Manhattan Marketing Maven

Unpacking Engagement

Engagement has become a term that means everything and nothing. Too often it’s used offensively, defensively or indiscriminately to thrust or parry arguments about strategy, technology, media or creative. 

Engagement is the desired human interaction that results from marketing activity. It’s a feeling, a thought or possibly an action that a person takes in anticipation of or in response to messaging or functionality. 

Engagement planning starts with the desired response in mind and then maps customer attitudes and behaviors to find relevant and appropriate inflection points to begin the conversation. Engagement planning doesn’t start with tactics or channels. It starts with an understanding of what real people are likely to feel, think or do in response to an artificial stimulus. In order to enter the conversation and frame up an initial message, marketers need to consider these five factors. 

Creature Cycles. We are creatures of habit. We do things in predictable ways. Standard behavior patterns include where we go, how we get there, what we expect, what we do and in what sequence we approach tasks. Most of us prioritize tasks and people in repeatable ways. 

Understanding internal drivers and external influences affecting target audiences allow us to find openings for marketing. The goal is to find ways to intersect the lives and life patterns of customers and prospects that synch up with what they do, want, need or expect. The first step in planning engagement is to figure out how to be relevant and useful. 

Standing. Openness to people and ideas is a function of familiarity and standing. If I know and respect you I’m much more open to you than if you are a complete stranger. Brands are sorted into discrete folders in our brains. You have to know how you are sorted and what standing you have to enter into the conversation. An athletic wear brand can probably speak credibly about exercise and wellness, less so about politics or cultural issues. 

Brands have less standing than friends, co-workers or family members. The level of credibility, awareness, interest and trust in a brand, basically how brands are sorted, determines the aperture you have for reaching target customers. 

Engagement planning has to begin with an assessment of your standing which might lead to the decision to borrow standing from those with better connections or connotations. (This is the origin of influencer and member-get-member marketing.) High awareness brands have more standing than invisibles or newbies. 

Standing defines the angle of attack. A complete stranger approaching customers using personal information or outsized claims prompts immediate revulsion and rejection. Getting good juicy gossip from a trusted friend is the opposite end of the spectrum. Plotting your standing will separate intrusive from invited messages. 

Posture. There are many ways to approach customers. Usually the approach is a function of the state of the relationship. In some cases a message delivered by a credible third party has more impact than a direct approach. In the case of brand loyalists, whispering insider or advanced information in their ears builds demand, satisfaction and loyalty faster. And for those actively shopping, eye-to-eye, direct offers can drive faster conversion. Posture affects the psychology of your positioning and shapes the tone, manner, language and attitude of creative. 

Timing.  Timing is everything. Texting a busy Mom at 7 am while she’s trying to get her kids up, dressed, fed and out the door is a non-starter. Brands need to understand the mindset and the mechanics of customers’ lives. As mobile becomes the ubiquitous on-the-go channel of choice, timing, utility and relevance become critical success factors. Marketers must get much more intimate with the routes and routines of target audiences. 

UXD. Any desired action must be fast, easy to do, intuitive and simple to understand. Account for distractions, fat fingers and multi-tasking. Messages must drive to simple desired actions. Labels on buttons and CTAs must be clear and telegraphic. Buttons have to be big and colored. Copy has to be scan-able and snack-able. Increase the font size. Don’t skimp on white space. Pressure test every sequence. Invest heavily in connecting all the data pipes on the back end. If you get everything else right but blow the user experience design, you lose the ballgame. 

Engagement is about genuine human connection. Channels, media, content and technology are facilitators. The ultimate measurement is a thought, a feeling or an action. 

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7 Ways to Sell Obamacare

The introduction of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) is a marketing case study in what not to do. 

Health exchanges are a new fundamentally different and untried way for consumers to approach healthcare, especially for those millions without it. Established insurance brands compete with lesser known brands and start-ups in a free-for-all retail arena that is driven primarily by monthly costs.   

Communications have to take a retail direct marketing approach rather than a wonky policy-making tone and manner. Governments and insurers need to become 24/7 retailers. And the websites ought to scale and work properly. 

This unique marketing opportunity is especially challenging because nobody really understands what Obamacare is or how it will work. And political voices on the left and the right are dedicated to keeping it that way. Surveys of healthy millennials, the most desirable and necessary customers, indicate many see no need to insure themselves. 

To compete in this marketplace, consider these seven tactics: 

Brand Identity Rules. If they’ve heard of you, you have a fighting chance. Awareness and preference are top priorities. Even well established insurers, used to selling through employers, will be below the radar. Establishing a clear brand voice and positioning is critical to retail success. We just might be on the cusp of a new round of spokespeople on the order and magnitude of Flo, The Gecko or the AFLAC duck. Though early efforts in several states seem to be very fluffy and short on details. Voice, tone, attitude and manner count. The classic insurance industry posture; we-know-what’s-best-for-you will not fly. 

Two-Way Conversations. Establishing a direct-to-consumer brand requires engaging your target customers in a meaningful conversation. Your best prospects don’t just buy a product; they buy into the company providing it. Aligning brand values and sentiments with best prospects is critical. Establishing a position, as a knowledgeable friend and adviser without preaching or scaring prospects matters. Giving consumers opportunities to ask and to tell will separate the winners from the also-rans. 

Name It. Keep it simple and intuitive.  Bundling plans with snappy, telegraphic names will assist consumers. A “Young Family Plan” instantly communicates targeting, intention and value. Anticipate likely consumer segments (e.g. singles, partners, new families, growing families) and construct affordable packages with fewer rather than more choices to resonate with millennial consumers. 

Talk Price. Millennials are unemployed, underemployed and strapped. Every thing they do is run through an affordability filter. The driving marketplace variables will be the what’s-in-it-for-me compared to the monthly price. Consumers will separate “must-have” from “nice-to-haves” then decide how the price will impact their monthly budgets.

Don’t be bashful about communicating price and value. Don’t hesitate to offer different payment schemes. Even though its mandatory, if the fine is cheaper than the fees, there is no incentive to buy. Smart players will sell-in very affordable plans and then up-sell over time.   

Be Present. Millennials are on the move and highly social. Presenting your brand in social and mobile media is table stakes. Understanding which devices and forums serve which marketing objectives is important. Insurers need the ability to target, segment and engage millennials in multiple channels at any time of the day or night. Nobody will fill out an application on a smartphone in the back of a cab. But they will fill out the form on a tablet or on Facebook while they are searching and researching the competition and consulting friends. 

Concentrate on Channels. Speak with one voice across channels. Your website, TV and radio spots or print ads, 800#, Facebook presence, e-mail and postal mail must look and feel similar. Leverage the inherent qualities of each channel for maximum customer engagement. Expect consumers to use multiple channels to discover, research and assess offerings before and after buying. 

Use Technology as a Utility. Make it easy to print out, email and share content. Don’t fear comparative shopping. Anticipate the conversations and frequently asked questions that will come up in the news media, in online communities, on blogs, in search or live chat and in-person between friends and family members. Develop content for those situations and deploy content and PR assets accordingly.  Think about ways to syndicate or seed branded content in places where your best prospects regularly go. 

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Crowdsourcing Software Reviews

Buying CRM software is a pain in the ass. Each suite starts with a different premise. Most software firms have a single core expertise but pretend to know everything or claim it’s easy to bolt on automation tools or ERP software. Rarely do the day-to-day users get a voice in the choice. 

Prospects confront a tsunami of techno-blab focused on features and functions, which rarely translates into a clear understanding of how this stuff will actually work to meet your practical business needs. And then there’s the money part. 

The software costs X. You must spend Y to install it. Then caught up Z for training.  Then there are costs for add-ons and upgrades. (This Total Cost of Ownership number often makes the high priced offer seem more affordable.) Usually, a team undertakes the search and makes the decision. A line executive or CFO type assesses strategic value. A CIO or IT guy looks under the hood. And a procurement or business affairs person negotiates the deal. 

Until recently, the only source of help were consulting firms who evaluate, rank and display the relative positions and merits of competing software vendors. The problem with this is three fold. In some cases the evaluators are not technicians but journalists who can be manipulated by vendors. The evaluations are an amalgam of undocumented opinions with no way to evaluate their validity, weight or bias. 

And the consultants are not independent like Consumer Reports. They sell the evaluations to vendors and to buyers. So there is a financial incentive not to slaughter anyone and a natural tendency to give everyone the equivalent of a “B.” Buyers are still left trying to figure out which one is the best. 

Now Matt Gorniak, and fellow software sales refugees, thinks they can crowdsource software reviews to yield better, more genuine, more democratic and more practical insights to help buyers. A belief in word-of-mouth advertising led them to create G2crowd.com, a customer ratings site for software featuring 2000 software products in 200 categories, with a name reminiscent of the designation for military intelligence (hopefully skipping the oxymoron). 

According to Matt, the average buyer asks, “How do I make a good decision among a set a complicated products with an endless array of claims?” His answer is to look at software the way you look at travel (TripAdvisor.com), restaurants (Zagat.com) or contractors (Judyslist.com) by relying on the wisdom of the crowd. Relying on multiple identified sources, you get unbiased software reviews that come at the products from a variety of perspectives. Reviews can be filtered by function, price and vendor. The stated goal is to fairly review software products away from the influence of vendor marketing. 

Reviewers are vetted by being forced to sign up/in with their LinkedIn ID. Supposedly the sheer mass of users and the diverse points of view will give buyers enough insight, direction and intelligence to make the right decision. Importing a B2C technique into the high-ticket B2B universe, G2Crowd.com aspires to be the Yelp.com of software and knock off Gartner, Forrester and their competitors. 

And while the freemium model sounds goofy, especially to someone like me who worked at SAP, its probably worth a try. G2 will try to make money by selling deeper, richer reviews and reports to more serious buyers. I’ll be watching to see what happens.

I Miss Jerry

I miss Jerry Lewis. Labor Day isn’t the same without him not only because he’s an incredible comic but also because he was the original social media marketer.  His 44 year run left us with four enduring lessons.

Create Own-able, Original Content. The schmaltz, the cheesiness, the kids in wheel chairs, the has-been performers singing long-forgotten big-band songs, the B rolls of guys in white coats holding test tubes, the drum rolls and the tote boards that conjure up the ghost of Ed McMahon, the lame local anchors and the tear-wrenching appeals all signal led Labor Day and MDA. Jerry consistently used original content to claim significant year-round mind space and to drive a singular and differentiated brand message.  There are thousands of charities and thousands of celebrity do-gooders, but there was only one Jerry and his kids.

Make it Personal. We all genuinely knew Jerry. He’d been a part of our lives since the 1950s. There was a great national catharsis each year as the telethon kicks off that focuses on Jerry. It was partly a morbid health-watch to see which diseases and which side effects of treatments Jerry himself will display each year.

But even before he created a Facebook page or a Twitter account Jerry was engaging us by leveraging his comedy antics and by singing those signature songs – “Smile”, “What the World Needs Now” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Jerry understood, maybe better than anyone that people buy people. He used emotion, humor, shtick, flattery and frank talk to connect with different audience segments.

Persistent Positioning. Jerry and MDA staked out the same position and for 44 years they delivered on it and raised more than $1.4 billion to fight muscular diseases. MDA owned Labor Day. There was nothing better and nothing more reliable and more comforting than watching Jerry, on The Love Network.  The predictable and familiar parade of firefighters, convenience store owners, letter carriers, realtors, oil companies, Harley Davidson executives and other random sponsors presenting those over-sized checks at random moments during the Labor Day weekend were signature moments.  Jerry knew that you position yourself, plant your flag and stick to it. Fads come and go but audiences crave the familiar.

Network Your Networks. Jerry and MDA put together an incredibly potent series of partnerships and alliances that consistently deliver results. The lesson is -- connect the dots. Use your networks to extend your reach, frequency and engagement with your customer base. Don’t be bashful about mashing things together or cross-pollinating ideas among your allies.

Happy Labor Day.  

 

Banish Banner Ads!

Online display advertising – banners – came to life, eighteen years ago, as a direct lift from print onto the Web. Ads adjacent to content would, so the theory goes, perform much like magazine and newspaper ads had for a century. 

In the early years, marketers experimented with banners that rotated, sung, lit up, buzzed and otherwise intruded. After significant consumer backlash, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) led publishers to create standard sizes, technical specs and placements. Since then display ads have become an automatic and routine element in media plans. Today buying and selling these commodities is automated much like program stock trading. 

The problem is that the basic premise was wrong. Display ads do NOT perform like print ads. Trust and recall levels are significantly higher for print ads. Almost from the beginning consumers looked past them. “Banner blindness” was diagnosed early on but marketers eager to go digital ignored the disease and its symptoms. When clients balked at paltry lead generation, site traffic or sales results, publishers touted banners for awareness building. This is the reigning conventional wisdom. 

Last year, according to ComScore, 5.3 trillion display ads were served in the US. Four hundred and forty five advertisers each paid for and delivered more than a billion banner ads in 2012. The average Internet user was exposed to 1707 of them each month, 2094 if you’re between 25 and 34 years old, even though between 31-54 percent of display ads can’t actually be seen because of technical, browser settings or rendering issues. 

In the 1.7 seconds that consumers glance past ads, only 1 percent of these ads drew a click. And just 8 percent of all Internet users account for 85% of all clicks. On mobile devices more than 50% of clicks are accidental. According to Solve Media, you’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad. 

The implication is, according to Susan Vranica writing in the June 11^th edition of the Wall Street Journal, “that billions of marketing dollars are being poured down a digital drain.” In an age of emergent content marketing, its time to banish banners in favor of media units that are seen, interact and engage with customers and prospects.

Run Better Social Media Contests

Contests are a staple of social media. They generate leads, opt-ins, sharing, comments and virility. The conventional wisdom is that simple contests spawn cost efficient customer engagement that makes people happy. 

Consumers are comfortable with the give-to-win proposition. They will give up bits of personal information, post or tweet, upload a photo or a comment, vote, take a survey or refer somebody in return for a chance to win. Few calculate the odds. 

Many contests and giveaways are designed for lead generation. Recently Unbounce released a study, based on 3 million visitors to 100 websites using their platform between March 15 and April 15^th, which promises to improve contest performance and lead conversion. For example, contests with prizes of $500 or more generated 700% more subscribers than landing pages without contests. 

Here’s their POV. 

Set an end date. People don’t respond to open ended contests because they figure they have plenty of time to do it later. By specifying a start and an end date, you build-in urgency. Consumers understand that the clock is ticking. 

Use the word “Giveaway.” “Promotion” sounds like it might or might not be a sale. “Sweepstakes” feels too chancy. “Giveaway” resulted in 27% more conversions than sweepstakes and 50% more than promotion because it connotes a freebie. 

Like Gating Sucks. This trick has been played out. Widgets that asked for email addresses drove 80% more subscriptions than the request to “like” a page. The like gate has become a signal for consumers to bug out. 

Bottom Right, Brand Names and Photos Win. The contest sign up box in the bottom right corner of the page drew 125% more subscriptions than bottom left. Similarly when the promotion box had a picture, almost any picture, conversion increased by 22 percent. When a brand name is attached to the giveaway details conversions saw a 28% spike. 

We have trained consumers where to look and what to look for. Don’t swim against this tide. 

Signal Ease of Entry. Site visitors are lazy. They want all the goodies but don’t want to work for it. When you direct them to “enter in seconds” versus a big honking “enter” button, opt-ins increased by 33 percent. Tell them how easy it is. 

Optimizing giveaways and contests is a matter of tweaking and re-tweaking. These simple tips suggest, as Michael Aagaad suggests, “value plus relevance equals more conversions.” This is true for contest rules and prizing strategy as well as the subtleties of constructing effective landing pages.

New Visual Engagement Insights

A picture’s worth a thousand words as regular users of Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and Pinterest know all too well. A new visual study from Curalate offers unusual insights into which images resonate and engage us best. 

Curalate, a visual marketing and analytics firm, looked at 500,000 images on Pinterest across 30 visual dimensions. You can get their infographic here. The goal was to identify the visual elements that drove greater re-pins.   

According to CEO Apu Gupta humans interacted with pictures before words because sight is our most developed sense. He speculated, “We initially started painting pictures on walls which were more emotional than text and are a minimal commitment.” Pictures, he says, offer so much context that minimal copy is needed to explain them or to orient the viewer. 

Here’s a quick summary of the findings: 

• Red/orange images get 2X the re-pins of blue images
• Multi-colors are re-pinned 3.23X more than pictures with just 1 dominant color
• Medium lit images get 20X re-pins over darker images
• Images with less than 30% whitespace are re-pinned the most
• Images that are 50% saturated get 10X more re-pins
• Vertical images with an aspect ratio of 2.3-4.5 are re-pinned 60X more often
• Pictures with less than 10% background get 2-4X more re-pins
• Pictures with smooth textures get re-pinned 17X more than rough textures
• Brand images without faces get 23% more re-pins than those with faces 

To some extent, these findings are an insight into our reptilian brains. They are also a reflection of how we have been visually trained by media since childhood. The lack of interest in seeing people is counterintuitive especially when you consider that the underlying psychology revealed in this study suggests that warm, clear, proportional, colorful and familiar images are the things that draw us in, capture our imaginations and motivate us to share. This is a big step toward a visual formula for increased engagement.

Apps are the Future of DTC

We are at the dawn of a mobile, personal health revolution. Beginning soon, technology will play a much bigger role in all aspects of healthcare and will have a heightened role and urgency for marketers selling drugs, health brands, devices, therapies and services. Apps will become a critical marketing and promotion tool.  

Apps hold out the possibility of fulfilling marketers persistent fantasy  -- that consumers will record daily, personal activity and that this data will fuel on-going relationship marketing programs. This belief is especially strong among pharmaceutical marketers who dream of patient diaries and yearn for patient data as a door opener for the patient-doctor conversation, widely acknowledged to be the single biggest hurdle in the DTC arena. Apps also offer technology for overcoming the two biggest consumer adherence and conversion stumbling blocks – what’s in it for me (WiiFM) and do it for me (DiFM). 

Depending on how you count, there are as many as 97,000 existing mHealth apps ranging from broad-based health and wellness tools to single brand, single action apps. Three out of four are paid apps. Forty-three percent are aimed at healthcare professionals. The majority of those are either dosing calculators or reference materials. 

In real life, less than 1000 of these apps have had more than 500 downloads. And nobody knows much about actual usage. On average, Americans have 41 apps on their smartphones and actually use eight or 1 out of every 5 apps they download.

Most, apps haven’t caught on because they don’t provide consumers with enough value to prompt use. But soon they will. 

New technologies like Fitbit, Nike+ and Up by Jawbone passively collect data using wearable devices that can be downloaded and distributed. These tools play to a general consumer desire to have technology do things for them by running in the background. Walgreens app with its scan-to-refill feature is gaining traction because it saves time and is fun to use. Walgreens, who have 10 apps in-market, reports that app users generate 6 million visits a week to its online sites and four times the sales of store-only customers. 

There are dozens of apps for chronic disease states like diabetes, asthma and depression that record incidents and data points or track adherence to dosing.  The Pew Internet Project reported in January 2013, that 69 percent of Americans track some kind of health data and one in five of them use some form of technology. All apps live or die by providing either utility or diversion. 

In the not too distant future an array of sensor-like apps to monitor vital signs and measure specific symptoms will hit the market. The uChek Urine Analyzer app, in development in India by Biosense Technologies helps patients read up to 10 biomarkers using reagent strips and the smartphone’s camera. You dip the strip in urine, photograph it and in moments, by comparing the image with a stored database, get a read-out of glucose, urobilinogen, pH, ketone, blood protein, bilirubin, nitrite, leukocyte and specific gravity. It’s a medical lab in your pocket. 

Similarly Brian Cunningham, and his team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed an iPhone-based biosensor that uses the phone’s camera as a spectrometer to detect viruses, bacteria, toxins, proteins and even allergens in food. The app is as accurate as a $50,000 laboratory spectrophotometer. 

The government not consumers will govern the speed of branded app development. Like social media, the FDA will waffle, stifle and hide for a while trying to decide if apps are medical devices or something else. And like social media, consumers will quickly adopt useful apps and the FDA, and pharmaceutical firms chronically fearful of the FDA, will play catch up. 

In the next phase of development apps will interact with each other and marketers will optimize apps by monitoring intra-app usage. Amazon and Adotomi have already introduced mobile app tracking systems to help developers and marketers understand exactly how consumers use apps by tracking in-app actions, keystrokes and content pathways.  This will streamline apps, give brands and designers a clear picture of the user experience and focus attention on the most engaging and useful functionalities. 

In a couple of years, an app on your phone will pick up a signal, from your body’s vital signs monitor. Comparing it with a stored EMR or a real-time connection to your doctor’s database will instantly process the signal. The app will cue the doctor, access your insurance coverage and the formulary, ping a pharmacy, alert you about a developing issue and probably suggest a course of action. 

Apps will give us 24/7 medical monitoring with the potential to better understand how people respond to conditions and the opportunity for heath care pros and brands to be in regular conversation with people about their particular heath issues. Apps marry data flows and body mechanics to Marcus Welby, MD. 

But this techno-magic won’t happen automatically. Marketers need to do much more ethnographic research about patients, better understand the practical behaviors and day-to-day attitudes of people suffering from diseases and think carefully about the interplay of 3 or more devices with each other and the real world in order to develop apps that real people will use. 

Brands have to think harder about how to message and persuade further downstream by developing better, more granular insights into patient journeys and patient mindsets. The conversation has to be re-oriented to where people are physically, in time and in treatment. And brands have to make their case one-to-one at each stage. We are on the cusp of great potential breakthroughs but we are down a quart in our understanding of people as patients and how they think about, act, feel and care for their bodies

Remarketing & Retargeting Revisited

Retargeting, also called remarketing, begins by dropping a cookie on site visitors. This enables marketers to follow them as they search, do social networking or flit from site to site. A person coming to your site can then be discretely followed by ads reflecting the content they viewed or reflecting their psycho-demographic profile. 

This tactic is particularly powerful because 90 percent of retail site visits don’t yield a sale. But consumers exposed to remarketing messages are 70 percent more likely to convert than those who are not exposed. And consumers who convert after retargeting generally spend 50 percent more than those who convert initially. So, marketers, who take a second or a third bite of the apple, by using retargeting, succeed better. And CPMs are much lower than banner advertising while the yield can be dramatic, as high as a 37% conversion rate. 

This has to be done carefully and with discretion and considered timing. Since many consumers find this very creepy and quickly abandon the brand retargeting them. If this feels like the Tom Cruise movie, AI, you are getting the point. 

Marketers can follow prospects as they search Bing or Google, socialize in networks or as they surf the Web. The mechanics of retargeting are done through third party networks. And there are a bunch of them including Google’s Display Network, the Facebook Exchange, AdMeld, Pubmatic and Rubicon. 

Similarly there are a bunch of emerging demand side platforms (DSPs) to manage this process. The leaders include AdRoll, AppNexus, Brandscreen, Criteo, DataXu, MediaMath, Nanigans, Kenshoo, Optimal, RocketFuel, Tellapart, TheTradeDesk, Xasis and X+1. 

The newest entrant in the DSP fray is Pinpoint, from Blue Fountain Media. Pinpoint claims to offer retargeting based on search history, demographics, geography and recency (within 24 hours), which, according to Gabe Shaoolian, is a proxy for consumer intent. 

“Pinpoint captures expressed interest and intent. It enables a brand to target a 40-year old upscale Mom on Long Island who wants a specific ring setting, with a specific gemstone, “ Gabe opines. “Because Pinpoint tracks online behavior and marries it to aggregated data, marketers get much more precision in terms of reaching interested consumers, identifying consumer intent and capitalizing on timing. It’s a retargeting trifecta.” 

Pinpoint clams to be “a new frontier in advertising.” It was beta tested with Oppenheimer Funds who found “better than expected results” that compared favorably to other DSP platforms they tried.  Shaoolian is positioning this tool as a “big data play for medium and small marketers” than will provide “real-time bidding at the best prices.” 

There is no question that retargeting is effective. There is evidence that third party networks can provide the right inventory and that various tools can plan, buy, optimize and report on retargeting buys. What’s yet to be determined is who will survive the coming shakeout and what will be the emergent best practices.

3 UX Imperatives from David Bouley

David Bouley is arguably one of the greatest American chefs. He is also a god when it comes to designing a user experience. Dining at his eponymous restaurant in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan is not only a sensation for the pallet, it’s a lesson in consciously designing an experience to surprise and delight customers. 

Here’s what I learned: 

Target the Takeaway. Everything begins with what you want the customer to see, feel and take away. You can’t get where you’re going unless you have a very clear picture of where you want to end up. In Bouley’s case, he wants you to walk away feeling amazing. He will fill your mouth with tastes and sensations you haven’t had before. He’ll surround you with warmth, comfort and a sense of understated luxury that leaves you with the feeling that you are welcomed and belong in his restaurant. He’ll focus on you and your guests by providing a platform to share and converse. And he’ll send you into the night happy, satisfied and with provisions for breakfast. Bouley has built a loyal customer base by starting with the business objective in mind. 

Focus on Senses and Cadences. Most experiences have a beginning, a middle and an end. By carefully studying these, Bouley guides what you see, hear, smell, feel and taste. Nothing is left to chance. The entry way smells of warm apples. The room is warm and lit sensuously with a roaring winter fire. The chairs are extremely comfortable and the linens are crisp but not overly starched. The menu reflects seasonal tastes and locally available fresh seasonal ingredients. The people who greet you are formal but friendly. Every element is orchestrated to give you a feeling of belonging and to heighten your enjoyment in the moment. 

You are taken on a very subtle guided tour that engages your ability to process multiple inputs simultaneously. The food comes out at a pace that feels natural. You never wait too little or too long for any course. The staff watches closely to see when you pause, when you’re done and when you need more water, bread or wine.

He leverages and improvises on consumer expectations. You expect a waiter; you get a team of them. You expect bread; you get a bread cart and a doting baker. You expect a drink, an appetizer, an entree and a dessert; you get that plus an array of unexpected tastes and mini-courses and conversation and explanations from the maître d’. 

God is in the Details.  Consumers are influenced by initial impressions, comfortable design and intuitive navigation. The only way to deliver these experiences is to develop a laser-like focus on the details. Bouley thinks about ambient light, the feel of the napkins, the weight of the fish forks, the shape of the water and wine glasses and the mother-of-pearl box that the bill is presented in. The staff mentions some of these things and asks occasionally about them.  

You need to focus on where people look, what they expect to do and how we’ve trained them to scroll, to click or to download. Where you place the CTAs, how big they are, the color, the labels all make a disproportionate difference in perception and response.  You need to get feedback as you design experiences; some from pixel tracking or metrics software, other from talking to your customers and testing your work with eye-tracking and guided task testing.