Collaborative Member Feature

Michael Stanton

Clayton Homes

Director of CX for Retail

What does experience strategy mean to you? 

To me, Experience Strategy is intuitive. It lines up with my experience as a consumer, and it has explanatory power for the behaviors of others. It shows us not only why people buy what they buy, but even deeper, why people seek out experiences to become who they desire to be, and how a company can position itself to help people better themselves. I think old school strategies just don’t jive in today’s world. More and more people will no longer accept a company that is seeking to simply make a profit to enhance the wellbeing of shareholders, because that will conflict with their own wellbeing in the long run. It won’t be the result of any single decision the company makes, but if they consistently prioritize the shareholders needs over the customer’s needs, they will degrade the trust of the consumer. However, when a company focuses on Experience Strategy for the wellbeing of its customers and employees, it ends up being even more profitable. It’s like working an orchard too hard. If you’re focused on extracting as much fruit as possible year after year at the expense of the health of the ecosystem, it will eventually die out. But if you focus on the health of the system, fruit abounds. 

How did the Meaningful Experience Collaborative Help you grow as a professional? As a team?

I think the combined exposure to new ways of thinking coupled with seeing my peers grappling these new things alongside me really helped to build my confidence. I’ve always known that asking good, hard questions is more important than finding simple answers. The Collaborative crystalized that for me. It forced us all to tackle the hard questions: Why do we engage with customers the way we do? How can our company create an experience that responds to consumer needs? What would have to change in our company structure to make that happen? We are often afraid to tackle these and other hard questions because we don’t see what the business leader report will look like on the other side of the question. So, we shrink back to easier questions that we can manage. That was not an option in the Collaborative. No one, from the Stone Mantel team to the other peers engaged in the research, would allow us to settle for more of the same. We were there to innovate and get experiences to their next evolution in our respective industries.  

As a team, it has really pushed us to unify around a set of frameworks, making the customer our focus and rethinking how and why we have certain internal boundaries that are working against what our customers really want from us. The research that we are cocreating as part of The Collaborative aligns well with our company’s mission, vision, and desire to innovate. It gives us a dream to strive toward. It is helping us actively pull things out of the abstract and map out how we can make experience strategy come alive in our organization.  

What has been the impact on your organization or way of working? 

I think it has drastically redefined our upper limits in experience strategy and the potential outcomes for our organization and our customers. Seeing everything through these fresh perspectives has gotten us all excited as we hear other folks outside our industry get excited our potential. It has also helped me see how these frameworks perform in many other industries. Seeing multiple concepts emerge from the same foundational research builds my confidence the tools. In fact, we are actively training more people in our organization on these concepts because of the impact we’ve seen in our own team.

What’s one thing you learned or implemented as a result?

It is hard to pin it down to one thing! These concepts have permeated a variety of projects. The major impact has been on the way we do consumer and customer research. We are asking different questions. Probing for deeper ways to connect and add value. But it has also changed the way in which we build and modify our offerings. Frameworks around Jobs to be Done and Modes have really helped our teams think differently and build new products, offerings, and innovations that have some truly disruptive potential. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the broadening of my own perspective because of the collaborative. Competition among companies has been completely redefined for me. Yes, there are still going to be companies that “get the job done” better for their customers and therefore “win” market share. However, the repositioning of the role of a company in a consumer’s life has so radically altered my perspective that I am excited by the prospect of company’s partnering up to solve complex problems together for the betterment of everyone, and I’ve seen it happen in the collaborative. If crossing traditional boundaries to solve complex problems and really help people excites you, then you’re probably missing out on the greatest opportunity to fulfill your passion by not joining in on The Collaborative.