Marina Candi

Design in the experience economy:using emotional design for service innovation

This chapter explores the relationship between emotional design and customer experience. It begins with an introduction to the concept of emotional design, comprising behavioral, visceral, and reflective elements. Next, the nature of service experiences is examined, leading to a framework that classifies services according to their functional and experiential positions. Understanding customer goals allows this framework to be used to design customer experiences, in terms of the journey that customers take when consuming a service. The chapter then discusses the cognitive traits associated with designers and argues that they are well suited to understanding the customer journey and designing the prerequisites for the desired experience. Two different approaches to understanding and acting on customer requirements are explored – user centered and design driven.

Setting the stage for service experience: design strategies for functional services

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify service design strategies to improve outcome-oriented services by enhancing consumers’ emotional experience, while overcoming customer variability. Design/methodology/approach: An abductive, multiple-case study involves 12 service firms from diverse online and offline service sectors. Findings: Overall, six service design strategies represent two overarching themes: customer empowerment can involve design for typical customers, visibility, and community building, while customer accommodation can involve design for personas, invisibility, and relationship building. Using these strategies helps set the stage for a service to offer an emotional experience. Research limitations/implications: The study offers a first step toward combining investigations of service experience and user experience. Further research can strengthen these links. Practical implications: The six design strategies described using examples from case research offer managerial recommendations. In particular, these strategies can help service managers address the customer-induced variability inherent in services. Originality/value: Extant studies of experience staging have focused on particular sectors such as hospitality and leisure; this study contributes by investigating outcome-focused services and identifying strategies to create unique experiences that offset variability. It also represents a rare effort to combine research from service management and interaction design, shedding light on the link between service experience and user experience.

Leveraging social network sites for new product launch

Purpose – The ability to make use of social network sites (SNSs) to promote new products and facilitate positive word of mouth around new product launch (NPL) presents an important opportunity. However, the mechanisms and motivations of SNS users are not well understood and businesses frequently fail to realize these opportunities. This paper examines some of the forces that motivate people to spend time on SNS sites and how these motivations are related with people’s propensity to engage in behaviours that can be beneficial for NPL.

Social Strategy to Gain Knowledge for Innovation: Social Strategy to Gain Knowledge for Innovation

Taking the knowledge-based view of the firm as its starting point, and acknowledging that knowledge can lie outside the firm, this research extends our understanding of how the growing social media trend can contribute to open innovation. We specifically focus on SMEs, which tend to be resource constrained and might benefit particularly from leveraging social media platforms. We bring forward the notion that people flock to social media because they are motivated by a desire for social interaction. Indeed, our findings suggest that SMEs that put effort into connecting customers on social media—which we refer to as having a social strategy—are likely to reap both customers’ involvement in innovation on social media and new knowledge of value for innovation. Examining differences between social media platforms used primarily for personal purposes and those used primarily for professional purposes, we find that a social strategy is more effective in the first category than the second. This likely reflects differences in the social identities that people adopt on these two types of social media platforms.

B2B negotiation tactics in creative sectors

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the negotiation tactics used in business-to-business (B2B) negotiations in creative sectors and to shed light on some of the characteristics of creative sectors that might drive these behaviors. Design/methodology/approach This is a multiple-case study involving interviews with 18 creative sector negotiators engaged in B2B negotiations. Findings The findings suggest that negotiators in B2B firms in creative sectors use a variety of negotiation tactics to reach agreement, but that there are some differences compared with other sectors. One group of tactics, not represented in existing taxonomies, is identified and termed closure-seeking tactics, referring to tactics intended to speed up the negotiation process and reach agreement as quickly as possible. The reasons for creative sector negotiators’ choice of closure-seeking tactics might stem from their desire to expedite the start of new projects to enable them to fulfill their creative drive. Research limitations/implications In addition to the identification of group of tactics observed in creative sectors, but not anticipated by existing research, the findings indicate that negotiators in creative sectors seem to lack interest in, and expertise for, negotiating and might be driven more by the desire to get on with the creative process than by concerns over monetary gains when negotiating. This could reflect unique characteristics of creative sectors and the people who work in these sectors. Practical implications This work offers new insights and understanding about tactics used in B2B negotiations in creative sectors. These findings have important implications for both practitioners in creative sectors, who might be too eager to reach closure quickly, and practitioners negotiating with firms in creative sectors, who need to understand the unique characteristics of these firms. Originality/value The originality of this work lies in its consideration of tactics used in B2B negotiations in the under-studied context of creative sectors and investigation of the reasons that drive the choice of tactics.

Revisiting service quality through the lens of experience-centric services

The purpose of this research is to revisit prevailing notions of service quality by developing and testing a model of service quality for experience-centric services. By problematizing the service quality literature, a model is developed to capture impacts of outcome-achievement, instrumental performance and expressive performance on customer loyalty. A multi-group structural equation model is tested to establish the moderating effect of perceived service character—utilitarian or hedonic. Outcome-achievement mediates the direct relationships between instrumental and expressive performance, respectively, and loyalty; the strength of these relationships is moderated by perceived service character. Emotional design to improve the experience is effective provided the expected outcome is achieved. However, for services that customers perceive as experience-centric, the outcome may be somewhat ambiguously defined and expressive performance is valued more highly than instrumental performance. Understanding customers’ perception of a service—whether customers seek value related to outcomes or emotions—is crucial when selecting appropriate measures of service quality and performance. Creating a good experience is generally beneficial, but it must be designed according to the character of the service in question. The research presents empirical evidence on how service experience contributes to customer loyalty by testing a model of service quality that is suited to experience-centric services. Furthermore, it identifies the importance of understanding service character when designing and managing services.

The influence of experiential augmentation on product evaluation

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of experiential augmentation on product evaluation by consumers. An important distinction is made between product-related experiential augmentation and experiential augmentation of the environment. Furthermore, the research examines how brand familiarity moderates the effect of experiential augmentation.,In two experiments (N = 210 and N = 70), both product-related and environmental experiential augmentation were varied. Participants tasted and evaluated a new coffee product from either a well-known or a fictitious brand.,The findings of the first experiment indicate that product-related experiential augmentation contributes positively to product evaluation for both an unfamiliar and a familiar brand. Experiential augmentation of the environment influences product evaluation negatively, but only in the absence of product-related experiential augmentation. The second experiment tests some possible explanations for this negative effect and shows that it occurs only in the case of a familiar brand.,The findings offer implications for marketing managers seeking to positively influence consumer product evaluations through experiential augmentation. First, marketing managers are advised to make a distinction between product-related experiential augmentation and experiential augmentation of the evaluation environment, and, second, they should take brand familiarity into account when employing experiential augmentation of the environment.,This research contributes to the literature by showing that product-related experiential augmentation and experiential augmentation of the environment differ in the impact they have on product evaluation and providing insight into the relationship between brand familiarity and experiential augmentation.

Articulating the service concept in professional service firms

The purpose of this paper is to propose a solution to the challenges of professional service firms (PSF), which are referred to as cat herding, opaque quality and lack of process standardization. These result from misalignment in the mental pictures that managers, employees and customers have of the service. The study demonstrates how the process of articulating a shared service concept reduces these challenges.,A narrative methodology is used to analyze the perspectives of old management, new management and employees during organizational change in a PSF – a website design company growing to offer full-service branding. Group narratives are constructed using longitudinal data gathered through interviews and fieldwork, in order to compare the misaligned mental pictures and show the benefits of articulating the service concept.,Professional employees view growth and change as threats to their culture and practice, particularly when new management seeks to standardize processes. These threats are revealed to stem from misinterpretations caused by miscommunication of intentions and lack of participation in decision making. Articulating a shared service concept helps to align understanding and return the firm to equilibrium.,The narrative methodology helps unpack conflicting perspectives, but is open to claims of subjectivity and misrepresentation. To ensure fairness and trustworthiness, informants were invited to review and approve the narratives.,The study contributes propositions related to the value of articulating a shared service concept as a means of minimizing the challenges of PSFs.