The New Consumer Experience: Create Your Own Ideal Environment

We’re currently mobilizing a collaborative innovation project here at BIF targeting the ‘consumer experience’. As we lay the groundwork for model testing in Rhode Island, I’m thinking how psyched I am that [finally] we’re finding ourselves with an alternative to the frenzied mass-media, mass-buying, super, mega-consumer experience of the 90s.

From ‘being spaces’ to pop-up retail stores, the how and where we buy goods and services, and what kind of experience we have doing it, is going to radically change over the next few years.

“There is a genuine opportunity [to offer] something truly new to consumers, who are not only looking for entertainment, but also for uniqueness, discovery, trying out, hanging out, empathy, and even transformation.” March, 2006 trendwatching report

If you head over to trendwatching.com you’ll see some great photos of the new consumer experience. Having read the report, I felt inspired to create my own ideal experience:

Being Space: TwoRooms [targets home-based workers with kids and supplies office and WiFi for me and child-care for the little ones]

Service Offering: Cleanicum [This is a German launderette/lounge, except in my version, they fold the clothes too.]

Product Offering: Rotating Pop-up stores. Once a month I want Banana Republic to come to me. [Check out the J.Crew Holiday Haberdasher as example.] I want my hair salon to come to me. And on Saturday nights, I want Dommelsch; a free pop-up concert of local artists.

Right now, BIF is recruiting collaborators to develop a network of Rhode Island retail outlets that would serve as a platform to explore and test innovative customer experience models. The platform would enable customer experience sensing, tracking, and measurement to serve as a baseline for testing customer experience innovation.

What’s your ideal customer experience?