10

Trendslation

This second guest chapter is written by Claire Dennington, who has been working on her PhD in the field of translating trends into experience. Claire has been doing fantastic work in using trendslation, a method she has developed together with large and small organizations. But she is better at explaining this than I am…

In this chapter I’m going to tell you why cultural trends matter as part of the move to becoming an experience-centric organization. You will learn how to use this cultural material as a source for innovation, and through examples I will discuss culture and meaning-making. I will also introduce you to the method of trendslation, which offers a way to design for more meaningful service experiences in line with cultural trends and experiential DNA.

Hachiji Dachi!

Understanding Cultural Trends to Design for More Meaningful Service Experiences

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, thousands of people in the Mid-Atlantic states were left displaced from their homes. Wanting to help, an Airbnb host got in touch with the company, asking how she could share her home for free to help some of those in need of temporary shelter. Airbnb was built on a commercial context, in which it was assumed that there would always be payment involved, and it turned out to be an extreme challenge for them to make free rental possible. Instead of turning their backs on the project, however, the company spent an intense weekend rebuilding their platform around this new service offering of sharing homes for free, in times of crisis. They then developed this capacity further and launched a new service offering, called Open Homes, which is now an established part of Airbnb (see Figure 10-1). Open Homes offers meaningful experiences to people in need of temporary housing due to natural disaster, conflict, and illness. At the time I’m writing this, nearly 300,000 people have been evacuated from their homes due to wildfires in California, and the Open Homes initiative is contributing to finding a place of sanctuary for evacuees. Airbnb’s unique ability to swiftly deliver innovative and meaningful experiences in line with their core offering of sharing homes is not rooted in the quest for solely making more money. It comes from the company’s strong organizational alignment and experience centricity, from deep compassion and values, and from a unique sense of how to translate cultural conversations into new service experiences.

Figure 10-1. The Airbnb Open Homes initiative, which allows hosts to share their space for free, is a good cultural fit for Airbnb. It doesn’t have any commercial intent, but is a strong fit with the personality and experiential DNA of the organization. (Source: Airbnb.)

Earning Your Cultural Black Belt

As you are reading this chapter, hopefully your organization is getting close to the top of the experience-centricity maturity scale. You have carefully crafted and discussed your experiential DNA, built an internal experience team, hired an experience manager, and put experience at the heart of your organization. The time has come for you to further refine and advance this experience centricity by reflecting on and understanding your position within the contemporary cultural domain your company exists within or relates to. You may be wondering how the introductory story is relevant to your organization. Well, if you want to fulfill your true potential as a black belt experience-centric organization, you need to focus on delivering culturally relevant service experiences. You need to design for experiences that are in line with your customers’ current worldviews and cultural context. You need to design for experiences that offer emotional value, ones that make sense and matter, ones that help customers fulfill their external identity projects. You need to design new services your customers not only have to use but really want to use.

Understanding Why Culture Matters

As customer experience becomes increasingly important, the way you choose to reinforce and influence your cultural position will become a key differentiating factor. By developing and nurturing your organizational ability to respond to cultural trends, you will be able to offer your customers new service experiences that are aligned with cultural movements and conversations. Your organization will gain competitive advantage and attain stronger customer loyalty through service experiences that customers perceive as attuned to their lifestyles and attitudes. Cultural alignment allows you to become a front-runner in your industry. Through this approach, you will be able to design new services that your customers love.

A black belt experience-centric organization understands that culture matters because:

• When you are proactively involved with culture, you are seen as a leader rather than a follower. You stand out in the market by standing for something that resonates with customers at a deep level.
• You create a connection between your experiential DNA and culture that is unique to you, and difficult for competitors to copy.
• Culture and cultural context frames meaning, and what is perceived as meaningful to people has great value. We interpret meaning through our cultural context, and through interpreting cultural codes.
• Cultural understanding relates to people’s sense of self and extended identity. Through cultural codes—like how we dress, what we eat, and our leisure activities—we display our preferences and taste through expression of self. This relates to individual identity creation and communication, and to a community of people.
• The more you focus on the customer experience, the more you develop a service personality. This personality is viewed by your customers in terms of expected behaviors, and these behaviors go beyond the experiential journey through the use of a particular service. Customers therefore view your behaviors through a cultural lens, meaning they expect your organization to behave in ways that reflect current cultural movements and to act according to cultural contexts.
• Being aware of culture, and linking it to your experiential DNA, gives a clarity of purpose that makes you stand out as both a service provider and an employer. Thus it assists in the development of internal culture and in recruitment of relevant staff.

To become a black belt you need to build cultural sensitivity and fully embrace the fact that cultural alignment can push you in the direction of becoming a front-runner in your industry. Through this approach, you will be able to design new services that your customers love.

Defining Culture: I Say Po-tay-to, You Say Po-tah-to

“Culture” is one of those terms that can be somewhat slippery and vague. No wonder, as it is a term used in several ways, in different contexts. You may use it to refer to high culture, as in the fine arts and going to the opera. Or you mean corporate culture, as in how your workplace has certain shared values, rules, and rituals, like Black-Tie Mondays or Casual Fridays. Or perhaps you mean pop culture, describing popular preferences and expressions, like trending Netflix series or the latest music craze. Or you may mean “culture” as in the unique and specific cultures of individual countries. In this chapter, when I talk about culture, I use it in terms of contemporary culture—a shared set of current values, practices, behaviors, and beliefs that exist in everyday life, shared by people within a community, as defined by cultural theorist Stuart Hall.1

Being Attuned to Culture

Let’s go back to the introductory story for a minute. Airbnb, as a dynamic and innovative experience-centric organization, is inherently attuned to societal and cultural movements. One could say that the whole concept behind it was based on a strong cultural trend of people traveling more and wanting to experience new places, but not in the way many of us traveled for years and years, like tourists. No, now we want to travel like locals—not merely visiting a city, but living the authentic life in a local neighborhood, visiting the local café, having a friendly chat with a neighbor, being part of the community and imagining that this new place is your home away from home. This is, after all, Airbnb’s experiential value proposition, to “live like a local.” From the very first air mattress the Airbnb founders started renting out, the local experience was enhanced by sprinkles of small cultural clues (like leaving a few quarters for visitors to use for public transportation).

As an experience-centric organization, Airbnb has developed a unique sense of cultural movement, and an understanding of how to translate this into new experiential offerings and touchpoints. They continuously adjust, fine-tune, and innovate around their core offering of affordable rental accommodation, in line with cultural influences. They also strongly align this to their experiential DNA and their vision to “help create a world where you can belong anywhere.” By translating cultural influence and brand DNA into experience, they are able to offer more meaningful experiences, like that of the Open Homes initiative. Through this initiative they created a meaningful experience not only for people in crisis and their families, but also for people wanting to help and for the whole community.

Airbnb didn’t initiate Open Homes because they wanted to earn a few more bucks (the service is, of course, free). They did it as an act of benevolence because it was the right fit for their experiential DNA. This initiative was truly in line with their service personality as a friendly open-minded neighbor, building on the personal values of the founders. What would you do if your friends, family, or neighbors were in need? You would open your home to them.

Cultural influence shapes service personality and people’s expectations of behavior. Now, imagine if Trump Hotels offered rooms for free in a time of crisis. Would you question their motives? Would you think that they were commercially (in some way) trying to exploit a vulnerable situation? The cultural reaction from Airbnb was the right fit for their experiential DNA, but it would be wrong for Trump Hotels. Having an experiential focus creates expectations of behavior, and actively taking part in relevant cultural conversations is therefore key to delivering meaningful experiences.

Let’s look at another example. French supermarket Intermarché identified cultural trends regarding a growing awareness around food waste and sustainable food. They translated this into a meaningful experience through the design and development of a new and successful service offering. Intermarché turned what could have been a marketing stunt into a full experience. Focusing on the imperfect fruit and vegetables that are usually discarded for their looks, they used humorous characterizations based around the concept of “inglorious fruits and vegetables” (see Figure 10-2). They translated this into an experience through a strong design profile, a tongue-in-cheek tone of voice, and a full service ecology, comprising in-store happenings, inglorious smoothies, and inglorious soups, as well as by selling the disfigured produce. The results were beyond belief: products were sold out, new customers visited the stores, and Intermarché received national admiration. The key success factor was that they translated the trend into a strong experiential offering and implemented it right down to the individual touchpoints.

How to Trendslate

To successfully trendslate culture into service experiences, you need to first identify which cultural trends are relevant to your organization, and then build on this as a key part of the experience you are offering. This cultural affinity needs to be embedded throughout your organization, as part of the company backbone, and it needs to be embedded in your experiential DNA. You need to go beyond tokenism, minimum Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) standards, add-ons, or clever marketing stunts. You need to design for experiences around issues that your customers engage with, on an emotional level. And you have to mean it. Why? Because if you don’t, the people you care about, and the people that care about you, will see straight through you. As with the Airbnb example, when designing for meaningful service experiences, you need to embrace the act of benevolence—that people believe you have their best interests at heart. And you need to be brave.

When Airbnb acquired a Super Bowl advertising spot, just 10 days before kickoff, they decided to use the opportunity this touchpoint offered to culturally relate to President Trump’s recent travel ban, and at the same time launch the initiative #weaccept. In an interview, CEO Brian Chesky recalls how he almost decided to pull the ad two days before it aired, fearing the consequences it might have on the business. Instead, it became one of the most shared Super Bowl ads ever. It was timely, it was radical, it related to the company’s experiential DNA, and it was in tune with the sociocultural and political movements of the time. It worked because it was a good fit with Airbnb’s personality and the behaviors that its customers expected.

Patagonia is a clothing brand that is built on a kind of bravery, in that it takes a stance against the mainstream fashion industry. With its activist personality, the brand embraces a philosophy and vision around building long-lasting and durable products, without causing unnecessary harm to the environment. This is embedded in the company’s experiential DNA, extends throughout the whole organization, and permeates every detail of the Patagonia experience. The close connection to nature and outdoor sports experiences translates into their products, as well as into their anti-marketing approach (don’t buy more than necessary), and more recently into their new services, such as clothing repair and their hub for worn Patagonia wear.

When Nike, in September 2018, hired former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick (famous for kneeling in protest of racial injustice during the US national anthem before NFL games) as head of its campaign, it risked igniting a blaze of controversy. Social media filled with images of Nike shoes going up in flames (#justburnit). Mainstream media predicted the brand’s fall, but instead Nike stocks skyrocketed. The company was seen as taking a stance for something it believed in. The experience of Nike presenting a personality that believes in and defends equal rights for all was perceived as meaningful (for those who didn’t burn their sneakers) and in tune with the experiential DNA of the company. Its bravery was repaid many times over.

Understanding Cultural Trends: The Importance of the Zeitgeist

As a black belt experience-centric organization, you need to become aware of and attuned to the cultural spirit of the moment—the zeitgeist. This is the essence of the era, which is invisible to most people at the time, but obvious when they look back on it in the future. The experience-centric organization is in tune with the zeitgeist, and always manages to adapt the customer experience to the underlying shifts in culture (see Figure 10-3).

“Rip. Mix. Burn.” was Apple’s message to fans in the early 2000s, when the company completely disrupted the music market. By introducing the music download service iTunes and launching the new iMac with features for both ripping and burning CDs, they were offering the customer the lead role as orchestrator and owner of their own mix of music. Apple had picked up on the zeitgeist of independence and freedom of choice in society, and had translated this into an ecology of products and services. Together with the design of the desirable iMac machines in colorful translucent plastic, this transformed and saved Apple (see Figure 10-4). The combination of the (at the time radical) iMac design and a focus on disrupting the music business turned Apple’s fortunes around, and one could argue that this was all due to perfect trendslation.

For most consumer-oriented and product-focused organizations, understanding and translating cultural trends is a key factor for delivering the right products at the right time, to the right customer. This means providing meaningful and desirable products in line with your customers’ values, needs, and expectations. It means having a team of design professionals keeping up to date with trends and using their design skills to translate them into new service experiences. You need to invest time in finding service designers with a strong organizational fit, and knowledge in branding, service design, and cultural translation.

You need to develop dynamic organizational structures that take into account this cultural knowledge, and have a team that can not only identify which trends are relevant, but also reflect on and extract the underlying meaning of these cultural shifts. Why are these trends happening? What are they signaling? What are the main reasons a trend has manifested? What is the underlying meaning behind this trend? And, more importantly, what does this mean for us?

Delivering a Fabulous Aesthetic Experience: Aesop

Aesop is an organization that is founded on responding to the cultural trend of beauty (see Figure 10-5). It is a high-price luxury experience that frames its experiential offering through beautiful, highly aesthetic, and poetic experiences. Aesop is an example of a company that has captured the zeitgeist of beauty. It has created an aesthetic world that goes a long way beyond the product, such that when you enter into a relationship with Aesop, you are not buying cosmetics, you are appreciating beauty.

For over 30 years the brand has been “offering skin, hair, and body care formulations created with meticulous attention to detail, and with efficacy and sensory pleasure in mind.” There is a strong focus on design and experience throughout the entire organization. Every single touchpoint and element in the customer’s experiential journey has been beautifully crafted. With close links to art, design, and architecture, and an immense interest in and understanding of materials and ingredients, Aesop offers products, packaging, a graphic profile, and shop interiors that both look and feel divine. The company’s experiential DNA is continuously translated into highly stylistic and aesthetic elements such as carefully curated artist collaborations, a friendly yet professional tone of voice, and invitations that combine poetry and beautiful illustrations. Aesop is not for everyone, but in the target group their customers feel that the brand adds value to their lives, through the aesthetic experiences it provides. Every time they wash their hands or faces, they associate the experience with the wondrous world of Aesop. And, of course, they are willing to pay for this experience. Aesop’s ability to successfully identify and translate a cultural theme of beauty into a world of aesthetic experiences has been highly successful, and has resulted in 40% year-on-year growth.

Figure 10-5. Aesop has transformed buying and using beauty products into a pilgrimage and sacred aesthetic experience. (Source: Claire Dennington.)

Linking Experiential DNA and Culture

“Where there is a disconnect in authenticity, people will feel cheated and react negatively.”2

– Tai Tran, Forbes 30 under 30 CEO

When you are designing new services, it is key that new offerings are not only attuned to cultural trends, but also tightly aligned to your experiential DNA. The Aesop example describes an experience-centric organization that has successfully aligned its experiential DNA to cultural trends and infused this throughout the whole organization. With cultural awareness and cultural alignment, you can more easily identify the direction to develop your new service offerings and what fits your company best. That is, cultural awareness and alignment give you a clarity of vision and invisible boundaries. And just as important, they help you understand what does not fit your company. If Aesop wanted to move into a new fast food space in a suburban mall, most of the company’s loyal fans would probably gasp in disbelief and turn their backs on both this initiative and the brand. However, if Aesop instead launched a pop-up bar at a local music festival, providing healthy beauty- and skin-enhancing vitamin-infused juice shots, most fans would applaud it and not even think twice about using, or promoting it. In other words, there is a specific cultural opportunity that fits Aesop’s experiential DNA, and the same is true for all organizations. Knowing this and using it to your advantage is key to trendslation.

When IKEA launched the social kitchen Kutchnia Spotkan in Warsaw—a large, fully equipped kitchen in a spacious city apartment—they were not only offering a space for people to get together to make and enjoy a meal, they were simultaneously addressing the issue of small, expensive living spaces in larger cities. It seemed IKEA was not just trying to sell furniture, but also exploring how to create opportunities for customers to get involved in valuable and meaningful experiences, in an innovative way that aligns with the brand proposition of “affordable solutions for better living.” Similarly, when dating service Match.com saw that 3.1 million of its users listed “coffee and conversation” as an interest, they teamed up with Starbucks and introduced “Meet at Starbucks,” a one-click-coffee-date invitation feature with a chat function. That function enabled users visiting Starbucks to chat directly with other users there, creating experiential opportunity for people in our digital age to meet up in real life and adding individual value to the customer experience.

In 2016 Starbucks founder Howard Schultz encouraged employees to use their vote in the US election, and the company teamed up with the voting service TurboVote to enable employees to register via computer or mobile device. In 2018, Starbucks employed 8,000 veterans and pledged to employ 10,000 refugees. Rather than just adding a marketing campaign, the company is aligning initiatives to its DNA and fully embedding this into the organization. This is a new direction for Starbucks, and has not always been a success. Its #racetogether initiative aimed at stimulating discussion about race was a failure, not because of the idea, but due to its implementation. However, it’s clear that Starbucks has recognized that it is not only an economic actor in the market, but also a cultural actor in society, and that this comes with both responsibilities and consequences.

The Trendslation Method: Three Steps of Translation

After working with several brands and companies on service design research projects, I saw the need to assist companies with trendslation—that is, translating cultural trends into new services. I have worked for several years developing the trendslation method (see Figure 10-6), and have used it with local, national, and global organizations with great success. The aim of the trendslation method is to offer a way of designing for more holistic and trend-driven service innovation, and for more meaningful and highly experiential service encounters. The trendslation method explores how trends can be factors for conveying intrinsic meaning, and how organizations can capture this meaning and use it to develop new experiential offerings in line with their experiential DNA. The three steps of trendslation are:

1. Understanding and exploring the trend to extract the underlying meaning and its relationship to your experiential DNA
2. Ideating to translate meaning into experiential value propositions (EVPs)
3. Defining and detailing the service concept through an experiential journey and experiential elements

Figure 10-6. The trendslation method is a three-step process that translates trends into new service experiences. (Source: Claire Dennington.)

1. Explore the Trend

The first step of the trendslation process is to gain a clear understanding of the underlying meaning behind a trend. This means reflecting on what the trend actually means, to whom, and how, why the trend is happening, and if/how/why the trend is relevant to your organization. In my work with partners, the mere act of mapping, discussing, and then putting the trend into words and visual representations makes this underlying meaning more clear. In essence, you will be decoding and encoding the intangible nature of trends, and making them relevant to your experiential DNA. The five-step DCODE process enables this exploration:

D – DISCUSS

What are the implications of this trend, on a personal, individual, societal, and organizational level? Discuss what the key features and characteristics of the trend are, and what level of relevance it may have to your organization. Discuss the extent of the trend. Is it a micro, meta, or mega trend?

C – CONSIDER

Why is this trend emerging now? Are there larger movements impacting culture and society, such as technological, political, sociocultural, environmental, or economical shifts? Consider in what way attitudes are changing, and why these issues are important to people. Consider whether your organization could and should relate to this trend. Is it relevant? Why? In what way? Remember that the trends need to fit your organization, experiential DNA, and service personality in a good way.

O – OBSERVE

Notice where you find “clues” or evidence manifesting the trend in different sectors. Go on a city safari or research trip, look to news, social media, new product ranges, art, movies, literature, best-selling lists, trending hashtags. Observe new innovations, services, and start-ups. Start gathering examples of these clues and create a visual repository of them.

D - DEFINE

Articulate what new needs and opportunity spaces can arise in light of this trend and in relation to your experiential DNA.

E – EXPLAIN

Capture the core, the bloodline, the underlying meaning of the trend in one simple phrase.

For each step it can be helpful to note down keywords, short statements, and ideas along the way. You may look into several relevant trends that you merge together—anything that can help pinpoint and reveal what you and your company view as the underlying meaning. This is not an exact science, and it helps to co-create a visual, experiential code map. When working with desirability and experience, thinking in visual terms can lead to a more coherent and holistic representation of the underlying meaning through the evidence, or codes that are emerging. Such visualizations can help give you immediate feedback about whether the experience looks and feels right, and create shared ownership in a project team. Your goal should be to synthesize this process down to a short sentence summarizing the underlying meaning, which serves as a baseline for further concept ideation.

2. Develop an Experiential Value Proposition

Now that you have explored a trend and understand its inherent meaning, you are ready to translate this knowledge into alternative experiential value propositions (EVPs). To do this, you need to map out new opportunity spaces, and start ideating around what new offerings you could provide that cater to them. Consider how a new offering could impact or build on your existing offering, and if and how these new offerings align with your experiential DNA. Try to imagine near-future scenarios based on the insights in the first trendslation step. Start discussing what a completely new offering could be, what a modified version of your existing offering might be, and what could be a future offering. As you start framing new offerings, go into more detail about the experience. What would the new service be called? What is your elevator pitch? Which images would you use to represent the experience? By doing this, you and your team will start developing a coherent interpretation and aligned expectations. This is also a great way to start building a concept library for later use and inspiration.

3. Detail the New Service Concept

It’s crucial to stay open-minded at this step of the trendslation process. There is always a lot of can’t, won’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t do, but you must resist that way of thinking and be open to new ideas. Ask yourself what your customers will dream of, fear, anticipate, and need help with solving in light of the trends you have identified. What will be meaningful to them? Focus on the cultural context of your new offering and on the experience you want to offer.

To further refine the offerings/ideas into service concepts, develop a stylistic experiential journey map (Figure 10-7). The stylistic experiential journey is like the experiential journey (see Chapter 8) crossed with a mood board. It takes the experiential service journey a step further and communicates a richer view of the experience by adding stylistic images that relate to the experience at different stages of the journey. In this way cultural and style aspects are linked to the customer experience, thereby ensuring cultural relevance right down to the individual touchpoints.

Through developing the stylistic experiential journey, you may identify new opportunity areas, and this can lead you to develop other and better experiential value propositions. To engage customers throughout the service journey every touchpoint and detail needs to have a high level of style, including service-specific details such as tone of voice, sensory elements, gestures, and rituals.

Figure 10-7. The stylistic experiential journey adds culturally relevant images to the experiential journey mapping described in Chapter 8. In doing so, it gives you a richer experiential view of the journey, and ensures cultural relevance right down to individual touchpoints. (Source: Claire Dennington.)

To reinforce the journey, add specific experiential elements to touchpoints to reinforce your organization’s intended experience/meaning, and to help you develop a specific service style. Experimental elements could include sensory, symbolic, gestural, physical, digital, material, aesthetic, and spatial details, such as tone of voice, interior design, graphic elements, taste, sound, lighting, fonts, colors, illustrations, photos, branding, and form or geographic location, to mention a few. By understanding and detailing these elements, you can shift, alter, or even curate the experience

Conclusion

This chapter has described how cultural awareness needs to be a core competency in the black belt experience-centric organization. By having an understanding of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, you will be able to trendslate cultural trends into relevant experiences that surprise and delight your customers. In doing so, you will be able to satisfy needs that customers have not yet recognized, build long-term relationships with them, and create experiences that they consider desirable.

Trendslation is a method developed to help organizations monitor trends, identify those that are relevant for their services, and transform them into desirable experiences. The method is straightforward and has been used successfully in large and small organizations, ranging from supermarkets to global clothing brands. Trendslation is an approach that requires a high degree of experience maturity, and therefore builds on a core competency in organizational experience centricity.

To round out this chapter, I’d like to say a few words about value perception that will influence all organizations during the next years. Throughout the past years, and in my PhD work, I have worked with many brands and businesses that are product-focused. Their main aim was to sell products, and they concentrated on the point of sale. As we are shifting to a service-dominant society, with a focus on experience, they have all had to contemplate the meaning of value. This means moving from a point-of-sale focus to a service experience focus, while also developing an experience-centric culture. Value is now derived from interactions and relationships rather than through the point of sale alone, and this has consequences for the organizational mindset. Following the trajectory toward experience centricity changes this mindset, and the trendslation approach becomes a natural further step for the organization.

Finally, there is one huge trend that we cannot ignore. Customers increasingly feel that we have come to a point in history where we need to acknowledge that our resources are not unlimited, and that today’s consumption patterns need to be left in the past. Customers are more and more critical of the “use and dispose” mentality of the past, and believe that this way of thinking needs to be ceremoniously discarded, for good. Longevity, social responsibility, and sustainability will be key trends for the next decade as customers look to develop long-term relationships with organizations taking a lead in this area. Being an experience-centric organization requires that you relate to these important issues. As people start consuming fewer products, or shift to using services that offer more sustainable solutions (like rental, reuse, and repair), you need to position yourself through new service offerings that create value beyond the point of sale. How can you become front-runners in your industry by offering emotional value, experiential value, educational value, or social value? In my opinion, a good start is embracing your new role as a fully developed experience-centric organization and delivering new service experiences that add value and meaning to people’s lives. In this way, you become a part of current cultural conversations, and that is a good place to be.