The Experience Strategy Podcast: Getting to know Dave and Aransas

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Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast, the only podcast focused on the challenges of creating and executing an experience strategy.

In this debut episode, your hosts, Aransas Savas and Dave Norton welcome you to their new podcast. Aransas is a coach and Experience Designer who has worked with leading consumer brands for the last 20 years. Dave is an Experience Strategist and the founder of the Insights Consultancy, Stone Mantle and author. Listen in to learn a little more about Dave and Aransas and the ways this show is going to tap into smart consumers, small business owners and big business experts to understand what makes an impactful experience strategy. 

[00:00:00] Aransas: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Aransas Savas, and I'm Dave Norton. So my friend Dave here is an experienced strategist, the founder of Stone Mantel, an insights consultancy, and author. You'll hear more about him in a second. I'm a coach and an Experience Designer who has worked with leading consumer-facing brands to create meaningful customer experiences for the last 20 years or so. We are your hosts of the Experience Strategy Podcast.

We are really excited to welcome you to our very first episode. So Dave, since this is our first episode, I think it might be helpful for folks to get to know us a little better and to find out what the Experience Strategy Podcast is all about. I say we start with this story of how we met. I found you through hearing Joe Pine, who is a part of your company, Stone Mantel talking at a conference.

And honestly, I was so completely [00:01:00] wowed by his frameworks and his thinking and the simplicity and clarity with which he explained them. that it got me hungry to know more about Stone Mantel and all of you. I came over and found you guys at a trade booth and I was like, tell me everything.

Total fan girl and pretty quickly joined your Collaborative with my company. At the time I was working with Weight Watchers (WW) and we joined the Collaborative, which I'll let you explain what The Collaborative is. But, I was so thrilled by this opportunity. You were helping me to go deep into experience research on behalf of the brand I was working with so that we could learn in tandem with other industries simultaneously bringing so much richness and efficiency to the process.

What do you remember about our [00:02:00] meeting that day?

Dave: [00:02:01] I remember meeting you for the first time at that trade booth. It was so fun to connect and Joe said you've gotta meet my friend Aransas Savas and we got started right away. Once you joined the collaborative, I think I did a really good job of slaughtering your first name there for the first couple of meetings in the program, right?

I think I called you called me ANSYS or something like that.

Aransas: [00:02:32] I want to rebrand myself one day.

Dave: [00:02:38] I can't remember what I was doing and you were very kind to say it's Aransas like Kansas. And so we really got to know each other through the collaborative program that Stone Mantel runs. What we do - there's kind of two sides to the Stone Mantel Company. [00:03:00] There's our consulting side where we help companies create meaningful experiences and then there is, are collaboratives, which are year-long programs with companies that are really trying to think forward about the future of Experience Strategy. They work alongside of each other and we go through an innovation process based on the Stone Mantel Method. We're always trying to look 18 months to two years out in terms of what companies need to be focused on for experiences. It's kind of a combination of research and working sessions and developing concepts for the companies that are involved. And so it was a lot of fun to have you involved. You were involved in the first year of our new program on Meaningful Experiences [00:04:00] and just brought so much to the table. All of the other companies that were apart just really enjoyed having Aransas Savas as a part of the program.

Tell me a little bit about how you got interested in Experience.

Aransas: [00:04:18] I started out in this world through theater. I got both my Bachelor's and my Master's in theater and it is a discipline of storytelling. It’s the understanding of those story arcs and an understanding of human behavior that got me really curious about what that looked like in the industry. I had been working with WW and I'm really passionate about the transformative aspect of their product and service. So when I was invited to help influence that, it was sort of a dream come true to [00:05:00] get underneath it and understand what it takes to create truly meaningful experiences for customers in order to meet their needs, but also to drive the business simultaneously. And so for me, it just really always been about fusing those, those two drivers. How do we help businesses be successful at the business of serving customers and meeting their needs and creating deep relationships all along? It's really one of those things where we all, I think had a moment at some point in high school or college where we're like, uh, what do I want to be when I grew up?

I mean, maybe there are the people who are like, I want to be a tennis player and that's all I want. I was like, I don't know. I like people. What is that job? So for me [00:06:00] I was on this quest to understand where I could work in the world that would let me be curious and excited about humans and human behavior and experience turned out to just be the perfect fusion of all of that.

Tell me about you though. I want to know how you got interested in CX, but I want to know more about you too. Like, where do you live? What do you do? What are you passionate about?

Dave: [00:06:20] Well, sure, absolutely. My wife and I are our empty-nesters. We recently moved from Colorado to Utah to be closer to our kids. Most of whom are graduating from college.

Aransas: [00:06:36] How many kids do you have, Dave?

Dave: [00:06:38] I have four biological and one that is adopted. We adopted him when he was 18, so he can't really adopt him it's a great family. Three of them are married and two of them are not, yet. And they're all just kind of growing up. I love to bike [00:07:00] and I'm sitting here looking out my window at all these bike trails and just cannot wait to get out on the trails maybe today.

I love soccer and I love thinking about consumer behavior and thinking about how people experience things. I kind of got into this in a kind of a backward way. I was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota and working full-time for a design firm where one of our biggest clients was Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, and I used some design thinking techniques that were in the early days, called participatory design research techniques to help Royal Caribbean think about how to change the way that they [00:08:00] created brochures and the way that they thought about interacting with the agents back in the nineties. You actually booked a cruise through a travel agent. It's hard to remember that, but that’s what was going on at the time. And they came to me with this project.

They wanted us to think about how to redesign their private island, CoCoCay. And about that time, Joe pine and Jim Gilmore came out with their book, The Experience Economy and it was 19 98, 19 99. I happened to be in Minnesota. Joe was also in Minnesota. I reached out to him and asked him if he could help me figure out a way to approach this redesign of CocoCay.

[00:09:00] And so we worked together. I began to realize almost immediately that when you think about Experiences, you're thinking about the context in which people make decisions. And that had always fascinated me. My Ph.D. work was in rhetoric. I love the idea of persuasion and how the fact that you could put together an experience that would be so persuasive to people, was just fascinating.

And that's kinda where I got started from and have always, since that day in 1999, when I was working with Joe, been focused on experience strategy.

Aransas: [00:09:47] Wow. What are some of the big highlights of your career so far?

Dave: [00:09:52] Well, it kind of started with a bang. I mean, redesigning a private island is a pretty cool [00:10:00] thing, right? To kind of do that from the very beginning. Royal Caribbean was a client of ours for many years. First at Yamamoto Mas. And then when I started my own company in 2005, just focused on experience research. A lot of the things that you see happening on board cruise ships, we were a part of in some way shape or form. Everything from the daily planner that you get when you get onboard a cruise, all the way to the onboard activities, the retail experience, and so forth.

So that was a great way to kind of get started. I started my own company in 2005, and moved to Colorado in 2002. One of the first clients that we had was when I started my own company, was a [00:11:00] deluxe, the check company. People used to write checks way back when, and they were trying to think of themselves as a customer experience company for their clients, which were banks. Lots of small banks and large banks as well.

Aransas: [00:11:22] And so then when they were saying that, were they thinking customer service?

Dave: [00:11:27] they wanted to help their clients be more focused on experiences and they actually hired a number of different companies to come in and work with them to build a program. And I was kind of the last guy that got hired. We were in charge of research.

How do you research experiences? How do you turn the research into experiences? And that [00:12:00] program was very successful for Deluxe.

They ran it for a good 10 years. It really helped change the way their clients think about the company and they named it the Collaborative, the Deluxe class. Yeah, that's how I kind of began. After they got done doing collaboratives, they said we were done with it. And I said, Hmm, I think I'd like to do this, not just in the banking industry, but for all categories.

And so, that's how we got started with Collaboratives. Some of the other big things that we have done, we work with a lot of big companies to help them think through Experience Strategy. Our clients include some of the best brands out there and if I started naming them, I would probably get in trouble.

You can go to the website for that [00:13:00]. One of the most exciting things that ever happened was right during the big banking crisis of 2008, I happened to be doing ethnographic research. My team was doing ethnographic research for a company that's now been bought.

And we happened to be in Washington State when Washington mutual started going down. We happened to be in New York when wall street was going crazy. It was one thing after another, and we watched consumer behavior shift in terms of what they thought about trust, because we were literally there, as they were [00:14:00] re-evaluating what types of experiences they wanted from banking. It was one of the most fascinating studies I've ever done.

We've worked on the Smithsonian. We worked alongside Disney to help the Smithsonian think through their non-exhibit space experiences. We've worked on a number of projects in consumer goods and in travel and healthcare. We do a lot of work in healthcare these days around patient experience and patient metrics.

So it's been quite the journey. It's been a lot of fun

Aransas: [00:14:38] Very cool. All the things you've touched over the years and all the customers that you've impacted as a result of working on so many projects with so many different organizations, it's really, really striking Dave. I think when you talk about the banking crisis, those are the big moments in history that transformed how we [00:15:00] interact with brands, and certainly, we are in another one right now. It is 2021. We have been through arguably one of the most, and impactful cultural forces in all of history. You know we will always remember 2020, and to me, it really is the perfect time to start to talk about experience strategy in a broader, more meaningful way. To think about the way that it impacts big organizations. How is Amazon going to navigate this? How will LinkedIn and the big leaders of the industry, how will they navigate this? But also how will smaller organizations respond to this period?

Dave: [00:15:52] Absolutely. There's not a single restaurant that hasn't been affected and had to rethink its channel strategy.

[00:16:00] There are so many companies right now that are trying to think what's what does a real journey for our customers looks like? Just so much that's going on. And unfortunately, I think a lot of companies confuse the measurement of an experience with having a strategy for the experience. And that's one of the key things that we want to cover.

When you think about Experience Strategy, you're thinking about - I have a limited amount of money that I can spend to engage the customer. To get the job done for the customer, to really impact my relationship with the customer. How do I spend that money? What strategic moves can I make that are going to be scalable that are going to be [00:17:00] consistent that is going to bring surprise and delight and enjoyment to my customers that are going to bring my light, my brand to life?

It's there's so much to talk about around Experience Strategy.

Aransas: [00:17:17] Me too, I think I listened to every customer experience podcast on the market and there are a lot of them and I've been so struck by how little emphasis there is on Strategy, to your point.

The other thing is that I feel like so many of them are targeted at CX professionals who work in big global organizations. I really can't think of a single one that directly brings in the customer's experience of this and lets the customer's voice lead the conversation. It's one of the things I'm really excited to do here is to [00:18:00] create some strategic insight and expose the inner workings of these big organizations so that we can tap into this at organizations of all sizes, but also so that we can let the customers continue to guide our thinking around strategy. So that's really one of my big hopes here is that organizations big and small get to benefit from this thinking, but also that we keep learning collectively together.

What customers do value? What they see as valuable and an experience to help guide emerging strategy, both for big and small organizations. I think we're going to do it in some interesting ways too. You know, one of the things that I think will be really interesting is to interview customers about their experiences.

I want to bring people in and have them tell us what great experiences look [00:19:00] like and what frankly awful experiences look like. And I want you to help us understand the strategies that were driving some of those resource constraints.

How are those influencing decisions? How are tech implications driving our strategies, and hopefully collectively we can all get a lot smarter as a result of taking a more inclusive look at these big questions. I also want to hear you grade these organizations, Dave. I think it'd be really cool if one of the effects of this podcast is that we get a scorecard.

What organizations are doing well and which ones, you know, could use a little help with their experience strategies. So as you think about grading experiences, What goes into it?

[00:20:00] Dave: [00:20:00] Well, we are going to grade experiences. This is a lot of armchair backseat kind of thinking, right.

We are going to be listening to people describe Experience and then we're going to try to grade a company strategy based on it, or the lack thereof, because I think oftentimes companies don't really have an experience strategy. We're going to be fairly simple about it, just like in your English class in college.

Right. I used to teach English a number of years ago. We'll have an, a, B, C, D E F scale. And it'll be based on a heuristic.

Dave: [00:20:47] It's going to be a set of principles that we're going to be looking for. Of course, the number one principle around experience [00:21:00] strategy, I think is time well spent. Did the customer feel like it was time well spent or time will saved, is also a good. We're going to be looking for that. We're going to be looking for time well spent. We're going to be thinking about some of the things that they're doing with their channels, what they're doing with their measurement, how they think about their target audience, and their use of different techniques.

Do they surprise and delight? Do they stage things? There are a number of different factors and of course, we won't take all of those factors into consideration every single time. We'll try to hone in on some of the things that maybe they should be doing, or they are doing really well. And just with the few customers that we've already talked to, I think you're going to find some really, really [00:22:00] interesting stories and perspectives on what is Experienced Strategy?

Aransas: [00:22:07] I have no doubt. We're going to learn a ton. I'm also really excited to bring in the experts. So whenever we cover industries, we're going to try to get an inside scoop from other pros to, you know, dish on what's working and what's broken.

What’s influencing these customer experiences. Lots of ways to get into this and our big hope here is it is time well spent for you. We're excited to spend this time with you learning and growing and discovering, and hopefully collectively uncover ways to create deeper loyalty, deeper relationships, deeper meaning, and purpose, and the time that businesses and [00:23:00] customers invest in one another.

We expect the learn a lot as we go. So thank you for learning along with us and for heading out on this grand adventure with us.