I recently watched an early episode of Mad Men, the award winning series about one of New York’s most prestigious ad agencies at the beginning of the 1960s, in which the creative team sit down in executive Don Draper’s office, light up cigarettes, pour a drink, and start thinking about the advertising pitch for a financial client.
The client, Liberty Financial Capital, is “looking for a new kind of promotion, some kind of irresistible fireworks that brings people to the bank, even if it is just to visit”. They are thinking about toasters and blenders to lure in who they perceive to be their customer: women.
Advertising guru Don quickly reframes the issue. “Jack [the client] keeps talking about escalating the toaster wars, to lure women in, which is silly if you think about it… most women aren’t in charge of the banking.”
“They visit the bank,” notes one of the other creatives, Paul.
“They do,” agrees Don. “All we do… is try, and get the girls in… families… you know what? Men need their own accounts. Beyond the family.”
The team react enthusiastically. “I can see that,” says the account manager. “Discretion. Discretionary.”
“Statements send to the office,” chips in Paul. He pauses. “Liberty Capital… Private Account.”
Don looks thoughtful. “No,” he says. “Liberty Capital… Executive Account.”
Service Designers of the 60s?
Far from the creative team sitting and thinking about how to pitch an existing product or service, they actually identify a new customer need and service solution for their client, all within 90 seconds, no flip chart or even notepad in sight. The Mad Men advertising gurus were the service designers and innovators of the 1960s, it seems.
If we fast forward to the first decade of the 21st Century, we can see many companies continually bringing new products and services “to the market”. Many of these are designed internally, in a similar way as in the Mad Men clip: a creative team convenes, brainstorms some ideas, and identifies solutions that are then signed off, implemented and rolled out. Focus groups test the product or service that has been created. Advertising and marketing tells customers the benefits.
In short, this is service innovation, minus any design process.
What service designers do is provide a much more structured, robust approach to reach the same aim, understanding unspoken customer needs through ethnographic techniques, looking for insights around the current customer experience, visualising the experience and touchpoints within the experience, looking at how experiences can be rethought and re-conceptualised, and then designing solutions that can be prototyped and tested before they are implemented and rolled out.
It takes longer that 90 seconds, but investing in getting the thinking right upfront is often significantly less expensive than paying to rectify problems later on. An increasing number of long established retailers are failing to innovate around their services and keep up with an increasingly digital age, and are going into administration and bankruptcy. No matter how seductive the Mad Men image is, it is time to pay more attention to the way services are designed.
This was how service innovation was done in 1960. How is your organisation doing it in 2011?
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Sit down and think about it? Almost none of the organisations I’ve ever worked for even did that.
Actually, I think the common way is to look at what your competitor is doing, tweak it, and roll out that. Safe, if crap.
Many banks are suffering paralysis by analysis, with overloaded spreadsheets and plans that never actually work out that way anyway …