Define Your Experience Strategy
Why It Matters. How to Build It.
‘Bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services’
Do you recognise the company saying this? (The answer is further down in this post).
Think for a moment about what this company is saying.
Best user experience.
Innovative hardware.
(Innovative) services.
It’s got nothing to do with The How
Nor anything to do with The Who
It has nothing to do with brand, marketing, or service tactics, all focused on execution.
It’s all about The What.
It asks: What meaningful experiences will we create that drive innovation, growth, and value, not just for the business but also for customers?
This is what then drives execution across the business. And sometimes, maybe, a changed business model.
It’s future-focused. Distinctly different.
And to create value for consumers, you have to be different from brands that promise value.
You’re more useful, more helpful, more accessible.
You’ll be more resonant in culture and more in tune with how consumers change in their multi-identities, hyper-individualism, and needs. Let’s call these brands “thick brands.”
Defining Experience Strategy: Why It Matters and How to Build It
Many companies manage their experience by investing in training, customer service, or digital tools.
But these are tactical moves, not strategic moves.
They’re filling an ‘experience strategy’ gap with a blend of brand and operational strategy - but they are execution frameworks filling the vacuum of an absent, deeper, intentional experience strategy.
An experience strategy goes further: It creates meaningful, differentiated experiences that fuel innovation, deliver growth, and add value not just for the business, but for people.
Using the term “customer” in your experience strategy can unintentionally reduce individuals to their transactional role, stripping away the nuance and complexity of their life. In contrast, calling them “people” or “humans” reintroduces empathy, context, and diversity into the conversation.
It reminds us that experiences are not delivered to segments, but lived by whole people. With emotions, relationships, constraints, and aspirations. This simple language shift opens the door to more expressive, respectful, and meaningful experience design.
This shift also aligns with more advanced frameworks such as systemic Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) and modes. Systemic JTBD recognises that people don’t just seek to complete isolated tasks—they aim to keep multiple aspects of their lives in motion and balance. Similarly, the concept of modes acknowledges that people operate in different mental and emotional states throughout their day. Dave Norton of The Experience Strategist writes much about modes and Systemic JTBD on his Substack.
Recognising these dynamics allows you to build experience strategies that fit not just into customer journeys but into whole-life systems.
Examples
Amazon's Subscribe & Save customers want to fit into a broader life system. It helps them manage household essentials with minimal effort, orchestrating automation across medications, groceries, and home goods. It’s not about the cheapest or most loved, but about supporting a systemic job: helping ‘me’ maintain stability and control in my daily life.
Spotify recognises that listeners operate in different modes, from “Focus” and “Workout” to “Relax” and “Commute.” These are situational mindsets and have nothing to do with demographics or segments. Spotify curates music based on mode for relevance and emotional resonance. The app is serving states of mind.
Spurred by Tesla, car manufacturers now consider the automobile an updatable software platform, requiring the application of digital integration, user experience, and technology expertise throughout design and production processes. They then sell subscriptions to unlock services like OnStar and Apple CarPlay. Conversely, appliance manufacturers like Samsung continue to grapple with the elusive promise of internet-connected screens for refrigerators, washing machines, and other home appliances.
The first three examples show how strategic experience design can extend beyond features and touchpoints to embed within people’s systems and mental states, creating personal, durable, and contextually intelligent value.
The Foundational Questions of Experience Strategy
Experience strategy centres around foundational questions:
What makes the business model compelling to the people it serves?
How do we clearly describe people’s (customers’) needs?
How is value created and sustained over time through meaningful experiences?
These questions need answering for an experience strategy that does more than respond to market pressure or deliver functional outcomes.
It's about shaping a holistic roadmap for sustainable relevance.
The Role of a Strategic Point of View (POV)
Where brand strategy relies on differentiation, marketing and service on execution, experience strategy relies on a point of view. It answers the question: WHAT?
It’s a future-focused stance on what people will need and how the company is uniquely positioned to meet those needs.
An effective strategic POV has many elements to it.
Think about the 4P framework I showed you last week.
Addresses a near-future need or "should" state (how the world should be for people)
Articulates what the company needs going forward (capabilities, realignments, innovations)
Defines the impact on the business model (how this will create or shift value)
Includes guiding principles to shape decisions and behaviours internally
There are many ways to express a strategic POV:
A declarative statement (e.g., Apple: "Bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services")
An insight statement (e.g., "People want more control over digital time v. our solution prioritises time well spent")
A comparison (e.g., "Others offer speed v. we’ll optimise for significance")
Even a narrative or story that brings the POV to life for internal teams (and in multiple formats) can effectively engage different internal audiences.
Patagonia, Who Gives A Crap, Spotify, Starbucks, Tesla, Glossier, LEGO, and Red Bull are brands with experience strategies and are called ‘thick brands’. They sell clothes, toilet paper, streaming music, coffee, cars, drinks, and more—but so do others. Yet they stand out in their category with their point of view, which operates on one of the 4P dimensions.
Red Bull is famous for its energy drinks, but it goes beyond just selling beverages by embracing extreme sports and youth culture. It organises and sponsors events like the Red Bull Air Race, Red Bull Crashed Ice, and Red Bull Rampage. Red Bull aligns its POV to things that resonate deeply with adventurers and thrill-seekers.
Glossier is a beauty brand whose online-first approach focuses on building a community through social media engagement, user-generated content, and influencer collaborations. Minimalist packaging and an emphasis on natural beauty is a POV about authenticity and inclusivity.
These examples highlight how a POV drives creative ways to stand out in their respective industries, creating more value for their customers.
It can be about service, branding, purpose, or transformation. Whichever it is, they distinctly reach for it and excel at it, allowing the rest of the business to coalesce around a roadmap for executing it.
Why It Matters
Today’s customers’ expectations are constantly shifting. The pandemic, digital disruption, and emerging technologies have profoundly reshaped how people think about time, meaning, and value. They’re in consumorphosis mode.
We must plan not just for what's known, but for constantly evolving contexts.
And that’s where experience strategy with a clear POV comes in.
It enables you to:
Think about how to get ahead of the curve, rather than react to competitors or technologies
Align your teams across silos with a shared vision
Design and prioritise solutions that address people’s real, evolving, and complete needs
Anchor your journey mapping, personas, and design activities in a stronger strategic foundation
What Makes an Experience Strategist Essential
In many organisations, the person who should know the customer best is not the marketer or product manager—it's the experience strategist.
If that’s you, congratulations because it’s one of the most interesting, thoughtful jobs around.
You don’t just understand what customers want now; you anticipate what they’ll want next. Your insights will guide journey work, channel investments, employee training, service design, and organisational fit.1
Without a strategic point of view, experience work can become reactive, fragmented, or overly dependent on silo’d playbooks. But when rooted in a strong POV, experience strategy becomes the foundation for how a business executes, expresses its relevance and earns trust in the moments that matter.
Final Thought
A journey map shows where people go, and personas show who they are. But a strategic point of view shows why it all matters and what the organisation must do next. It provides the throughline between insight and action, customer and company, and the present and future.
Think T-Mobile, which reorganised organisational fit around processes and structures to succeed in its pivot to no-contract. At the beginning of 2013, T-Mobile suffered from an ongoing loss of share that affected its image and financial health. The Un-carrier initiative dramatically changed that. At one point during the campaign, T-Mobile was gaining customers at a rate that exceeded the three competitors combined. Further, according to a study by Baird Equity, 26 per cent of potential wireless carrier switchers are looking at T-Mobile, as compared to 9 per cent for Sprint, 10 per cent for AT&T, and 19 per cent for Verizon. In the minds of many, T-Mobile went from an also-ran company to a firm with a leadership position that reinvented a significant industry. It’s a fantastic achievement.
T-Mobile could not grow until it did just that, developing a half dozen “must-haves.” A technological advance did not cause the disruption. Still, some simple changes in pricing and contracts protected its innovative, disruptor position with breakthrough brand-building and ongoing game-changing innovation.
Any brand can become a true challenger brand.
Interestingly, the brand that pulled off this innovation wasn’t Verizon or AT&T but the fourth-place player. Why? Because the industry leaders had too much to gain by sticking with the status quo. As a challenger brand, T-Mobile had less to lose and more to gain by disrupting the wireless category and doing what the other carriers do not: They put the customers’ needs ahead of ‘legacy as usual’.
Essays on experience strategy, the experience economy, and future thinking.
Thanks for reading.
Michael
I have a quick request. Please share this with colleagues so we can broaden our audience and opinions.