Crossing the imaginary chasm: Value Stories (remote edition)
“Experiential marketing” (also known as experience marketing or emotional marketing) proposes that the satisfaction perceived in the value proposition offered by a product or service is intimately linked to the experience offered before the purchase and during its consumption.
Although traditional marketing focuses on basic aspects of a product such as a price, place, or promotion, this concept has evolved towards a more comprehensive definition in the attempt to enrich the relationship between brands and their customers or consumers, exceeding the natural limits defined by the classic marketing concept and addressing the senses and emotions seeking to eliminate any barriers to purchase.
According to Scott Christ, writer and entrepreneur, “experiential marketing is about making connections between brands and consumers”. This way of relating to the client “compromises the consumers’ senses and allows them to interact physically with their brand”. And this is where Management 3.0 can provide specific practices to facilitate the discovery and development of solutions
Therefore, during the development and creation of a plan to improve the overall experience of a technology development company here in Panama (https://www.totembear.com/), I decided to create a case study (fictitious) that would serve as inspiration for the team involved and through practices such as value stories and meddlers game. That story would make them live their values and thus respond to the experience their customers need.
I explain the flow of the game I created and played with the team:
- Act I: Creating the environment “The situation” — The game poses a challenge where participants must structure a solution considering the values that identify them. In order to do so, they must decipher the best way to relate to each other and find a purpose that identifies them. That part of the game is very important because the customer experience is an emotional concept that can generate multiple results. Therefore, there are several very useful methods to understand these interactions, traditional tools such as empathy maps or business canvas models, which help us build a clear vision of the value proposal you want to raise and how it will be measured along with the expected benefits. As Management 3.0 practices are very flexible, create a case that would allow playing with values within a fictitious situation, promoting solutions through imagination, for that reason Value stories practice fits perfectly. In this part, I read the situation to create the urgency of the situation
The challenge was: “VICOD Toys has hired them to design a revolutionary app. Their CEO gives them total freedom to design the company needed to develop a solution to address the various challenges of today.
For this purpose, he has brought them a list of “trendy topics” and asked them to select the topic of their preference for this spin-off that their company wishes to experience. He only sets some conditions:
- The CEO imagines an app, which works like a video game, inspired by the selected theme
- What would be the working principles with which the team should start to promote creativity and be aligned with the values of the team ?
2. Act 2: Creating a Customer-centric organization
Find out which are the usual routes that your customers choose. Enrich the contents of social networks or other forms of interaction with our customers, understanding past interactions, and identifying the segmentation that the company is addressing according to the profiles studied. This becomes essential to develop more efficient strategies, for this I asked them to design an organizational structure through meddlers game
The challenge continued, when I read the next part of the history:
“The CEO of VICOD Toys has been thrilled. It seems that she liked the problem they selected very much.
She comments: “I love stories”. Some time ago I took a course in Design Thinking and the consultant placed great value on this tool for connecting with users.
Could you create a story which could serve as inspiration for a group of developers to create the game you are recommending to me”
3. Act 3: Prioritization plans
The team was excited because they enjoyed the practice of creating stories with purpose. Once you have the main characteristics of the different customer profiles, their possible routes, purchase patterns, and their experience, the game asks that companies can prioritize their actions according to the impact they can produce in the organization and check if their values are present in the solution
Value stories are also definitive in areas as varied as competitiveness strategies, creation of services for our clients, work relationships, innovation processes, or investment decisions.
The challenge of our organizations is to understand that when we refer to values, the way we act is much more important than what we think and say. But for values to have meaning in human teams, it is indispensable that their members share the explicit meaning of the proposed values.
The stories are great for simplifying abstract concepts and complex messages such as values. When we try to understand a new idea, it is normal to feel confused, but stories can help us. If we explain a new technology product through a story focused on its benefits, users will quickly understand what it is about.
Stories bring people together. Stories have universal themes and characters, such as the journey of the hero, the defeat of the villain, or the person who triumphs despite adversity. A good story, therefore, makes a lot of different people feel the same at the same time and can help you create a sense of belonging around the values and culture of the organization.
I would love to experience creating a set of values through management 3.0 with real stories of people and explore the responses of the team through their values and culture in a similar dynamic.
