Muller-Lyer illusion is when you see lines with arrows pointing in different directions, and most often make a mistake of judging which one is longer. Caution is you should not trust your impressions of length.

Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed the most. We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available, and cognitive illusions are generally more difficult to recognise than perception illusions.

How can service design process take this aspect into account to avoid errors or mistakes.

The voice of reason may be much fainter then the loud and clear voice of intuition. More doubt and confusion is the last thing you want when you are in trouble. The upshot is that it is much easier to identify a minefield when you observe others wandering into it when you are about to do so. Observers are less cognitively busy and more open to information than actors.

We can minimise errors arising out of our intuition, memory and biases by reducing cognitive loads of people in the selection and decision making process. Aiding people in making right choices goes a long way for services and products brands.

There are 8 types of biases that can help you while analysing or evaluating a service design challenge.

1 Survivorship bias: Paying too much attention to successes, while glossing over failures

2 Confirmation bias: Placing more value on information that supports our existing beliefs

3 The IKEA effect: Placing too much value on the things we’ve done ourselves, often while discounting other people’s smart ideas

4 Anchoring bias: Being overly influenced by the first piece of information we receive

5 Overconfidence bias: Thinking your contribution is more important than it is

6 Planning galaxy: Underestimating the time it will take us to finish a task

7 Availability heuristic: Placing more value on the first idea that comes into your head

8 Progress bias: Overstating positive actions while downplaying negative ones

(This Perspective was originally published on February 24, 2018 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

While evolution is still (somehow) a divisive topic, what it has taught us is this – only the fittest shall survive. In the branding context, the adage ‘survival of the fittest’ shows that only those best equipped to bear down the fluctuations and challenges of shifting environments will be successful.

The good news is that unlike biological and human evolution, business evolution does not have to rely on lucky mutations. We can enable evolution leveraging technology – our secret (or rather, not so secret) weapon.

Then and now – the evolution of customer expectations

When we are talking about evolution how can we not talk about how customer relationships have evolved. We have come a long way from the time when the terms of customer relationships were dictated by the brands. It was all about pushing – push your fliers, emails, phone calls, voice mails, mailers, newsletters to the customer. The brand decided ‘hey, this is what I want the customer to know and hence I shall provide only this information’. But what did the customer want? This didn’t quite matter to most brands.

Today the story has flipped. The customer is front and center. The customer is in charge of how they want to interact with the brands, what they should talk about, and which channel is their preferred one. Everything must be personalized and contextualized and all these interactions have to take place at the right place, at the right moment and on a device of their choice. Seamless and cohesive with individualized touchpoints is the new mantra.

With digitization driving continuous disruption, it’s abundantly clear that customers want more than superior product features or functions. What they want more is great “service” –personalized, immediate, and convenient.

On the one hand. all this seems easy to provide owing to the plethora of technologies at our disposal. Yet, brands are failing to provide the elevated experience that the customer wants.

Customer Experience – What Customers Want

This could be attributed to the fact that even now brands are failing to recognize that the lines dividing products, services, and environments are continuously fading. Instead of focusing on creating only a stellar product, conscious design now needs to integrate all these elements and then identify the right combinations to create compelling customer experiences.

Take Tesla for example. They have a great product but how did they transform their customer experience? By simply opening their futuristic showrooms in malls and prime locations and designing an environment that helps the customer connect with their product.

What is evidently clear is that customer experience strategies can no longer be created in isolation. Your customer experience design can no longer just be dictated by the 4 Ps of marketing…because today, your competition is not just the organizations belonging to your industry. Your competition is everybody.

That is to say that my expectation as a customer from an airline will perhaps be the same as my expectation from Zappos. And while this might not seem like a fair comparison, it is how the playing field is today. The best way to identify how to deliver a great customer experience is to know what they ‘value’.

United Airlines did a great job of completely flipping their customer experience on its head when they were developing their Business Class product. Their initial focus was on designing a luxury experience. However, upon talking to their clients they discovered that luxury was not just the bells and whistles. Their customers were more interested in being rested and well-slept upon arrival. Rest trumped luxury and this led the airline to completely redesign their customer experience, including the pre-departure shenanigans. This change of strategy (among other things) helped United Airlines climb out of bankruptcy

Customer Experience does not come in a ‘one size fits all’ package

It is clear that customer experience too, much like everything else, does not come in a ‘one size fits all’ package.

You can have the most up-to-date technology in place, have the right product at the right price, and yet your customer experience could be poor. You could be doing everything that your competition or the market place is doing and still your customer experience might not work. This is so because customer experience is not just about touchpoints and journeys. It is about interactions and experiences with your product and service.

It makes sense for customer experience strategies to leverage the usual suspects (read, data, technology, etc.). But the strategy in itself has to emerge from understanding ‘who’ you are and what that represents to the customer. What naturally emerges from that understanding is ‘what’ the customer wants from you and ‘how’ do they want to engage with you. That drives an understanding of what they are trying to achieve by using your product or service. It helps identify the behaviors (both natural and constructed) that are connected to the buying experience. And it comes from constant introspection of the core of your brand and continuous assessment of how the customers relate to the product and the experience you are providing.

Technology has to complement the human element and not overshadow or replace it. Because today people don’t just buy a product. They buy into what the brand represents, the idea and the experience. And they expect this experience to be unique, original, and authentic.

Write to us on info@lokusdesign.com.

The battle cries in the marketing battlefield are getting louder. But hold on a moment. Are those really battle cries or the cacophony of chaos that emerges from the copycat wars?

It’s hard to ignore the imitation games that brands play these days. Everyone wants to crush the competition. Everyone wants to ride the ‘moments’ wave. How does it matter if the moment is not relevant to your brand? Everyone is doing it and so must we.

Look at this from a distance and you’ll see the amusing resemblance to the tale ‘The Pied Piper of Hamlin’. The piper plays his flute and all the mice in the city follow him to their death.

Unfortunately, that is what entropy does too. It will bring about the death of a brand because, in today’s hyper-competitive market, it is only the authentic, the original, the genuine who will last.

But is this information new? No. So then, why do we continue to succumb to entropy?

When you can’t innovate, copy

Look closer, and you’ll find this to be the marketing weapon-of-choice of many. In a market that grows in hyper-competitiveness in seconds, innovation seems like too lofty a goal. The urge to capitalize on every trend and every moment guide the marketing rulebooks. Who cares if these trends are aligned with your brand purpose?

The copycat mindset seems to be at play here. Since everyone is jumping on the moments and trends wagon, most brands feel like they will lose out their “moment” in the sun. This fear becomes even more real when we look at the digital playing field – one where likes, shares, retweets become a barometer of success. It’s undeniable that brands are getting popularity in these fields. That original tweet about the price of bananas got some many RT’s, didn’t it. But is that what your brand will be known for in the future, well, even, tomorrow?

But coming up with original ideas is easy, said no one ever. And in the face of these forces at play, brands find it easy to piggyback on other’s ideas rather than focusing on their inherent values.

The herd mentality

Hasn’t a teacher or a parent ever asked you “if your friends jump into a well, will you do it too”? Most answers to this have been of vehement denial. Why would you in your right mind jump into a well just because your friends are?

But what if your friends are all buying the latest iPhone? As you see them using the cool features and the even cooler photographs and hear the conversation about how ‘cool’ the phone is, chances are you’ll end up buying one as well.

People are influenced by people. Period. Take a look at the growth of influencer marketing and you’ll know what we mean. Marketers and brands leverage this herd mentality (meaning “ the obedience of the individual to the mass, blindly and without reflection…”) to influence their customers. At the same time, they are influenced by the herd mentality too – everyone is doing it and so must I.

You reason that since everyone is leveraging striking an emotional cord as a marketing campaign, you feel you must too. But does this work for you?

Axe, for example, took the idea of the emotional cord and worked their campaign “Find Your Magic” to deconstruct a culture of “toxic masculinity”. Axe made a complete pivot from its old ‘bro-centric’ ideas of man and womanhood. They used no influencers nor celebrity ambassadors to create an emotionally charged campaign. And they won.

McDonald’s, on the other hand, used grief to build an emotional connect with a TV ad about a boy asking about his dead father. The ad was widely criticized for exploiting child bereavement to push a brand (especially since it was in queasy proximity to father’s Day) and also drew many unflattering comparisons to Nationwide Insurance’s “dead boy” Super Bowl TV Spot.

Yes, the audience today demands emotional resonance – but not at the cost of authenticity. They will call you out.

Authentic is just too hard

Had it been easy, everything in this world would have been original and authentic.

It is far easier to co-opt and exploit an issue or a trend, even in a cynical, emotional or humorous way, than to build something authentic. Take a look at the ‘rainbow washing’ that happens every June when Pride fever grips all. Or for that matter, look at how brands jumped on the ‘issue-driven’ wagon.

Where Pepsi’s tone-deaf ad featuring Kendel Jenner became the most mocked campaign in 2017 as they tried to address diversity. At the same time, Heineken got plenty of claps for its “Worlds Apart” campaign that not only addressed the diversity issue but also other hot button topics such as climate change, feminism. Heineken steered away from the corn syrup unity formula and brought together real people with opposing views and started a dialogue. When it came to ‘authenticity’ the Heineken campaign won as they did not focus on presenting vague representations of conflicting points of view.

We cannot emphasize enough – entropy will eventually lead your brand to a fall. Because when you succumb to the forces of chaos you are drifting away from your inherent positive valence. You are shifting towards something that is not your own. How can you position yourself in a differentiated manner when you become a clone? How can your voice be heard if you swim in a sea of noise?

So while the temptation to do what others are doing might be high, and the rewards might seem immediate, know that it is only the original and the authentic that survive the test of time. The copycats fade into oblivion.

Write to us on info@lokusdesign.com.

From the look of things, it seems to me that the branding industry seems to be facing some sort of “Purpose Tsunami”. Everyone seems to think that ‘purpose’ is the new advertising secret weapon. Brands are identifying hot causes, the more controversial the better, and then tagging along with campaigns to these topics. All in the name of purpose and to show that they care.

You might ask, “What’s so wrong with that? Aren’t they creating awareness…doing good?” But from where we are standing, all we see is a lot of words and no meaning.

We get why purpose is suddenly in the spotlight. The millennials love purpose. The age of the woke customer is upon us. People want to believe that they are part of something bigger…’doing good’ is social currency. From that perspective, these messages are easy wins. You can’t fault a company for wanting to save the whales, right?

People want to buy from companies that follow their purpose and are willing to step out of their comfort zones to push the purpose envelope. It’s also said that people want to work in companies that have a strong sense of purpose. That helps them feel more connected to the company because then, they feel, that they are a part of something genuine. This helps them anchor themselves, their beliefs and values to it. Because today, unlike yesterday, not only is the customer woke, the employee is woke too.

A variety of statistics also support the rise of purpose.

Consumers are no longer making decisions based solely on product selection or price; they’re assessing what a brand says, what it does and what it stands for.

• Nearly half of US consumers who are disappointed by a brand’s words or actions on a social issue complain about it.
• Nearly eight-in-10 (79%) Americans say they are more loyal to purpose-driven brands than traditional brands
• Consumers feel a stronger emotional connection to purpose-driven brands
• Brands with a high sense of purpose have experienced a brand valuation increase of 175% over the past 12 years compared to the median growth rate of 86%

Clearly, the consumer expectations from a brand have never been higher. No wonder, brand purpose is the marketing buzzword of the year.

However, to us, much of what is being propagated in the name of Brand Purpose looks suspiciously like opportunism. Brands are following the money and not the purpose. That’s just purpose washing.

Let’s take Budweiser as an example. Of course, we have no problem with the beer. However, for International Women’s Day last year, Budweiser showcased female employees in departments such as mechanical engineering, health management, etc. Nothing wrong here.

What stuck out was the fact that Budweiser, much like most alcoholic beverage companies have historically been running sexist advertisements as the norm. The brand still has Budweiser Girls. Well, of course, as is expected from all companies today, they take women empowerment seriously (sarcasm alert here). And while they have gone and revamped their ads to suit the modern-day sensibility, there’s no real attempt to disavow the company’s past ads or for that matter, Budweiser Girls.

The Gillette campaign that targeted toxic masculinity is another example we must look at. We actually like the campaign. We believe they may be serious about turning a new leaf. But are they going far enough? Now if Gillette really wanted to put their money where their mouth is, a good starting point could perhaps be the pink Venus range for women. Let’s start with, why names like Embrace and Passion?

Let’s also look at the curious case of Unilever. The brands Axe and Dove both are under the Unilever umbrella. But notice how Dove focuses on spots like Real Campaign for Beauty while Axe Body Spray serially objectifies women?

And let’s not even get into the ‘rainbow pandering’ that happens during the LGBT Pride movements. While this is a welcome change that shows society’s cultural shift towards equality, it becomes pandering when companies exploit LGBTQ rights without meaningful action at their organizations. Example, Victoria’s Secret showed support for LGBTQ during pride month, but the brand has serially refused to have transgender models for their annual fashion shows. Hardly equality, is it?

Retailers like H&M, Primark, Target, and Levi Strauss all have gone gung-ho about rainbow apparel. But much of that apparel is manufactured in counties where it’s illegal to be gay.

We have an issue with this kind of marketing because such marketing creates dangerous blind spots and creates an illusion of progress. And also, let’s face it. The woke customer is smart enough to see through this charade. Remember how Pepsi was called out for its Black Lives Matter campaign?

Now Harvard Business Review credits ‘purpose’ as the key to 21st-century success. And with that, we have most brands singing the song of conscious capitalism – capitalism that has a soul. But when Starbucks doesn’t pay taxes, or Johnson and Johnson keeps 98% of its cash (amounting to an approximate $42 billion) offshore in 2017, they show that they don’t really care about the well-being of the people you serve.

Don’t get us wrong. We are not saying brands should drop everything and embrace causes or charities. We are saying that they should be true to their Purpose. And Purpose must be linked with action. In that light, if a cause aligns with that Purpose, then they should whole-heartedly climb aboard. If not, then let it run its course independent of your opportunistic participation.

It is high time that brands understand that and put their money where their mouth is. Because otherwise, ‘purpose’ will lose its meaning. Look around, it’s already being mocked. Let’s not confuse brand activism with brand purpose and let’s also not just jump on the activism wagon for the marketing impact.

Write to us on info@lokusdesign.com.

Have you seen Toy Story 4? I think it’s perhaps the best one of the series. What I loved in the movie was the inner turmoil the main protagonist, Woody the cowboy sheriff, faces in the absence of his purpose. With his first owner gone to college and a current owner who doesn’t find him interesting enough, Woody fumbles until he finds his purpose in reuniting a lost toy with his current owner.

Before you think this is just another movie review you didn’t want to read, let me assure you that it’s not. We often undermine the power of purpose…thinking it may be a ‘good to have’. But what is life without purpose? What is anything without purpose? And branding is not free from the need to be purposeful as well.

Brand purpose, the reason for the brand to exist, drives an idealistic view of how you want your audience, your customers, to view you. Without purpose, you cannot engage with your audience at a meaningful level. And in the age of entropy, this can be the death knell of a brand.

However, brand purpose does not matter only to your external customers. It matters, and matters perhaps a great deal more, to your internal customers – your employees.

Purpose drives satisfaction

According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, 89% of executives believed purpose drives employee satisfaction. 84% of those surveyed believed that it aids an organization’s ability to transform. 80% stated that it helps in increasing customer loyalty.

Think about some of the greatest brands – Apple encourages you to ‘think different’, Nike that says, ‘just do it’, GE that urges you to ‘put imagination to work’. The essence of their purpose not only reflects in the products that they build but it also resonates across the entire organization.

While the customers keep the lights on, without purpose you won’t be able to keep your employees anchored to what you do.

Purpose drives ownership

IBM is a great example of a brand that has worked to strengthen its purpose continuously. They have continued to strengthen their brand purpose to not only drive growth but to give greater meaning and inspiration to their employees’ lives. By doing so, they have given their employees something to aspire to and have given them a reason to care.

Purpose drives employees to care. Employees who care will have a higher sense of ownership. A higher sense of ownership automatically translates to greater productivity. Greater productivity impacts the bottom line positively. Ownership also drives motivation. And a motivated workforce is more engaged and enabled. Driven by purpose, people work towards creating products and services that drive value in the life of the customer. And the customer drives the profits. The math is fairly simple.

The age of the woke employee

It is not just the age of the woke customer. It is the age of the woke employee too. Your employee is someone else’s customer after all, isn’t she? So logically, the rules of engagement have to be the same for the customer and for the employee.

PwC says that 30% of employees who work with a sense of purpose feel a profound connection to their company. Then there is the fact that by 2025, millennials will constitute 75% of the workforce. And millennials love purpose. They will work for companies whose values and purpose match their own. The old work contract that read “I will work to buy stuff I love” has been replaced with “I will work because it makes me happy”.

Purpose trumps profitability (for your employees, at least)

In the age of this woke employee, purpose also trumps profitability. The Deloitte 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report showed that the millennial workforce looks beyond a company’s financial performance when deciding on a prospective employer.

Your employees are your brand ambassadors. Unless you can inspire them with your brand purpose, how can you inspire your customers? Your employees are your main consumers. And they are watching you. They are watching your words and assessing if these words are translating into action. Words only turn into action when the purpose is linked to the brand in a credible and authentic manner.

The true measure of your brand’s impact shouldn’t begin with analyzing how it impacts the customers. Instead, it has to first analyze if it impacts your employees. It is only when purpose resonates across the organization that your employees will develop a sense of ‘shared purpose’. And when you and your employees have this sense of shared purpose, your customers see authenticity and genuine effort.

So, while you get your swanky cafeterias and pool tables to engage your employees and keep them happy, do take the time to focus on your brands’ purpose. For it is the brand’s purpose that will keep your employees rooted to your company.

Write to us on info@lokusdesign.com.

Have you heard the story of Chicken Little? The story of the little paranoid chicken who kept alarmingly announcing, “the sky is falling”. Today, Chicken Little could very well be exclaiming “the experience is falling. The experience is falling” as we get sucked deeper into the experience economy.

What’s alarming about being driven by the experience economy, you ask, especially in the context of branding. Aren’t experiences driving businesses? If we take a look around, all brands are now getting hyper-focused to create brand experiences that build their brands’ perception. This makes sense, especially because brand perception is put together with every little piece of interaction with the brand. And of course, that applies to the physical space that accommodates the brand as well.

The space that houses the brand cannot be inanimate. It can no longer be passive. If it is then how can it drive brand experience? How does it then impact brand perception? How does it create a discerning value?

The brand space is not only about accurately positioning the merchandise and the brand logo. It more than color schemes and color palettes. Brand spaces have to be designed such that these convey ‘meaning’ to the customer.

The play of Purpose

So where does the chicken little story play here? Why did we begin with that story?

You see, one of the main objectives of any branding exercise is to stand out in a crowded market place. And today everyone is just doing that. In this constant tryst to stand out in the experience economy we are bombarding our customers with, you guessed it right, ‘experiences’. But have you for a moment thought, ‘am I doing it right’ or ‘am I doing too much’? Because everyone today is creating ‘experience centers’, I must do it too. And the chaos continues.

Today every brand is hyper-focused on customer experience. Customer experience has become the driver of revenues. Consider that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for great customer experience. Customers are also willing to pay a 135 – 18% premium for luxury and indulgence services.

So, experience is everything today. But will you achieve brand success if you blindly jump on to the ‘experience’ bandwagon? Will just following some ‘spatial design shiny new thing best practices’ support your brand through its journey? Are you following the principles you should? And, should you also design an experience center because it is ‘the’ trend of the season?

Logically, the answer to the above questions is ‘no’. Why? Let’s highlight these points

• The objective of spatial experience design is to be unique to stand out
• It cannot be copied. If it is, then it is not unique
• It has to stand for ‘something’ and has to be aligned to ‘something’. ‘Something’ here cannot be a trend

If you blindly follow the trend, then what difference between you and Chicken Little?

So, what word can replace the ‘something’ in the statement? That word, simply, is ‘purpose’.

Purpose and Spatial Design

Reflecting brand purpose in the brands’ physical space isn’t usually an obvious consideration. How do you even reflect purpose, the compelling reason for your existence, into spatial design? Are we not expected to follow a design principle when it comes to physical spaces?

Purpose represents what the brand stands for…what it is. It forms the core of every experience and every action of the brand. Take Adidas’ HomeCourt concept stores. These stores mimic the sports arena designed with the objective to make the brand experience more immersive. Everything in the store resembles a sports arena. The entrance resembles the tunnel players use to emerge on to a sports field. The shoe department is a locker room. There is a sports reference in ‘everything’! This spatial design builds on experience that emerges from the brand’s purpose – to be the best in everything sports. And it works.

The Lexus experience center in New York puts the ‘E’ in experience. You’d think that the automobile giant would build this experience center around automobiles. They, however, keep all covert and overt mentions of their product out of this center. The focus here is on the experience and what an experience they deliver. The purpose of the brand is to “Create Amazing”, and they very well do it here!

Experience without Purpose equals Entropy

Keeping purpose at the center of spatial experience is necessary not just to create that ‘wow’ factor and engage the client in a meaningful way but also to reduce entropy. Entropy is just noise. It is just blindly following the herd mentality – he is doing it, so must I. How can this be a strategy for a meaningfully unique experience?

Without alignment with purpose, creating a spatial design will only drain your resources – both human and financial. Without it, you will only expend your energy and spend valuable dollars to create designs that are clones. How can that deliver value to the customer? How can that build your brand perception? “This is just like XYZ”, your customers will say. The objective of creating an experience then lies defeated. And then we just cry, “the sky is falling”.

Today brands have to be more aware, more deliberate in each of their actions. Designing immersive spatial experiences is no different. Only by staying close to the brand purpose can you ensure that your consumers are not just captivated by the layout but also by what the brand stands for and its core essence. Staying true to brand purpose is the secret ingredient for brand success, even when it comes to spatial design.

Write to us on info@lokusdesign.com.