Cindy Gallop’s Six Principles For Creating Experiences That Connect
The inimitable Cindy Gallop returned to Australia this week to give a high-energy, 15-minute presentation at Adobe Symposium on the six key principles for creating experiences that connect.
According to the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, these principles also apply to successful relationships in life as much as business. Without further ado, here they are (in her own words):
i. Communication through demonstration
You’ve just met me. Imagine I walked onto the stage and I said to you, “Hi, I’m Cindy Gallop and I’m screamingly hysterically funny, trust me.” I reckon you’d be sitting there going, “Well we’ll be the judge of that thank you very much.”
If I walk out onto stage and tell a joke and you laugh, you might think, “Well that’s pretty funny.”
That’s communication through demonstration. Don’t say it. Be it and do it.
ii. Blue-sky it
When you design your experiences, don’t design them with what you think is possible today. Go further. Project out five, 10, 15 years into the future. Go magical, go fantastical, create experiences of your dreams because, trust me, the technology exists to make that happen today.
A very good starting point for blue-sky is, “What would our consumer love to have happen?” “What would we love to have happen?”
I have an example of this myself. I do a lot of talking about negotiating and reinventing ways of doing business. People said to me a lot, “I wish I could have Cindy in my pocket, on my shoulder.” But how can I scale myself?
Last year, R/GA scaled me and turned me into a chatbot (Cindybot) for equal pay day in 2017. Search Ask CindyGallop on Facebook and I will talk you through how to negotiate your next pay rise.
By the way, the amount to ask for is always the highest amount you can say out loud without actually laughing out loud.
The future is not advertising units, the future is advertising product. The future is creating things of utility and value that surprises and delights consumers in the way that they are delivered.
iii. Trust
I’m going to give you the guaranteed formula for business success.
You seek out, hire and retain the very best talent in the marketplace, and then tell that talent what you want them to achieve in your business, and then step right right back. You enable that talent to achieve that goal in any way they see fit, and you demonstrate every day how much you value that talent and enable that talent to share in the profit that they have helped to create.
It’s that simple! And no one ever does it because it requires a high trust working environment. You need to build trust into your team and into the processes.
In 2013, the Super Bowl was held in New Orleans and during the Super Bowl there was a massive power outage and everything went dark for 34 minutes. And during that power outage, Oreo Cookies instantly tweeted an ad that said, “you can still dunk in the dark.”
That tweet got 10,000 retweets within the first hour, many thousands more after, was hugely newsworthy and hugely PR’d and did amazing things for Oreo’s business.
The reason that happened was that they got the key decision makers from the client side and from the agency side and they put them in a war room and said, “We trust you. You know what the brand stands for, you know what our values are and you know our tone of voice. If there’s anything topical that happens during the super bowl, you get all over that, create something and put it out immediately, you can sign it off yourselves in the war room. We trust you.”
That is the power of trust when it comes to designing amazing experiences.
iv. Create experiences based on shared values
I believe the future of business is when brands and businesses come together with their audiences (consumers, analysts, staff) on the basis of values that you all share and when you’re enabled to collectively and collaboratively co-act on those values. When you walk the talk together, you can make things happen in the real world that will benefit consumers, benefit society and benefit the brand and business.
If you’re not sure what your values are, they are not your mission statement. They are about you looking into yourself (as a person or a brand) and asking yourself what do I stand for, what am I all about? And then walking that talk, communication through demonstration.
v. Humanise data
Data is not statistics and numbers. Data is people.
When you think about humanising data collection, you can think about it like this:
In life, you come across people you like and you think to yourself, “I like this person, we could be friends” or “we could work well together” or “I’d like to date this person.”
And because you like that person, you want to find out more about them. In order to do that, you begin opening up to them yourself. You begin sharing information about you with this person to encourage them to share information about themselves with you.
You build an atmosphere of mutual trust, respect, liking, affection until the point that you’ve brought that person to you and they are thinking, “I want you to know me.”
That is how brands and businesses should be humanising the collection of data. Share yourself and be transparent with customers about the benefit to them of the relationship of mutual trust, respect and liking until your consumers get to the point where they think, “I want you to know me” because they see the benefit to them.
vi. Humanise
At the moment, ‘diversity’ is a buzzword in every single industry, quite rightly.
I’m not a fan of the word diversity. And the reason is it’s not about diversity; it’s about humanity. All we’re talking about is reflecting the world as it really is, and that’s what great successful experiences do.
If you want to change the world through digital experiences, your experiences have to reflect the world as it really is and what that means is that your team has to reflect the world as it really is.
It is absolutely crucial that you design, create and implement through a diverse lens. Because the absolute foundation stone of every single experience that connects, that bonds and builds a successful relationship is empathy.
And you cannot be empathetic unless you reflect the world as it really is. And your team reflects the world as it really is. So, that what you are doing is creating empathic, fundamentally collective experiences.
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