Chapter 15
Designing Services that Sing and Dance1
Marina Candi
Reykjavik University Center for Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Ahmad Beltagui
University of Wolverhampton
Introduction
Design in the context of services continues to baffle practitioners and academics alike. What can be designed when there is no thing to design? Design is usually understood as the activity of giving form to manufactured products. So when it comes to intangible services, it may seem like there is not much that designers can apply their skills to. Nevertheless, as the importance of service industries has grown and jobs in manufacturing industries have declined, there is increased recognition that service design may in fact offer a means for the scope of the design profession to grow (Candi, 2007). Examples such as the Apple iPhone, Bang & Olufsen sound systems, and the Volkswagen Beetle have imprinted the clear message that product design can make a huge difference. None of these examples represents the most advanced technological innovations, but each can command premium prices and persistent market recognition based on outstanding design. Similarly, design—unlikely as it may seem to sound—can be used to create competitive differentiation in services (Candi, 2010).
The key to understanding service design is to recognize that design need not only be about giving form to physical objects. Design thinking involves reframing problems in a manner that allows novel solutions to be developed (see Chapter 1 of this book). Whether or not these solutions take the form of tangible artifacts, the focus is on those who will benefit from them. In other words, the ultimate aim is to influence customers' experiences, to form lasting impressions in their minds, and encourage them to return. Interaction designers recognize that the customer experience is beyond their direct control, but they design with the aim of influencing the emotional connection between customers and products. This means the focus of design has moved from the product or service that customers interact with to the behavior of the customers themselves (Redström, 2006). As Herbert Simon's definition in Chapter 1 suggests, design is the act of changing a current situation into a preferred one. So good service design should have a transforming effect on customers, offering a positive emotional outcome and improving their lives in some way.
Theater can be a useful metaphor for understanding services. Like theater, services involve one group of people performing for the benefit of another group of people. The processes that have been developed over thousands of years of theater can, therefore, be used in managing service processes (Grove, Fisk, & Bitner, 1992). Like theater, services require preparation and planning (or what we might call design) with the aim of creating a particular reaction and a lasting memory in the customer's mind. As in script writing for the theater or the screen, the result of design thinking in services should be to produce something with a powerful narrative, to engage the audience, and to offer something unexpected but ultimately memorable.
In this chapter, we start by describing the differences between designing products and services. We introduce the theater metaphor to show how this offers a useful starting point for service design. Next, we discuss the challenges that make experiences elusive before offering three principles that can be applied to service design: narrative, participation, and surprise. To illustrate these principles, we describe two examples of companies that engage customers by designing for “singing and dancing” and thus create compelling and memorable service experiences.
15.1 Products, Services, and Experiences
When we think about outstanding services, design is probably not the first element that comes to mind. Ritz-Carlton is well-known for empowering its staff to spend money to solve customers' expressed, or even unexpressed, problems. Southwest Airlines is well-known for its pioneering efforts to make flying fun. And many of the stories of Nordstrom's liberal return policies are mythical in proportion, being told and retold and passed between generations. But are these examples the result of design? Certainly not in the traditional sense of the industrial design of objects. But if we take the object of service design to be the customer and its success to be a memorable and compelling experience, then employee roles, service environments, and return policies are all aspects that can be used to set the stage. By broadening our view of design, we can extend the theater metaphor to encompass all the areas that are managed in the typical service business, see Figure 15.1. Indeed, the notion that all business is a stage has been espoused for a long time (Grove et al., 1992; Pine & Gilmore, 1998). Customers can be regarded as the audience, and the business is responsible for staging a performance that engages and involves this audience in order to make the experience memorable. Managers and owners play the roles of directors, producers, and backers, who help to shape the production. The performance is created and delivered by employees who can be thought of as the actors appearing on stage and the technical crew, working backstage to make the show happen. The environment in which the performance takes place can be thought of as a stage, requiring aesthetic design to capture the audience's imagination, while the information systems and equipment of a business are akin to the sound and lighting equipment on the stage. Finally, the script consists of the procedures put in place to ensure a consistent performance by the actors.
Figure 15.1 Analogies between theatrical production and service design.
Adapted from Pine and Gilmore (1998).
Building on the theater metaphor, the task of a financial service firm is to choreograph the performance of financial services to create a desired experience for customers. This entails a focus on the psychological and emotional impact service encounters have on customers in addition to the technical core of the value proposition. Likewise, health care providers transform customers physically, but by deliberately staging an experience, they can capitalize on the importance of the psychological element of physical health and leave positive memories even in the context of crisis or tragedy.
Experiences Are Elusive
Designers often express broad, idealistic aims like making the world a better place through the things that they design. However, the things that are designed are usually judged in terms of their own characteristics, rather than on how well they achieve their ultimate aim. A famous statement, attributed to the management guru Theodore Levitt, states that people don't want to buy a one-quarter-inch drill bit; what they really want is a one-quarter-inch hole. In other words, the quality of a design cannot be judged by looking at the thing that is designed, but at its impact on customers' lives. If we take this perspective, we can see product design and service design as one and the same, even when there is no thing to design. When the aim is to create a positive experience—as it always should be—products and services are the tools that are used to achieve the aim. The experience only comes into being within an individual's mind as a result of their interaction with what has been designed. The challenge that designers face is twofold: they do not directly control the experience, and no two experiences are identical even when the same props and script are used. This dilemma is illustrated in Figure 15.2.
Figure 15.2 Companies can design the conditions (or prerequisites) for a service experience. But it is only when customers interact with the service that the service experience itself comes into existence.
Compare this challenge of designing an experience to that of writing a play. The script writer seeks to make a lasting impression on the audience, to educate, entertain, or challenge. The writer does this by appealing to thoughts and emotions, but can do so only indirectly through the words that are written, but will then be interpreted by directors and delivered by actors. Exactly what each individual takes from the final performance depends on factors that cannot be fully controlled. These include what the individual knows and has experienced in the past as well as the physical and social environment in which the performance is experienced. Just as two people can have entirely different views on how good a performance they watched together was, two customers can have entirely different experiences as a result of the same service. The objective of design thinking becomes identifying a customer problem, reframing it in a manner that enables a solution, and then being able to adapt that solution for specific customers. The customer's experience is undeniably ephemeral, changeable, and difficult to control, making the challenge equivalent to that of creating classic theater. What companies can do is control and design the prerequisites for an intended service experience. In the following sections, we offer some guidelines that can help in doing so.
15.2 How to Design for Compelling Service Experiences
Businesses normally have three main levers at their disposal for putting in place the conditions under which a desired service experience can be created. They can control the environment in which the service is offered, including some or all of its tangible and intangible aspects; and they can design service processes, including the behaviors that are expected of employees. In a theater, the environment is the stage, but also the auditorium, the foyer, and the backstage area. All of these exert an influence on the mood of the audience, and designers should be aware that anything can help or hinder the creation of a positive experience. The service processes include the script followed by actors, but also the procedures followed by sound and light technicians and even the process of checking tickets on entry. We can see that there are at least two layers here—the performance itself and the supporting activities. All of the components need to be closely aligned and follow a clear plan for it all to make sense. If not, the audience will be distracted from the emotional impact of the script and the acting.
Sometimes acting looks so natural that it appears to be spontaneous—as if those on stage are speaking the words of the script for the first time. But watch a performance on two consecutive nights and it becomes clear that improvisation happens and takes an incredible amount of preparation as well as the ability to read the audience and adapt the performance accordingly. Successful service businesses are those that plan their service processes meticulously and work toward flawless delivery. But success also lies in allowing employees the freedom to improvise within these service processes. This doesn't mean throwing service process design out the window. Planning to do things by the seat of your pants is seldom a good idea. What is called for is designing robust service processes that anticipate multiple permutations of possible service journeys and include a great deal of built-in flexibility. Service processes should empower employees to be helpful, responsive, and flexible, while still ensuring that service delivery is streamlined and economical.
But what should be included in a service process—or script, if we continue to use the theater analogy—to create a compelling and memorable experience that customers will want to repeat and recommend to others? There are many things that could be placed at the core of a service value proposition to achieve this, but we emphasize three that are particularly promising, while not necessarily obvious. These are narrative, participation, and surprise.
Narrative
An experience can be seen as a sequence of events that take place over time, involving a number of different actors and seen from several different perspectives. To describe an experience is therefore to tell a story, or narrative—one that is unique to the person telling it. For a designer, the story ends the moment ideas are put into practice and sales begin. For the customer, however, the narrative is just about to begin. Designing an experience requires the designer to consider the customer's perspective and see the delivery of a service as part of the customer's narrative.
Successful service businesses typically plan their processes meticulously, making use of mapping tools, such as the service blueprint (Bitner, Ostrom, & Morgan, 2008). The service blueprint identifies touch points, for example, the point when a waiter takes a customer's order in a restaurant, as well as processes that happen in the background, such as passing the order on to the kitchen staff who prepare a meal. It identifies possible points of failure where things could go wrong and which designers should pay particular attention to. Design is typically a visual activity, in part because the creativity it requires is likely to involve the right side of the brain, which processes visual rather than verbal information. Mapping tools that allow the visualization of otherwise intangible interactions are therefore extremely useful in the service design process. However, such tools tend to focus primarily on business processes. This means they capture only the business's side of the story while neglecting the customer's side.
A subtle but important distinction can be made between touch points (seen from the business's perspective) and moments in a customer's journey (seen from the customer's perspective). Jan Carlzon, credited with taking the airline SAS from the brink of ruin to the top of its industry, famously claimed his company had 50,000 moments of truth every day. Every time an employee and customer interact, there is an opportunity to shape the customer's experience, for better or for worse. Unfortunately, what happens in each of these moments is not fully controlled by the company. For example, an airline could do everything correctly but find its customers unhappy because of delays in traffic or at airport security or simply because of a bad night's sleep. While these things cannot be predicted fully, taking them into account calls for considering the emotional impact of service interactions and how these contribute to customers' narratives.
All the processes, environments, tangibles, and interactions that come into play in a customer's typical journey through a service can be identified and mapped. A crucial task is to examine the emotional impact that each of these can have on the customer. The key here is to look not only at what happens but at how the customer feels about it. This exercise should help reveal inconsistencies in the narrative of the customer experience or identify opportunities for improvement. Looking for failure points, as service blueprinting does, is an important task, but when mapping the customer journey, the failure points are not in the efficiency of the process, but rather a failure to contribute to a positive experience.
Part of the appeal of design thinking is its ability to address so-called wicked problems, which are complex and consist of many interconnected issues. The application of design thinking can develop an understanding of problems from the customers' perspective, considering all the details, while also retaining the bigger picture. What seem like unrelated processes that are the responsibility of different people in an organization all come together in creating a customer's narrative of the service. So, in addition to considering the details of each process, the designer needs to see how they fit together and ensure that they convey a consistent message.
In a bank, employees are likely to adhere to a formal dress code to convey a message that this is a reputable establishment and that these are serious, hardworking people who can be trusted with your money. Employees would not dress in T-shirts or jeans because this would be inconsistent with the expected narrative. Similarly, a bank that wants to be perceived as a high-class establishment and wishes its customers to feel respected and valued would not present its customers with the gift of a cheap, mass-produced pen, since this would be inconsistent with the desired customer narrative.
Participation
Although we tend to think of theater audiences as passive consumers, there is a long history of active audience participation. At the very least, actors expect to hear a response from the audience, and this helps encourage and inspire their performance. Yet there are also many examples of attempts to break the fourth wall by engaging the audience directly in the story. Stuart and Tax (2004) draw attention to the traditional British pantomime, in which active audience participation is absolutely essential to the show. Well-known children's stories such as Peter Pan or Jack and the Beanstalk always feature a villain, whose every appearance is to be booed by the audience, and a hero, who enlists the help of the audience. The experience relies on an auditorium of children shouting, “He's behind you,” to warn the characters of danger. Another example is the cult film Rocky Horror Picture Show, which people show up for repeatedly and usually in full costume, not so much to watch the film as to be part of a collective experience by engaging with it and with others in the audience. Likewise, participants in comic book or science fiction conventions, music festivals, and sporting events add color, humor, and sometimes noise by arriving in costume and providing an atmosphere. Such events would be nonevents without their participation.
Leaving the theater for a moment, services always involve customer participation. Indeed, the defining feature of any service is not its level of tangibility or lack thereof, but the presence of the customer in the production process. Customers always supply an input, which may be their possessions (e.g., when a customer ships a package), information (e.g., when insurance companies process customer details to produce a quote), or it is their mind or body (e.g., education, health care, or theater). Rather than simply processing these inputs, however, services can be designed to facilitate more active involvement from individual customers and, increasingly, from communities of connected customers.
A well-known type of customer participation is self-service, which is in many cases simply an ill-disguised ruse pretending to improve customer convenience while actually being a way to cut costs. However, two approaches can be seen when we consider self-service.
One does indeed involve identifying processes that can be passed on to customers in an attempt to reduce costs. The airline sector has been revolutionized by budget airlines that require booking, ticket printing, and even check-in to be conducted by customers online. The savings are passed on to the customer, allowing these airlines to offer cheaper travel options. What they generally fail to do, however, is to offer a pleasant experience. It may be a memorable experience, but when it is, it may be remembered for the wrong reasons and leave customers liable to switch to other airlines.
The Irish airline Ryanair has been as successful as it has been controversial, with its deliberate attempts to shake up the established European market leaders. It has recently acknowledged the negative experience it has offered through its focus on efficiency and cost while treating customers (and employees) with disdain. Restrictions on hand luggage and other small details that irritate passengers unnecessarily have been reexamined by the company in an attempt to change its image. These actions came about suddenly after years of intense criticism from customers. The catalyst? A conversation with customers via Twitter in which the CEO recognized the level of annoyance and vowed to shed the company's macho image while trying not to upset people unnecessarily. The old-fashioned approach of managers taking to the phones to listen to customer complaints or manning the checkout register still work in the Internet age.
The second approach to self-service is examplified by the Swedish furniture giant IKEA. Like Ryanair, it passes many processes, such as transportation and assembly, to customers and shares the savings by offering cheaper products. IKEA's popularity can partly be explained by its low prices and the convenience of buying everything required for a home from one store. Another factor, however, is what a group of behavioral scientists have referred to as “the IKEA effect” (Norton, Mochon, & Ariely, 2012). Their experiments demonstrated that people value products more when they have contributed some effort to their creation. Deliberately or inadvertently, IKEA stumbled upon a formula for creating emotional attachment between customers and products, which leads to positive experiences of the IKEA brand. By combining design for functionality, along with design for manufacture and assembly, with perhaps a touch of emotional design, IKEA arguably generates customer loyalty based on customer participation in the form of self-service.
The biggest driver of self-service approaches in recent years has undoubtedly been the technology that enables e-commerce. From bookstores to banking, entire segments of commerce have moved or are moving to the Internet. In most instances, this simply removes the human touch and replaces it with a depersonalized and frequently daunting and stressful experience. However, there are many examples of customers forming communities based on support and collaboration—communities that in turn help power innovation. The open source software movement, in which global communities of like-minded individuals use their spare time to develop software is a case in point. The objective of most participants is recognition or challenge rather than financial gain, and the results can be seen, for example, in Wikipedia and OpenOffice.org.
Humans have a strong need to belong, and a sense of community among service customers can provide a powerful way to fulfill this need. The rise and impressive popularity of social network sites speaks volumes about the leverage that businesses can gain by connecting customers. A good example is American Express's Open forum, which is an online forum created by American Express for its small business owner cardholders. On this forum, small business owners get to know other small business owners and exchange ideas, tips, and stories about running small businesses. The benefit to American Express is decreased customer churn due to the strength of the community of customers.
Online customer communities or offline user groups can provide a wealth of information that companies can leverage for service design. In the online realm, this activity is sometimes referred to as netnography or the analysis of big data, in which businesses track customers' conversations or analyze statistics on their behaviors to try to discern what they want or might want in the future. Although such market research may be a reason for companies to try to encourage the creation of customer communities, these communities, if they take life, can also build loyalty among customers. Such loyalty will, in many cases, be to the community rather than to the company. But if companies keep the community as a whole satisfied, an individual customer's loyalty to the community will make them reluctant to leave it and, by extension, reluctant to stop using the service.
Customer communities can become powerful forces for change, and there have been instances of communities rising up against a business. For example, a Facebook group created to protest a change of tea blend by the English brand Twinings forced the company to reintroduce its original Earl Grey blend alongside its new product. The historical tradition of protests over tea is clearly alive and well in cyberspace.
Thus, service designers should think about how they can design to create a sense of camaraderie, affiliation, belonging, or kinship with other customers. Building in a way for customers to converse and interact with each other is a possible way to do this, and leveraging existing social network sites is a promising means to do so (Roberts & Candi, 2014).
Surprise
For businesses, predictability is traditionally highly desired. Standardized processes are well suited to measurement and improvement as businesses strive for efficiency and profitability. For customers, predictability is desired when it means they know what to expect when making a purchase. When it comes to experiences, however, an element of surprise is a great way to keep things exciting and keep customers coming back for more. Everyone who flies regularly on a commercial airline knows what to expect from the in-flight safety briefing. Southwest Airlines has been known to surprise its passengers with lines of poetry inserted into the otherwise serious presentation. Air New Zealand, knowing many of its passengers have made a Lord of the Rings–related vacation decision, has begun producing themed in-flight safety videos, featuring Hobbits, Orcs, and all manner of Middle-Earth creatures. The stories about outstanding service providers such as Nordstrom and the Ritz-Carlton are full of elements of surprise. The Nordstrom store that accepted a returned set of car tires even though no Nordstrom store sells tires is one such legendary example. Surprise (aka variability) often originates from the customer, but outstanding service providers are able to cope by being flexible. The Ritz-Carlton capitalizes on its policy of delighting customers and publishes its own portfolio of stories on its website. This may be taking things just a step too far. If it is expected, it is no longer a surprise, is it? There is a fine line here.
Four Seasons employees follow what the company refers to as its Golden Rule: “Do to others (guests and staff) as you would wish others to do to you.” This is made possible because employees are empowered to provide guests with a personalized service. Employees seem to approve (Four Seasons repeatedly appears on Fortune magazine's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For) and customers feel the benefit. There are two important lessons we can take from this example. First, employees are crucial to any service because customers are unpredictable, so it is not possible to plan for every eventuality when designing a service. Second, since employees are so important, it becomes vital that they also have a good experience. Employee empowerment is a very important condition needed for surprise in services delivered by people or facilitated by people. Employees need to be adept at “reading” each service encounter and deciding when a surprise might be welcomed.
Surprises are surprises only if they are surprising. This means customers should not be prepared for them. They are probably more appreciated when seeming to be genuine one-off, rather than carefully choreographed, events. That being said, surprises can, of course, be planned, for example, when a small art agency enrolled a flash mob of singers to surprise guests at its opening.
15.3 Services that Sing and Dance
We next provide two examples of services that “sing and dance,” which we hope will inspire.
A Service that “Sings”
A web development company struggling with limited office space capitalized on this challenge by allowing prospective customers to have a glimpse of developers while they work through a glass wall separating the customer meeting room from the work area. Thus, the glass wall provided a window onto the company's backstage, similar to the way some restaurants bring their kitchens into open view. Being a young company with a relatively young staff, everyone works to a random mix of contemporary music. No isolating headphones here—everyone listens to the same music, and every once in a while, someone starts singing out loud and a magic moment happens when everyone joins in. When current or prospective customers experience this, they get the message that the employees love their work and that this love will go into the services delivered. The singing is not part of a defined service process, and it's not part of anyone's employment contract. Rather, the conditions for spontaneous bursts of singing have been built into the company's culture, which emphasizes creating memorable experiences for customers and, indeed, for employees as well. This brings up a potential added benefit worth mentioning. Research by Candi, Beltagui, and Riedel (2013) has shown that businesses that emphasize the creation of compelling experiences for customers are typically more successful in attracting and retaining great employees than are businesses that neglect experience design. Thus, customers are not the only beneficiaries of a company's experience creation; employees also benefit, and, by extension, the company benefits.
This company has incorporated an element of real, rather than premeditated, surprise into its service. The possibility of surprise is supported by the company's culture and by the sense of community among employees. The element of surprise reinforces the desired customer narrative of a happy company that will provide a happy service with happy results.
A Service that “Dances”
Our example of a service designed for dancing also centers on a window and comes from a small shop selling one-of-a-kind art and design. This shop struggles with the configuration of its retail space. There is a window at the pavement level, but to enter the shop itself, customers have to cross the psychological hurdle of venturing down a steep flight of steps into a windowless basement. This company decided to capitalize on the window, and rather than use it to try to display as comprehensive a sample of the wares available at the subterranean level as possible, to use it as a stage for “dancing.” One day, passersby see an artist hard at work at his easel in the window. On another day, they might see musicians performing or models showing the latest from a fashion designer. The performances are not necessarily tightly scripted or choreographed, but certainly attract attention from people who pass by and might be compelled to venture into the retail space and part with their cash. This is a good example of creative and ever-changing design of the service environment to create experiences of surprise for customers. An additional benefit is the interactions and communication that can form among the audience members outside the window. These might be transient communities, but crossing the psychological hurdle of the staircase is probably easier with a new friend than on one's own.
A word of warning is in order here. While businesses should strive to create compelling experiences with their services and even go so far as to place the experience at the center of the service business model, service delivery is no less important. Beltagui, Candi, and Riedel (2012) refer to the trap of the hollow core, meaning a service that is all “song and dance” and no substance.
15.4 Designing a Service Experience Is Never Finished
The design of a service experience is an ongoing process. Experiences need to be constantly refreshed lest they become stale and uninteresting. This means one should never view a service as fully designed. It also means that in many cases there is scope for experimenting with different types and variants of experiences. By trying out various experience staging methods and initiatives, companies can simultaneously keep their customers engaged and interested and continually refine the experiences staged.
Designing a service experience is an iterative process. A business should in most cases start with the service processes and service environment, keeping the experience narrative firmly in mind, but can then add other elements such as customer participation or surprise. The design is never complete, and companies must continue to rethink, re-create, and re-design their service experience while attention to the core service delivery should never be neglected. Table 15.1 provides a worksheet, made up of a list of questions for transforming a service into a compelling experience based on narrative, participation, and surprise.
Table 15.1 Service Experience Worksheet
| What is the narrative (or story) the service should deliver? |
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| Is there scope for leveraging positive self-service? |
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| Is there scope for including active customer engagement in service delivery? |
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| Is there scope for the creation of a community of customers of the service? |
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| Are there elements of surprise that could be introduced into service delivery? |
|
How do the service processes need to be modified to support this narrative?This chapter suggests only three ways to create a compelling and memorable service experience, namely, narrative, participation, and surprise. However, there are more options, such as incorporating memorabilia (souvenirs), focusing on ergonomics, offering customization options, and others. Each business will need to carefully consider the nature of its service and discern what ways to create a desired service experience are most likely to result in competitive advantage.
15.5 Conclusion
Creating compelling service experiences can lead to improved business success by improving profitability, enhancing a company's reputation, its attractiveness to employees, and its ability to enter new markets and attract new customers. We posit that designing a service should focus on creating a service that literally or metaphorically “sings and dances” and that the outcome will be a compelling and memorable service experience.
So how can a company design a service that sings and dances? Assuming the core functionality is fit for purpose and is at least as effective as competing services—by making use of narrative, participation, and surprise. Environments and processes should be designed with an understanding of how customers will perceive them and how they will help customers to build a narrative of the service that has a happy ending and encourages repeat visits. Customer inputs are necessary for any service, but rather than a disruption to smoothly running processes, they should be taken as an opportunity to enhance the experience. To this end, processes and employee roles can be designed around customer participation and to encourage the formation of customer communities. Last, but certainly not least, design thinking—reframing problems and developing novel solutions—can benefit service design by continuously redefining the service in order to deliver an element of surprise to customers. The company should start with solid service processes with lots of built-in flexibility and a service environment designed to support the desired experience. Also, the company should put the service experience squarely at the core of its service value proposition. The rest depends on continuous creativity, which may be fully premeditated or result from flexible service processes supported by empowered employees.
References
- Beltagui, A., Candi, M., & Riedel J. (2012). Designing in the experience economy. In S. Zou & S. Swan (Eds.), Interdisciplinary approaches to international marketing: Creative research on branding, product design/innovation, and strategic thought/social entrepreneurship. Advances in International Marketing Series, Vol. 23, 111–135. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
- Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L., & Morgan, F. N. (2008). Service blueprinting: A practical technique for service innovation. California Management Review, 50(3), 66.
- Candi, M. (2007). The role of design in the development of technology-based services. Design Studies, 28(6), 559–583.
- Candi, M. (2010). Benefits of aesthetic design as an element of new service development. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 27(7), 1047–1064.
- Candi, M., Beltagui, A., & Riedel, J. (2013). Innovation through experience staging: Motives and outcomes. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 30(2), 279–297.
- Grove, S. J., Fisk, R. P., & Bitner, M. J. (1992). Dramatizing the service experience: A managerial approach. Advances in Services Marketing and Management, 1(1), 91–121.
- Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology 22(3), 453–460.
- Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review, 86(4), 97–105.
- Redström, J. (2006). Towards user design? On the shift from object to user as the subject of design. Design Studies, 27, 123–139.
- Roberts, D. L., & Candi, M. (2014). Leveraging social network sites in new product development: Opportunity or hype? Journal of Product Innovation Management, 31(S1), 105–117.
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About the Authors
Marina Candi is Associate Professor at Reykjavik University's School of Business and Director of the Reykjavik University Center for Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She received her PhD in business from Copenhagen Business School. Prior to entering academia, she spent over 20 years working in the IT sector as a software engineer and project manager and, during the latter half of her industry career, held positions in executive-level management as well as sitting on the boards of directors of IT firms. Her research interests include design-driven innovation, experience-based innovation, business model innovation, and interactive marketing. Her research has been published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Technovation, Design Studies, and the International Journal of Design. For more information, please see www.ru.is/staff/marina. Dr. Candi may be reached at [email protected].
Ahmad Beltagui is a Lecturer in Operations Management at the University of Wolverhampton Business School. He holds a doctorate from Nottingham University Business School as well as a master of engineering (in product design engineering) from the University of Strathclyde. His research interests concern the role of design in business, particularly in service management and innovation, as well as product development. His research has been published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, and Design Management Journal. Dr. Beltagui may be reached at [email protected].