Lessons from Lamborghini: “The Only” Approach to Experience Design - Victoria Taylor

Josiah: 0:00

You work in the area of experience design, experience consulting and it's really it's a very hot topic in hospitality right now. Everybody talks about it, everyone says it's valuable. But where you and I actually initially connected was this concept that you call the only, and it pushed beyond how many people talk about experiences into something more specific. I wonder if you could explain this concept a little bit more for us.

Victoria: 0:24

Yeah, sure, and I'd say where it came from was at my, I guess, my dissatisfaction with the industry in producing same and similar solutions. And even as new ideas and concepts came along, they would then be replicated. And I think naturally that's what we do as a world. You know, beyond hospitality, we see something that's interesting, we see something that's popular, and then we get all we're just going to do our version of that. You know, we're just going to do a, do a recreation of that for our own brand or for our own activation or for our own hotel, whatever it is. But the impact of that isn't just on what you're doing, it's on everything else that's been created. So actually, what we start to see is this kind of homogenization across all of these sectors of very same, similar cookie-cutter approach. Offerings and guests are far more sophisticated. You know they have a world of choice out there. They have a world of choice where they can choose to spend their time anywhere they want and they get enough of these same and similar solutions. So I was like my this this came from a bug bath, so my bug bear of I am fed up of seeing the same thing day in, day out. So if I can make my approach that for everyone that I work with, that it educates them to become the only and to be more brave and to be more audacious and to think differently, then I've done a good job. You know, and that requires putting humans at the decision. You know the center of decisions, and then so, right, how how can we be different and how can we create our own, unique, so that we're not the same as everybody else, so that, in essence, is what the only is.

Josiah: 2:12

Can you walk us through the process to get there at a high level? I know there's a lot of complexities to this because I'm interested. I feel many I speak with tell me about their work on this in their organizations and sometimes it feels almost like a checkbox thing where it's like we should have experience, or we should have experience design, and it's more of like did we check the box? Then, as you said, we're looking at the world from the perspective of the guest. How do you look at the world from the perspective of a guest?

Victoria: 2:39

It's exactly that. I think, as you know, we're all guilty of being experts at what we're experts at. So, okay, I'm here as a being interviewed as an expert and experience, but I've always got something to learn. We all have, you know, and I think very often we all think we've got all of the answers, when really we should be asking more questions, because that's how we get to know our guests better, by constantly being in this questioning process rather than saying, well, our guests are Gen Zed. That's. Another thing that I can't stand is grouping people by categories, because you put two Gen Zed people together and they're wildly different, right? So you know, really suspending that kind of who we are and what we think we know, and asking questions, understanding more, not just thinking you know, is our guest going to want to sit in this restaurant that we've designed and look at this and say who are our guests, what are they doing, where are they going, who are they going with, what are they buying, what are they shopping, what other experiences are they having? You know, really understanding who those people are and, even if we don't know the answers, asking the questions more, because that opens us up to being more curious, to trying to build an open life picture about the people that we want to serve and when we understand that we can start to better the experiences that we create. So I think, looking beyond who we are as brands, who we are as hotels, who we are as experience providers, and so you know what is out there in the world and what are these people thinking, reading, writing, observing, watching, asking other industries Because that's something that I think happens a lot in hospitality in particular is we're a bit echo chambery, you know, we kind of have the same conversations with the same people about the same things and we don't learn a lot, we just Stay stagnant.

Josiah: 4:37

I want to maybe to illustrate this and how it could look. We talk about an example from the luxury side of lifestyle brands. I know a big part of your work is with ultra high net worth individuals and you can't talk about that. But maybe at a high level we could talk about a luxury brand and my understanding is Lamborghini did something interesting recently as they were thinking about showroom design.

Victoria: 5:02

Yeah, and I think what's really interesting here with Lamborghini not just Lamborghini, but many luxury brands now are looking beyond their sector and I think that's what we all need to be doing. So when we've sat around tables with Lamborghini, there hasn't been a single person from the auto industry there. Those people that have been sat around those tables have been people like myself in hospitality chip builders, yacht designers, beauty specialists, clothing specialists, handbag builders you know all of these different craftsmen and different design disciplines to be able to bring expertise from different sectors and different types of consumer behavior, because, ultimately, guests of Lamborghini are also guests of hospitality. They're also buyers of handbags, they're also this and how can we get those different pitches on who they are if we don't look outside who we are? So it is having those conversations with cross-sectors to say, hey, you know, our guests are buying from you. What are you learning? You know how can we be more collaborative and learn more about our guests by being interested in them. You know, it really is quite a basic thing If you think about it. You know, since the beginning of time we are, you know we think about some of the probably the very early books we read. I don't think you've ever read this amazing book called how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, you know, and it's always about people loving the sound of their own name and people being far more interested when we're interested in them, and it really is that, you know, it really is looking at human beings and saying you know, how can we be so interested in them that them coming to us becomes the obvious choice? And we don't do that when we think in bedrooms, bathrooms, linens and cocktails. Ultimately, that's what we're packaging up in something far more beautiful. But to get to that, it needs to be more personal than that and in order for that, we need to understand them better, and the better we understand them, the better we can serve them. So, yeah, that's something that Lamborghini have been doing. That's something that we're seeing across a lot of you know the luxury industry right now, and I think that hospitality nearly really like needs to grab hold of that. I do think we're an industry that is quite far behind in that respect and, yeah, I mean, I don't know whether you you agree with that, but I I certainly think that we are lacking behind.

Josiah: 7:33

There's a lot of room for growth, and I think your advice is applicable across the board, but especially for those of us in hospitality, there should be an advantage because hospitality at its best, it comes from a very empathetic place, comes from a place of curiosity, and so it's time to not only look at that from a service perspective, but also an experience design perspective, and be very thoughtful about this right.

Victoria: 7:54

Yeah, absolutely, and I think you've hit the nail on the head. You know it is a very service driven industry. Of course, you know it's an industry built upon empathy and understanding, but service is wrapped up in just that service I serve you and actually, you know, I serve you, you Transactional, even though it is service-led, it is a transactional relationship. But actually, you know, I believe that we need to see this as like a transference of story between guest and employee constantly, rather than it just being service-based, and we see this more as a dance between Guest and employee. It feels like more of an experience. So it isn't just here I'm serving you your dinner, here I'm serving you a cocktail, I'm making you a cocktail. It's you know this, let's. What are we co-creating here? You know how is your story feeding into our story and how can our story become a part of your story? And you know there's a lot. There's a lot more that can be done than just this basic transactional service.

Josiah: 8:58

Yeah well, it's an interesting trend I'm tracking. There's a brand in the Netherlands, a hospitality brand, that I call their associate sidekicks, and that's very casual. You know it's a different concept. You have to think about what it looks like within your brand. You know your brand kind of style, but there's an opportunity here. I am curious though, victoria, is you kind of think about, if you look at the space, what are you most excited by or like is inspiring you and kind of makes you excited, as you kind of look at experience broadly?

Victoria: 9:27

What's exciting me is the potential, this potential for cross-sector collaboration, more than more than anything actually, because I think we are at a pinnacle time where, collectively, we can all raise the bar in experience and I think there are so many different Disciplines and practices and learnings and best practices from theme parks, from Entertainment, from hospitality, from auto, from retail. There is so much crossing right now and the potential is Exponential. It really is, and that that really is what excites me, because there's all these future collaborative opportunities and I just think we are like literally lifting the lid on that right now. I think we're just on the cusp of Phenomenal things. Yes, we've seen collaborations. We, you know, we see a lot of that. I think we've seen Collaborations that aren't always overly well thought out, if I'm completely honest. Sometimes it's let's collaborate because it's a collaboration. But I think, if we can actually really intentionally think about how we can put our guests at the centre and what we can learn from each other to Help grow our guests, and we're in a great position. So that massively, massively excites me, as I'm sure you can tell. Well, I I'm gonna encourage people to follow you on LinkedIn because actually the day that we're recording this.

Josiah: 10:43

You just had a post About not forgetting the guest. Sometimes we get so carried away on something we forget that guest perspective, and so I appreciate you walking us through this.

Victoria: 10:52

What I would say from a practical perspective, and this is just like a really like, really, really basic, because Sometimes you know where, where I'm talking and where Hotels might be talking are very much Different places and it's sometimes it's very hard because Experience means different things to different people, right? So it experiences, such a widely used word. Now that it does, it becomes this thing. That's just like let's include experience. Let's just include experience in the equation. I would say a really good starting point for people is to, you know, I think that's a very important part of the question. I think that's a really important part of the question Suspend brand intention, design intention, whatever that intention is in what you're trying to create, and really think about a guest experience. So I'll give you an example when families arrive at resort, for example, and they have just been on a journey, they could have flown for two hours, they could have flown for 10 hours, whatever that journey time is, there's this wonderful opportunity and this is just one of thousands and thousands of experiences but there's this wonderful opportunity when a family arrives for a hotel resort to make a first impression. Everything when you go into a hotel reception in general, in 99.9% of the cases, are designed for adult physical, eye, height, right. So everything is designed for the physical eye height of an adult. And you've got these little tiny kitties that are coming in with you and there's nothing to keep them interested at all. There's nothing at their eye height. So what they're seeing is the bottom of legs, the bottom of counters, really boring aesthetics that aren't captivating at all, whereas adults are at this completely different eye height, where they see, you know, what has been designed, because it's adults that design these experiences right. So we see it from adult eye height. And then a child's tired, they've gone on a journey and they cry, and then all of a sudden, adult attention is on their child, because that's the most important thing to them. So there's this wonderful moment where a hotel has the opportunity to create this first impression and it's shattered because attention is now on the child. So actually, when we fail to design for the child, we also fail to design for the adult. So it's really thinking about all of these different perspectives at every tiny point of an experience and walking through our properties, walking through our experiences, sitting in every chair in the restaurant, to say, well, what's this for you, and what might it feel like eating dinner here as opposed to eating dinner here, and what does it feel like lying in bedroom number 102 as opposed to bedroom number 22? And what's the view from window number 48 as opposed to window number 36, from bedroom number 36? You know, and how do people feel when they interact with this member of staff? Well, going into that with that number of stuff and you'll find out as opposed to this number of stuff. So there's such tiny, tiny details, but there are things that people can do with no budget. You know the work that I do is budget driven. You know people come to me to create extraordinary experiences and we go through a very. You know, I have an 18p approach that I take people through and it's you know, it's very granular, it's very detailed. But if anybody is sitting there right now with no budget to invest in experience, doing those experiential walkthroughs and suspended design intent and really thinking about what guests experience, you can only do that by becoming a guest and not being somebody within the organization. So go and become a guest and go and do all of those things and, yeah, that's, that's something that everyone can do.

Josiah: 14:33

It's a great, great call to action, great reminder. Victoria, thank you so much for taking some time to chat through this with us and and sharing your perspective.

Victoria: 14:42

You're welcome. Thank you for having me.