The Collective Experience-Suite
If you’re like most leaders, you’re probably spending your days manoeuvring the functional building blocks of your business—Marketing, HR, Operations. You’re moving pieces around the board, but you’re missing the point. You aren't selling functions. You’re selling experiences.
Every organisation has an Experience-Suite, whether the leaders at the top are aware of it or not. In fact, a lack of awareness here is exactly why most modern leadership teams are stuck in the weeds. They’re too busy head-butting over territory to see that they’re actually destroying the very thing they’re trying to build.
To win in market, you have to get your head around the seven domains of the Experience-Suite. If you don't, you're just leaving your brand’s perception to chance.
The Experience-Suite is a circular system of seven domains: Brand, Product, Phygital, Digital, Consumer, User, and Employee Experience. On paper, it looks clean. In reality, it’s a mess of overlapping accountability. This is where indecision and doubt happen.
Consider, for example, these questions:
Which leader owns the brand identity on a digital dashboard in a vehicle?
Which leader owns the P&L for a pair of augmented reality glasses?
Who owns a digital platform used only by employees?
When you have a lack of clarity, your touchpoints become sources of conflict rather than growth. As a leader, your job isn't to measure these things but to deliberately design them. That’s because value is either created or destroyed in the overlaps.
The Experience-Suite domains are your tools of the trade. If you don't get these right, your people will forget about what actually drives innovation and value and instead focus on basic tasks like implementing new software so they have something to add to their performance review.
The “Asset” Experiences: BPDs
Brand-X (Brand Experience): Brand isn't marketing fluff. It’s the backbone of your business. It’s the emotional connection your CUEs (Consumers, Users, Employees) have with your culture and your offering.
Product-X (Product Experience): These are the line items on your P&L. But don't confuse a products form with its function. Product-X is the ergonomics of the shampoo bottle; User-X is whether the customer actually likes the result.
Phygital-X (Phygital Experience): This is the blurring of the physical and digital. If you can’t climate-control your car via an app, you’re living in the past. The customer doesn’t care about your internal silos; they just want a superior, seamless experience.
Digital-X (Digital Experience): This is no longer just a website. It’s how we live and earn. A great Digital-X cloaks complexity. If it feels simple to the user, it’s because you’ve invested heavily in the smarts behind it.
The "People" Experiences: CUEs
Business starts and ends with people. Period. You have to manage these three groups well and with absolute precision.
Consumer-X (Customer Experience): Customer-centricity isn't about altruistic empathy. It’s about business continuity. It’s about keeping your ear to the ground so your business stays relevant. Without human-centred design, customer-centricity is just a buzzword without a plan.
User-X (User Experience): This is about utility. Often, the user isn't the one paying the bill (think NFPs or NDIS). This domain gives you the specific, nuanced data that broad Customer-X research often misses.
Employee-X (Employee Experience): Your employees are the lifeblood of your culture. You can have the best functioning business in the world, but if you feed your people the wrong fuel, they will level your brand. EX isn’t about pool tables and blueberry muffins; it’s about autonomy, respect, and security.
The onus of ownership in The Experience-Suite is on the experience itself and, more specifically, the way that the collective experiential domains make a person feel. When you stop looking at your business as a collection of departments and shift the leadership focus on the creation of experiences, you stop internal conflict and start navigating toward a high-performance future.
This article is a summary of the ‘Experience-Suite’ methodology. Grab your copy of The Experience-Suite via Amazon.
