computer store for example, I couldn't reach that many people. There's a certain catchment area around it whereas with a catalog I had a broad reach. Well, the internet really allowed us to break free, if you will, from that trade-off between richness and reach. And for Dell, which was all about customization, I could now customize my own products. I could learn about them. I could add user forms, chat rooms. They even allowed me to sell my used products, which would then of course encourage me to buy new ones. I could self service, download software. I could repair, diagnose. So, really, the Internet allowed me to be far, far richer. Then I was in the past and I think that really just highlights, not just from a branding perspective, why the experience is becoming more important, but also from the environment in which brands exist encourages marketers to think about the digital environment, the Internet. And big data, all those aspects as feeding into the brand, and that really is a continual shift that we're witnessing. And in the next video we'll talk about how exactly do I design those experiences? And how is that different from designing products and services? [MUSIC]
