Don’t lose sight of creating memories in rush for efficiency

One Virgin Australia passenger wrote a poem to the airline to express their new-found love of the “middle seat” as a result of a brand-led initiative to engage with its customers.

Libby Minogue, chief marketing officer Virgin Australia, Dave Hartmann, strategy partner at Special Group.

In 1977 the founder of the Atari video game – Nolan Bushnell – opened a new restaurant chain called Chuck E Cheese. For those of you that have never been – think Pizza Hut meets Disneyland with a giant animatronic dancing rat. For any kid or kidult, it was a mind explosion of all sorts of amazing.

The insight behind the restaurant was simple: for a child the most frustrating part of the traditional restaurant experience was having to sit patiently waiting for your food to come. But at Chuck E Cheese, they created a literal theme park of games that children (and adults) were encouraged to go play while they waited.

In turn, they magically transformed the worst part of dinner into the best.

Chances are that if you went as a child, you will still find yourself today sat in restaurants, waiting for your meal, secretly wishing you could just get up and go play with a giant rat.

We all know that an impressionable and unforgettable brand experience like that is a mighty thing.

After all, in marketing we do a lot of great talking, but little talks as loudly as the experience itself. It’s the great point of impression that, in reality, advertising is just the opening act for.

But the truth is so many of today’s brand experiences come and go somewhat forgettably.

And in many respects they are deliberately designed to do just that.

Given that we’re a society that is time poor and anxiety high, the common mantra in experience design has become “just make it easy and make it quick”. A focus on low-touch, seamless and quick experiences. Experiences that take as little of the customer’s time and energy as possible.

We self check-in at airports and self check-out at supermarkets. We order our meal through a QR code at our table and we shop with a click.

Efficiency is the gold standard we tend to design for.

Now undoubtedly a smooth and painless experience is a good thing. But the point is that it only goes so far in realising the true power that a great brand experience can bring. Because in an effort to iron out the bumps, we are at risk of also ironing out the memorable. As we strive to make things as smooth and quick as possible, we can neglect the opportunities for moments of fun and the remarkable.

Our work on Virgin Australia is perhaps an interesting counterpoint to this tension.

We deliberately look for opportunities to wake up moments in the travel experience, and make an impression. To get people actually talking and feeling. Not just designing to minimise frustration, but designing to maximise love. Perhaps most notable has been our introduction of The Middle Seat Lottery – an innovation that turned the lesser desired seat on the plane into the most exciting, essentially transforming those seats into a lottery ticket to all sorts of wonderful prizes. For anyone in a middle seat it certainly punctuates the journey with something to remember.

We even had one passenger email in a poem they wrote about their new-found love of the middle seat after flying with Virgin Australia. That was a first!

The challenges of the airline industry mean that so often we are just hoping to avoid negative conversation, rather than sticking our neck out and aiming for a positive one.

And this is an example of what can happen when we set ourselves with a new expectation, designing for joy points, not just removing pain points.

So in short, effortless may be the foundation of great experience design, but the danger is in letting it eclipse opportunities for the magical and impressionable. If time is the great currency in life then rather than always just asking for less of it, find opportunities to warrant more of it.

Chuck E Cheese could have just tackled their issue of impatient kids by simply bringing their food out quicker. But instead they made the wait so much better.

And arguably the latter solution is just as helpful and a million times more memorable. So make room for your brand to positively interrupt.

Tell your story, showcase your purpose and bring your personality. Like a dancing animatronic rat and a middle seat lottery, do your brand justice and make it memorable.

Dave Hartmann is strategy partner at Special Group. Libby Minogue is chief marketing officer at Virgin Australia.