The Milkshake Experience. Part 1

I get this feeling a lot: you think about this one really neat concept that you always knew about but never really questioned it — and then, out of blue, you come to realise how it actually bears significant implications for the grand scheme of things and it’s changed the way you look at the world around you for good. Know what I mean?

I like to believe it happens to everybody; the real trick is about noticing it.

People excel at learning. But not so much at being mindful. Yet today, I want to place one such really neat concept in a clear line of sight.

I was meeting with a bunch of mates the other day and passed by a cinema on our way to KFC. (The entire construct of socialising over food and the industry built around it is worth a separate discussion.) If you happen to live in a big-ish town or city, most cinemas would likely have similar projector specs, same source resolution, likely multiple auditoria with different seat count and bigger/smaller screens, and the ever-overrated 3D. Those options — they are the base expectations. But what would make you opt not to go to the nearest cinema?

Cheaper showings elsewhere perhaps, but the cinemas can control the prices — besides, even an unpopular venue could decide against driving prices down despite it increasing attendance purely to prevent too noticeable a drop in the average ticket prices in the area and thus depressing the revenues for everyone (but especially themselves).

So if it isn’t the price, then what is it?

Classic thinking of “price-quality-speed: pick two” doesn’t really apply to the cinemas.They offer a bizarre experiential product that in its turn is fueled by other, more conventional products (being the rights to show the films themselves and supplementary goods). Cinemas don’t seem to focus any particular market segment — and people come to cinema for a variety of reasons little to do with their demographics: get the first glimpse at a new film, socialise, kill time, or do something inexplicable like watch the same film again. So if it isn’t that, then perhaps cinemas’ business is built around offer differentiation strategy.

Whilst “going to cinema” is an experience, the cinema itself is still a very tangible system: full of vendors, amenities, with distinct interior layout, with concrete functions per each employee and each room. The “why” of people choosing one cinema over the other has to lie somewhere within this system — or rather at some touch points between the customer journey and the cinema’s systems.

The aforementioned baseline expectations are such cinema system elements that don’t really touch the customer — they are at the backstage, akin to pieces of machinery that keeps the system running — but then anything that diverges from the norm, anything different becomes a touch point: pre-ordering snacks; dealing with a clogged bathroom; having colour-blind screenings; not enjoying enough legroom; regular visitor discount; rude janitor, and so on and so forth. Some result in positive, some in negative experiences.

Oddly enough, there’s a lesson from UX practices that finds itself right at home in this discussion. In a tech firm, UX designers would inherently be part of the product team who would be part of the operations. But in other industries, the product owners would actually fall underneath the marketing team that develops the product and service strategy.

It may seem odd looking for hints to our marketing mix conundrum from the domain of software development. Let alone that user experience, although very much an everyday subject of interest, does still bear a bit of a “buzzwordiness” when used by marketers and not UX designers. Technical terms turning into an investor pitch buzzwords seems like a sort of a marketer’s rendition of the sorites paradox: much like with a heap of sand, becoming a buzzword is matter of both perception and utility (you wouldn’t measure diamond dust in heaps do you?).

What I’m saying is that we needn’t concern ourselves with appropriateness and buzzworthiness of the framework when trying to describe the underlying systems.

There isn’t really anything wrong with the term itself: that’s just how the collective body of consumers chose to deal with any idea (by creating memes and heuristics and generalisations). But what this perspective is missing out on is that, firstly, the pitches do prevaricate but for a good reason — UX does matter; secondly, UX on its own, as any other buzzword or, indeed, word, doesn’t just exist in a vacuum on their lonesome (until they lose all meaning in the public eye) but, rather, it is conceived inductively: a specific concepts atop a general concept atop abstract concepts etc.

Much like all bodies of knowledge, really.

Meaning if the specificities of UX logic can be applied to our case, then the general principles would as well. So what’s the greater abstraction category that UX falls under? Well, the user is a customer and although the UX doesn’t concern itself too much with brand strategies and whilst it does have some platform/technology-specific aspects, it isn’t much of a leap of logic to call it a subfield of experiential marketing and customer experience management (a much rarer acronymized term, too!). The irony of epistemology is present as ever: the less tangible field of CX is much better defined than the more measurable UX. A company wants better CX to drive sales — it’s a trivial and, indeed, intuitive idea, but let’s try to dissect some of its moving parts.

And so, the lesson from the tech world here, is that for a product to be proper, the people whose job is to think of the end-customer’s experience should be integral to the product’s development.

This issue I’ve come to notice very often indeed: the concept of customer experience divorced from the product design. This is suboptimal.

Why?

Because you don’t sell products or services — you sell packages, little systems of different elements that materialise the experience that the consumer paid for. To put it laconically:

Long story short, making the milkshake tastier didn’t affect the sales because people didn’t buy it for the taste. In the eye of the consumer, the “job-to-be-done” for a milkshake was akin to a banana or pack of candies — to make the long commutes by car feel less tiresome. People would buy a milkshake over a bagel or banana as it was easier to use in a car (less messy, fits in a cupholder). So the solution to increase sales was actually to make the milkshakes more viscous (increasing the time of consumption) and moving the dispensers outside the stores to let people avoid the drive-through queues (increasing availability). It worked.

It’s a really profound idea. And it’s also some very solid and very elegant economics: there’s no manipulating, there are no behavioural assumptions — just good old individuals as rational actors who make the best decision based on their utility function and available information.

The idea of jobs-to-be-done is powerful. But the notion of consumers establishing a certain function or job for the product as the primary reason for its demand despite the function in question potentially not being the focus or a consideration in the product design at all? That’s even mightier.

My thesis here is that some of those product design elements (knowingly or not) inform our buying decisions. This story really left an impression on me, so that I like to call this “job-to-be-done”, this “experience-sought”, as the milkshake experience of a product.

But this sentiment is also commonly downplayed, I find, by people stating that we describe the customer jobs as part of the value proposition vision all the same and that it’s but a different perspective. And whilst this milkshake think is, indeed, partly a heuristics for us to think on our feet quicker, it’s also more than that. Standard business model approaches focus on defining the consumer jobs based on demographics and segments first. The more modern approach suggests grouping consumers by the emotional context surrounding the buying decisions (the “what my-ideal-self-that-I-aim-to-be would do” analysis). Those two philosophies are totally legit, but the milkshake can still compliment our thinking, as it focuses not on the consumer’s economic or psychological portraits, but rather the on the systemic gaps in their behaviours — e.g., if it’s 8 AM in a suburb, somebody’s gonna have long commute to work because that’s why we have suburbs; if people commute to work, somebody’s gonna have breakfast in their car, because some people do breakfast and all conditions converge on at least some people having in during the ride.

These jobs-to-be-done are somewhat static, they emerge because of other systems and yet they fit in perfectly into our customers’ flows. And performing any job is a process, meaning that it is much more convenient for us as marketers and product owners to think of the interaction between the consumers and product as inherently experiential.

Much like with the milkshakes in the study, it was not about the designing the right milkshake for the right customer, but the right milkshake experience.

Every product has its own milkshake experience. The issue is whether or not it coincides with what the product owners envisioned it to be.

And whether or not we are ready in earnest to accept that looking at the same problem from a different frame can indeed offer a novel solution.

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