A life chosen through design

 

Michael Lai is accustomed to wearing multiple hats when it comes to his career. Senior partner and senior vice president of knowledge management at experience consultancy TANG, Lai is also an associate professor at Shanghai’s Tongji University’s College of Design & Innovation and the co-author of X Thinking: Building Better Brands in the Age of Experience.  

 

This combination of teaching, consulting, and researching isn’t new to Lai, whose past accomplishments have managed to wend a path through all three fields. After graduating from the Columbus College of Art & Design, Lai was promptly hired by his alma mater as a teacher. From then on, Lai transitioned from one role to another—designer, academic, consultant—but design was always a common theme when it came to the responsibilities of each role. “Everything that I [have been] doing is taking and analysing an original concept in its concrete form, abstract[ing] it into a model that can be applied into different areas, and transferring it into a different field and implementing it in that field. It models how designers think: how I can see a pattern in one place in real life or a physical situation, abstract it…and move the pattern into a different context and reapply it.” 

 

Lai’s start in visual design eventually transformed into interaction design, eXperience design, and now, business and organisation design—key areas within the experience economy, a system wherein experiences are economic offerings that can be purchased just like a product or a service, the prime example being Disneyland—although it does sell merchandise, Disneyland’s main purpose is to encourage customers to pay for good memories. 

 

As an eXperience evangelist, Michael Lai believes that brand eXperiences determine a company’s success or failure. These experiences not only shape how consumers perceive brands but also how brands can build meaningful relationships with their consumers through Xperience Thinking.

 

Shaping how people perceive the world

 

As an eXperience evangelist, Lai believes that brand eXperiences determine a company’s success or failure. These experiences not only shape how consumers perceive brands but also how brands can build meaningful relationships with their consumers through eXperience Thinking, or what we call X Thinking. “All the tricks that designers use have some insight or [are] based on insight on how the mind perceives the world. Experiences themselves are created partially through how people perceive the world through their senses… Creating brand eXperiences is about creating a perception that people will reflect upon: this is the experience of this particular brand.” 

 

His work on Xiao Guan Tea, a start-up selling Nespresso-sized tea capsules, features key hallmarks of his X Thinking approach. Despite tea occupying such a historical place in Chinese culture, the manner in which it was sold remained antiquated. Lipton was by far the top-selling brand, and no Chinese tea brands held any mass market recognition.

 

Lai went against the traditional understanding of tea marketing by eschewing tea connoisseurs. Instead, he and his team went for younger consumers with a respect for Chinese heritage. They identified key moments in which such customers would purchase tea - for example as a gift or for business meetings - and successfully modernised these rituals.

 

The experience economy has its roots in the West, where it has grown quickly since its inception in the 1990s, but it was his experiences in China that prompted Lai to co-write X Thinking. “[The book] served as a bible of creating brand experiences. It had a Chinese perspective to it because we viewed it as a lot of knowledge in China, especially in design and experiences… UX or the tools we use: persona, journey map, all these things have Western origins. [However], we developed our own tools along the way, and we wanted to share these tools with the rest of the world. We’ve learned so much from the international community, and we felt a responsibility to give back in terms of we’ve learned and gained and what we’ve created as a result.” 

 

In China, the book was meant for business leaders, aiming to teach them the value that eXperience brings to a brands and businesses. However, the book has also resonated outside of China, where conversations about the types of experiences and new concepts presented in the book have sprung up. 

 

In China, the book “X Thinking”  was meant for business leaders, aiming to teach them the value that eXperience brings to brands and businesses.

 

Consistency is key

 

X Thinking makes it clear that brands can transcend the typical customer journey by becoming an integral part of the customer experience—something only achieved by providing a consistent experience across multiple functional areas. “Every experience leaves you with the same impression…the original expectation and the actual experience [are] consistent. No matter what new thing they create, it always resonates as [being] the same brand that [you] know… When we’re designing brand eXperiences, there’s a specific goal that we’re trying to achieve. We want to make sure that the brand is a symbol for a theme or a concept, and we want to make sure that that theme or concept remains consistent through everything that the brand does. That’s to make sure that everyone understands that the relationship is there no matter what.” 

 

The value that Lai places on meaningful customer relationships sees him emphasising the importance of individualised and personalised experiences. Lai is certain that “in the future, more and more brands will be focused on niche markets… Everyone is going to look at how [they’re] going to represent [themselves] as individual[s].” 

 

Michael Lai stresses that businesses need to examine what they are offering and how they deliver it. “It’s no longer about physical benefits but a meaningful and memorable experience.”

 

More than a simple physical benefit 

 

Currently, Lai and his team are exploring two key areas: experience strategy and experience management. “Taking the qualitative approaches of experience design and applying it in a quantitative and data-driven approach for a business is still very new territory. However, that’s where we see the future of X Thinking in terms of strategy and management.” 

 

With his base in Shanghai, Lai has a unique perspective on the evolution of these areas. Reflecting on the astonishingly rapid pace of development in China, Lai notes that Chinese consumers are more willing to change and try new things, thanks to previous experiences with digital transformation in the past. “The thirst for innovation is greater than in the West,” Lai says. However, the developments in China also point to the future of brand building in the West, where consumers are already beginning to go down the same path. 

 

Lai stresses that businesses need to examine what they are offering and how they deliver it. “It’s no longer about physical benefits but a meaningful and memorable experience.” 

 

Michael’s work on Xiao Guan Tea features key hallmarks of his X Thinking approach. He went against the traditional understanding of tea marketing by eschewing tea connoisseurs.

 

Michael and his team went for younger consumers with a respect for Chinese heritage. They identified key moments in which such customers would purchase tea - for example as a gift or for business meetings - and successfully modernised these rituals.