Extending the Brand Radar: Preparation Rituals.

We live in a service society. For consumers, a service is a cluster of experiences that take place during a period of time. And this period of time is often larger than the majority of companies can imagine and influence.

When a consumer chooses to travel to New York for example, his adventure starts long before the airport check-in or even before the travel package purchase. Lots of small stages previous to the official purchase moment are experimented, one good example is the frenetic searches on the internet related to the context of the trip: local information, temperature, equipment, local fun, restaurants and so on...

Many of those stages take place along with close people or family members, even if you are planning to travel alone. Those rituals of preparation are subject to a high word of a mouth impact and serve to build up the confidence and to provide the necessary support for the consumer to go on with his journey.

A good example of a ritualistic stage that shows up often on the beginning of the consumer journey in a large variety of service scenarios is what we call it "Preparation". Doesn't matter if you are planning to go on a business trip leisure trip, or to check yourself in a new Gym club this ritual is always there. It takes place sometimes long before the first interaction with the service provider, but it has such importance in the consumer choice as it helps to build up the interest on the journey that can end-up in your store.

Lot's of touch points connect to form the preparation rituals, but the Brand that is going to provide the service in the future is not physically included yet, at this point the consumer still does not exist in the Brand radar. This can make direct actions of usual channels as call centers or even the company website fall obsolete, as there is no "touch" yet.

Some brands already understood the importance of taking part in preparation rituals of its customers and established platforms to make that possible using mainly the social media. It is very important that those actions end-up being honest, relevant and not sales-directed.

In a recent intiative, Virgin Atlantic launched an iPhone App to help passengers that are afraid of flying. The App is a course that includes safety information and meditation classes. This allows the passenger to get in the mood of flying long before he steps into the airplane, this way he can be more relaxed and prepared to touch-and-feel Virgin amazing service offers.



How about your Brand? You company knows about and participate or can at least influence some of the preparation rituals involved in your business?

In a fast response spree you can say: Yes. Because in my Web Site I do provide information about how to "package for a leisure trip".

But think again. Remember: There is no connection at this point between you and your "future' customer. This implies that, unless your Web Site is on the first page of Google when i type :"How to package to New York City", or unless i am an old returning customer, your Brand influence will not touch me at this earlier stage.

It worth remembering that, despise Social Media is being of high importance to help extend the brand radar to the consumer earlier rituals, it do not represent the only way to create engagement in the Preparation stage. And that the consumer will note actions that are really RELEVANT to them at those earlier stages of engagement.


To really extend the brand radar until the preparation phase it is important to get deeply connected with the consumers and to be aware of the full journey that direct them to consume your services.

We will cover those topics in our next Service Design workshop that will take place at 23/11 in São Paulo.

Wrap-UP on 10a IHRSA Latin America

Thanks for all the people present at my speech in 10a IHRSA Latin America. I had so much fun speaking on service design and moderating the Branding Workshop with my dear friend and renowned architect Patricia Totaro.

At the event we had the opportunity do discuss some key themes that forms the basis of an innovation strategy. In between those themes: Understand the basis of the Pyramid, Digital Brands, Digital Communities, Service Design, Branding, Brasil economic perspectives (remarkable presentation by my friend, host of the television show Manhattan Connection and renown economist Ricardo Amorim) and other issues really relevant for the Wellness Entrepreneur.

I am twice satisfied. First for having the opportunity to coordinate the conference program along with IHRSA/ Fitness Brasil team. Second, because of the success that the Microsoft project "MyGym" had at it's launch on the same event. More info on this project you can find in a earlier post in this blog.

The Fitness sector occupies a bright spot in the wellness industry and definitely it needs to take-over this position, reinventing itself to move from being an attachment to being part of people's lives.

Service Design Case : "MyGym"

My Gym Service Design Case

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From: us To: you

This week we are proud to announce the change from the old slogan "Experience Design" to our brand new one: "Service Innovation".
This change was inspired by our recent discussions in events in which we spoke and presented our ideas, sales pitches and the Engine (www.enginegroup.co.uk) seminar that took place in London-UK last week and from which i just came back.
It is kinda simple to chunk down what Design Loyalty does, and that is : Service Design.

Problem is that, not only in Brazil but in the whole world, people get confused with the term "Design", often accepting it as a "way to do nice cute things". And that causes a contextual gap that ends up draining lots of effort in the part of the sales pitch we do not think is the most valuable one.

The "What" part of the sales pitch is the one we are suppose to defend Service Design inside the "What do we do" context. That's the worst context to do it, in our view we're rather to pitch the "service design clever way" of doing things in the "How we do it" part. That's when we have time and can get more deeply inside cases and examples.
The "What" phase is a "elevator speech", and don't allows the right amount of info to be shouted out.

So, what we do?
Service Design. But that's our job, our way of doing things, and it is completely about us.

The question that really matters is:
What you Brand/Business wins by work with us?
And that is Service Innovation.

Now, that's about you.

iCoffee: A perfect case of Experience Design

Nespresso is the premium coffee Brand division of Nestle. Despite the parenthood with the mother Brand, Nespresso is a totally independent Brand. This strategy is seriously taken by Nestle, which prevents customers to easily associate both Brands, and allows Nespresso to position itself as a new luxury (Masstige) Brand.

Nespresso is a perfect case of Experience Design.

In every interaction with the consumer the Brand creates a remarkable experience. This experience is orchestrated in all touch points and takes in deep consideration the customers rituals when drinking espresso coffees.

The Nespresso Brand is strategically positioned as a New Luxury or Masstige Brand. This way it holds a premium price while it keeps itself inside the trade-up wallet of the average consumer. Only brands that delivers real meaning can be positioned in the up wallet, as this means that consumers will be pleased to trade down and save in other commodities to keep buying these premium goods (that's why you should not aim to be a commodity in recession times).

The Nespresso Brand has deeply impacted the espresso machine market when it introduced a completely orchestration of services instead of simply selling the espresso machines. Following a business model very similar to the iPpd model, Nespresso has created an Experience Value Chain that empowered the Brand to sell superior technology machines for a price bellow the average espresso machine market price, concentrating most of it's revenues in the capsules of coffee.

This experience design strategy became even more powerful with the creation of the Nespresso Stores. The stores are full of incantation moments and storytelling strategies. To be at a Nespresso store It is always a nice trip around design and the premium Coffee world, and unlike Starbucks, the store is not targeting to position itself as a third place for people, instead, it is there to tell stories that convey elements of luxury that have the power to make the Brand desirable. These elements are:

1) Identity and personalization
The Nespresso Club makes you fell like you belong to a very exclusive club of people.

2) The value of scarcity.
Special seasonal blends of Coffees and special limited editions in accessories and machines.

3) The constant search for the aesthetical and technical perfection.
High Impact aesthetical and usability Design permeates all products and service interactions. The only drawback is the Nespresso web site experience that , in my view, does not delivery the same experience level of the other channels.

But what makes Nespresso a great case of Experience Design it is not only the experiential signals, but the capacity that the Brand has of keep itself as a market leader over time, while still holds a premium price on the capsules in comparison with the common coffee sachets other machines uses and also the ability to keep the Brand evolving and maintaining a great customer loyalty base. To perform that through the delivery of consistent great experiences is what makes Nespresso a great case of Experience Design.

This is what an Experience Design project is really about: Consistently enchanted customer + Brand differentiation = Loyalty customer base and revenue growth.

For those who didn't associate why that is similar to the iPpd business model: In an iPod touch of 229 usd you can load 10.000 usd on music. Take also in consideration that iTunes store is now the biggest music store in sales volume in the world.
It is easy to see that the core success of the iPod is not in the 229 usd gadget but in the experience value chain it creates.

The Black Smoke Cloud

I am really mesmerized with the amount of complex innovation frameworks that have been popping up now and then in books, blogs and speeches.
Some of them have bullets that goes from 1 to 10, others 1 to 36, but the fact is that if we put all together there would be like 700 bullets on a PowerPoint presentation (not counting the duplicates).
In my point of view all of these bullet points are only part of a huge black smoke cloud, like those ninja hiding clouds, strategically blowed just so companies don't have to get into the only real thing that keep them from growing creative thinking, which is: Their excessive focus on a culture of control.

Today there's a lot of Innovation talking, and also new innovation "guru's" are popping up everywhere.But as a matter of fact, how many companies do you know that are really open to drop the “control" mindset and implement real value + strong bold changes programs for innovation? And that includes hard to swallow strategies like give paid time to employees do their own stuffs.

There are some companies trying to fill this gap by asking their employees to do "creative home works".
Recently i was confronted with a strange, to say the least, case of endo-marketing, where HR was trying to convince employees to visit museums and parks in their weekends and free time. Their strategy, by their own words, was created for "opening the employees creative mind". (Maybe they’ve got this weird idea after a quick look on the book "A Whole new Mind" by Dan Pink)

How come an enterprise can achieve an Innovation mindset if investing in human resources (like paid time, in this case) is not even in the horizon? To the point they are asking employees to invest it themselves.
This was my question to the HR manager, and for that, here is the answer:
"We will always count on commitment from our employees and it is not a big deal to ask them to spend their free time in cultural activities. This will even make them some good".
Good…says who? And by the way who is "them" ?

Recently i was watching Daniel Pink's new speech on TED about his new upcoming book. In this book he presents a lot of scientific explanations in order to prove that “the carrot and the stick” way does not work for building up innovative cultures and collaboration.
His point of view is very simple. When rewarded with bonuses people tend to work more efficiently, but only in tasks that are analytical, and therefore needs lots of left brain resources. In other tasks that takes more cognitive and right brain processing, the traditional reward mechanism can even slow employees performance.

In his speech he also shows that in recent experiments a group that were under the promise to be rewarded scored much worse in their performance on “right brain tasks” than another group that were not under the same promise.

This happens because the excessive concern on delivery a great performance creates a funnel in the brain that doesn't allows the “Gestalt thinking” to kick on.

So, what now?

Now, Brands that wants to innovate... let me rephrase that... Brands that want to survive in the next years, will need to stop to intellectualize innovation and start to get the hands dirty on it. And by that I mean to re-design the critical and more polemic parts of their management model, trashing away some of the old school metrics, reward systems and management "best" practices.

Nobody wants to read about an intelligent "new and improved innovation model". What is really necessary now is to build a simple and humanistic model, based on a intelligent reward system that delivers benefits and real value to employees.

If your lower income employees cannot get to a deep understanding of your innovation strategy... guess what... your strategy is a failure.

Viktor Frankl in his book "Man’s search for meaning", concludes, after a strong and emotional narrative of the time he spent in nazi death camps, that the only thing that the human being really need to be happy is to engage in something bigger than himself.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in his book Flow presents statistics that shows how money is poorly, or even not, correlated with happiness.

In my opinion the rollout of innovation in corporations cannot be headed by the same people that, for years, were safe keepers of the management "best practices". And the reason for that is simple: There’s no way a "best practice" will ever generate an innovative concept.
The whole mindset of "best practice" is overwhelmed with the only thing that companies need to get rid off if they want to become innovative: An excessive focus on a culture of control.

Companies to really get on an innovation culture will need to go deeply in knowing it's employees and what make them tick and generate stories about their relationship with the Brand.
And based on this knowledge, there is need to re-design the reward system to rebuild it upon real value propositions


Damn right, It takes a lot of work. Are you ready?

Is UFC an Innovation?

I Think so and Harley Davidson agrees.

For those who are not familiarized with the term, UFC means: Ultimate Fighting Championship. It is the largest MMA (mixed martial arts) competition in the World today
I decided to cover the aspects of it in the blog inspired by the fact that today is UFC night. This is de 101 edition of UFC. Yes, it has been 101 competitions already since the Gracie Family, creators of the world famous Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, entered the UFC stage for the fist time. In that occasion they passed the message that Brazil had more to offer than beautifull womans and soccer players. Even though you may not agree with the violence involved in MMA competitions, no one can ignore the fact that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is being considered by jornalists as the biggest Brazilian worldwide cultural explosion since Bossa Nova.
There's no MMA fighter in the world that can, safely, enter the octogone (UFC's ring) without at least a basic preparation on what the world calls Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Brazil is a leader in the UFC rankings and actually holds two titles in different categories, which is really unusual in that competition.
It is also the only country to earn direct respect, what I mean by that is, a brazilian fighter gets certain amount of respect already just because of its nationality. This is one thing that we didn't had experimented in other sports than Soccer yet.
For those and other reasons it is at least interesting to take a look and decode some of the aspects that involves this world wide phenomenon.

First, leave your personal opinions on fights behind, and let's check three elements that makes UFC a "not to be questioned" Innovation.

1) Innovation sometimes are a scary thing.
UFC in the early days was something not to talk about. It reminded us of clandestine fights, that ones that happens in somebody backyards. Normal people avoided to talk about it at any costs. And the competition was only adopted by a few martial arts lovers.

2) Innovation is not about the object. It is about the people.
The UFC brand is way beyond the fight already. Today it represents a life style. People that are not directly engaged in fight activities choose deliberately to live the UFC life style. This can be seen in the growth of certain Brands that were born as UFC fighter gear providers, one good example is Ecko Unltd. Harley Davidson itself and Burger king had also joined the hero quest of UFC fight competition atmosphere.

3) Innovation is a category killer.
UFC has made Boxe looks like a pillow fight. A Boxe fight will take much longer than people are willing to pay attention to, this is in part because of the "safety rules" of the sport.
Boxe lost it's innovation timing long before. Today it is a "fading" sport and if they don't reinvent it quickly it will be restricted soon to multi-sports events like the Olympic games.
This is the result you get by practicing the "keep doing what works" mentality in any category. While the fight consumers perceptions was evolving Boxe was stucked with it's pillow gloves and big clumsy old-funny shorts.

The result is clear. Show a teenager a picture of Lyoto Machida or Demian Maia, both UFC fighters that cannot be framed in the common fighter stereotype which is "big guys with small brains", and at the same time show to the kid a picture of a Boxe fighter (you can use the posted bellow pictures if you like). And ask that kid a simple question: If you had to choose, which one would you prefer to be like?
The image of the Boxe fighter today is the same as it was 20 years ago. And this doesn't please the eyes anymore, doesn't matter if you are a boomer, X or Y generation.

How about you? Who you 'd rather to be like?

These guys:


Or those guys:



* Sorry if you are strongly against fight competitions, but just try to be neutral and give your opinion based on context and identity of both scenarios.

And why Harley Davidson choose jump in the UFC?
Harley has associated it's image to the UFC Brand in a very sharp and clever way. Some people asked me already: But this is too violent, can it represents danger to the Brand image? . And also: But Harley wants to be seen as violent?
The answer is no to both questions.

The UFC Brand triggers the Hero Archetype in one of it's more traditional forms: The Gladiator. The Gladiator is the mysterious hero who fights in a closed space, and cannot leave until his opponent is dead. He fights all his life to earn the ultimate prize which is his freedom.
In the UFC the same scenario takes place. Only after the fighter had engaged in a certain number of fights he earns the right to control his financial transactions and to choose better his next fights.
The octagon (UFC ring) is also called "The Cage". Any Harley Davidson lover knows that "cages" is the way the Brand refers to cars. So, people are stucked in cages (cars) and Harley is their way to find their freedom.
So...wrapping up.
In UFC: The fighter will fight for his life, inside a cage, after the ultimate prize which is his freedom.
On the real life: People fight their daily battles on cages (cars, offices...), and the prize should also be the Freedom. And freedom can be achieved when you ride a Harley Davidson.

This is a strong association example between two brands. They have different archetypes but they share core values. Great deal.

Or did you thought that Harley was just doing mass media strategies again? They don't need it. They are just making their Brand statement strong in consumers mind.

Well, UFC is an Innovation. It is the reinvention of the previously released by Boxe category:” Highly produced drama fights, to watch at home with friends and family in the weekend". It has all the Boxe drama, fighters debates, historical sad fighter life-stories to backup the drama and the Hero Gladiator archetype and etc. But it all comes in a very contextualized way and with a language that is in perfect pace with today's consumers lives.