Stone Mantel Experience Strategy Blog

Dave Norton Dave Norton

The Experience Strategy Podcast: The Power of Omni-Channel Experience Strategies

Welcome to this episode of The Experience Strategy Podcast! Aransas and Dave are joined today by tech executive Liz Grausam, who shares her personal experience consolidating her finances. Managing personal finances has become an epic chore for many consumers. Big banks, burdened by outdated technology, aren’t making it easier for consumers to choose them in an increasingly competitive market. In this episode we look at the cost of tech debt on the customer experience, and ways businesses can use omni-channel experience strategies to create lasting loyalty.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

The Experience Strategy Podcast: Experience Pioneers

In this episode, Aransas and Dave are joined by the experience strategy pioneers, Lou Carbone, Joe Pine, and Bernd Schmitt to take us back to the birth of Experience Strategy, Design and Marketing. In this episode we dig into the cultural and business forces that drove the experience revolution, explore how experience strategy has transformed business development, product design, and marketing, and discover what these pioneers predict is on the horizon.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

The Experience Strategy Podcast: A Spotlight on Spotify

Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast! Today we are shining a spotlight on Spotify. Spotify has completely transformed how we listen to music forever. Launched in 2008, Spotify has grown to have over 356 millions users and includes a free or premium membership to access exclusive features of music listening, offline access, and ad free listening experiences. Spotify has found a way to connect with consumers on a deep level of emotional response by noticing our likes and dislikes in music and even offering new suggestions for you to discover. Your hosts Aransas and Dave welcome guest Margaret Callcott to talk about her own personal experience using Spotify for herself and her family. Margaret holds a PhD in advertising and consumer behavior from The University of Texas and has a long career in TV and digital content development. Tune into this episode as we speak with Margaret about her user insights and understanding how Spotify creates meaningful experiences with consumers.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

The Experience Strategy Podcast: Getting to know Dave and Aransas

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.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

Beyond Productivity Hacks Part 1

High performing families, couples and individuals tend to run their lives as a system of systems, to create space to have more energy to focus on personal wholeness, fulfillment, and wellbeing. This is a key insight from the first round of ethnographic research that kicked off the Digital Health Collaborative’s 2020/2021 annual research. The focus was on how family's, couples, and individuals of varied backgrounds, ages, and means live their lives. The first round put the spotlight on highly functioning households. One thing that stood out is that these high performers were much more likely to have created systems to manage day-to-day tasks with less effort and friction, to make their lives more enjoyable, rewarding and less frustrating. As illustrated below, these high performers manage health and wellbeing as both a system in itself, and the outcome of their many other life systems.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

Top Motivators when working from home

As more companies are gearing up to have employees return to the office, we asked people as part of our April 2021 research on Meaningful Motivation what keeps them motivated when working from home. Flexibility and being around family more are important, but the top two motivators are taking walks and listening to music.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

2020 Events are driving big changes

We just launched our February MX Monitor where we will dive deeper into virtual visits across industries, but we found it interesting in January that over half of people are planning to make some big changes in 2021 because of the events of 2020. Most were not surprising, but 62% of those that are getting a new car in 2021 said their decision was influenced by the events of 2020. Maybe there are a lot of family road trips coming in 2021?

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

What’s Your Brand Vibe

I was driving down Main Street in Midway, Utah recently. The town name doesn’t describe just how special and quaint Midway is. Residents don’t refer to Midway as a town. Rather they call it a hamlet.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

Empowering or Powerless

By Mary Putman. I am honored to have gotten to write this empowering or powerless article for Quirks with my wonderful colleagues Tom Donnelly, PhD, Dave Norton and Christophe Carington. It gives a nice overview of the The Digital Healthcare Collaborative and a peek at our research on stupid, smart and genius technology. It is very timely as we start our next round of co-creation research. I'm so proud of our forward thinking members that continue to push the envelope on using digital to improve patient and health outcomes!

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Mary Putman Mary Putman

Two Key Elements of Meaningful Experiences

Every month we look at the elements of meaningful experiences as we study how companies can create experiences that strengthen people and the areas of their life as they reflect on them over time. For companies, meaningful experiences give them permission to be connected with their customers at a deeper level, know more about them, and get their jobs done in a differentiated way that creates advocates. Positivity in experiences most often comes from empowered employees and is a refection of company culture.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

7 Minutes to Transform a Humdrum Customer Experience into a Meaningful One

One year ago, my wife and I met up at a restaurant with friends who had just completed a backpacking trip along a stretch of the Camino de Santiago—a historically significant, 500-mile medieval pilgrimage route through the mountains of France and Spain. As soon as we were seated at the table, our friends jumped into telling us about a particularly poignant moment of their trip.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

Reflections from Our Panel on Meaningful Experiences Moving Forward

There is no doubt that 2020 is a defining moment. Well, really a series of defining moments, but it will be remembered as a moment in time that changed the brands we admire and use, the experiences we prioritize, and how we choose to use our time moving forward. In the Meaningful Experiences Collaborative, we met last week to discuss our summer research and create frameworks around meaningful motivation, a new family dynamic, meaningful experience technology, and health and wellness. We finished our two days with a panel on what will make experiences meaningful now and moving forward.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

Stupid, Dumb, Smart and Genius Technology in Healthcare Intellus Webinar

In February 2020, the Digital Healthcare Collaborative met for its quarterly meeting to review research and discuss our charter. Our focus this year is on the impact of intelligent solutions on patient expectations. Consumerism in healthcare cannot be understood today without a focus on smart tools. It just can’t be. And so the members of the 2019/20 Collaborative spent the last year delving into consumer attitudes about smart tools and healthcare.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

Outcomes: What Every Healthcare Company Brings to Consumerism Already

In February 2020, the Digital Healthcare Collaborative met for its quarterly meeting to review research and discuss our charter. Our focus this year is on the impact of intelligent solutions on patient expectations. Consumerism in healthcare cannot be understood today without a focus on smart tools. It just can’t be. And so the members of the 2019/20 Collaborative spent the last year delving into consumer attitudes about smart tools and healthcare.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

Are Meaningful Experiences the Antidote for Anxiety?

In 2019/20, Stone Mantel launched the Meaningful Experience Collaborative. Building off of the success of the Digital Consumer Collaborative program which ran for seven years, Stone Mantel launched the MX Collaborative to address a key business challenge companies were facing: how to take customer experience to the next level.

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

The Joy Of Endings And Beginnings

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

From Sinking Product to $1B Gem

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Dave Norton Dave Norton

Innovation Case Study: Designing Housing for the Customer’s Jobs to Be Done

What kinds of features do urban dwellers really want for housing?

Space? Privacy? Nature? Parking? Views? Restaurants?

Danish Architect Bjarke Ingels tackles that question with every housing project.

And with each project’s locale, come different needs and opportunities.

Take, for example, 8 House in Copenhagen designed by his firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

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