Demographic Shifts and Experience Design Implications: Boomers and Mobile Devices

Ongoing demographic shifts (in the Western world) have massive numbers of Baby Boomers, with large amounts of disposable income - "Projections from Met Life Market Institute show that by the time the last boomer turns 65 in 2030, the generation will control more than 40 percent of disposable income in the United States." (from Some Like It Hot) - aging rapidly. I think we're just beginning to see what happens when business and Design respond to the implications of these demographic and economic shifts by creating both new businesses, and new designs.

To some extent Design has a frame of reference for the changes on the way: accessibility is a concern we already know, that will become a jumping off point to deeper, more contextual and more powerful design drivers. I expect these will challenge designers to employ increasingly holistic approaches to creating integrated products / services / experiences. The Jitterbug cell phone from GreatCall is a good example of design that initially addressed the changing sensory and physical needs of Boomers, but then goes further into considering the entire mobile phone experience, from activation to configuration and daily use from the point of view of seniors and their expectations for relating to technology. The end result was a new business.

Baby boomers and their parents haven't been quick to adopt mobile phones, even for use in emergencies. The technology is too complicated for many to learn quickly, and the screens and controls too diminutive for aging or infirm hands. ...The Jitterbug offers big buttons, easy-to-read text, and simplified, easy-to-use functions, an ear cushion, and an ergonomic shape. Personalized services make it easy for users to retrieve messages, and offers live operators for call-related support.

The Jitterbug clearly shows accessibility as a modifier of already well-defined user experiences, and how design can adapt these experiences to meet different needs. But Boomer needs exceed the point where simply adapting an existing product experience with minor changes (not at the level of the mental model) is a solution. And so the demographic shift of Boomer aging inspired the creation of a new company, GreatCall, that designs integrated products, services, and experiences, like the Jitterbug Onetouch:

...The JitterBug Onetouch sports three oversized buttons for users who primarily want a cell phone for emergency purposes, such as elderly or disabled users who need to be able to summon assistance with the push of a single button. One button dials 911, one summons live-operator call assistance, and the third can be programmed for any service the user wants, such as an emergency number, a towing service reception at an assisted living facility, or a loved one.

Three buttons that connect to predefined emergency services is not what I think of as a mobile phone, but it makes perfect sense for this set of design needs.

More important, the Jitterbug makes apparent that traditional scenarios for understanding mobile phone use do not adequately apply to seniors and aging Boomer populations. As design professionals, we know these scenarios, personas, and other design models serve as the basis for entire business processes, including manufacturing, marketing, sales, and service, as well as whole businesses.

In terms of design and business responses to large cultural shifts, the Jitterbug shows that integrated experiences require integrated design approaches, which in turn require close integration and systems-based thinking from all the entities contributing to the overall experience in some way, from hardware through the Web based phone management software.

For two years, Jitterbug and Samsung's industrial designers collaborated before bringing the new phones to market. Samsung understood immediately that there was a potentially large market for this new concept in mobile phones, but they had to be sold on doing more than creating a novel handset: they had to be willing to design the product in tandem with Jitterbug's service system.

Harris: "For them (Samsung) it was a handset. For us, it was a system. The handset was just one element."

Result: The Jitterbug phone design is simplified due to the fact it is managed remotely through a Web-based interface. "It's not just the design of the handset, or what the call centers do, it's all about the entire experience,"

From Jitterbug Phone Designed for Seniors, and Selling Technology to Baby Boomers & Seniors.

local tags: baby_boomers, demographics, design_thinking, holistic_thinking, mobile, systems_thinking

The Importance of Customer Experience During Mergers

Mergers and acquisitions activity in 2006 reached record levels, and it's likely that the pace will increase in 2007.

In the midst of the epic deal-making, companies should look beyond immediate benefits for shareholders and executives, and pay very close attention to the impact of mergers (and other major organizational shifts) on customer experiences. Why? Because acquired customers are easily lost.

Mergers and acquisitions create transition points, moments when avoidable customer experience mistakes sour once strong relationships with loyal customers of an acquired company, and they depart permanently. This is doubly unfortunate: the right customer experience can bridge old and new for acquired customers, and provide reassuring continuity during times of substantial flux in areas such as brands and identities, corporate cultures, organizational structures, supporting enterprise architectures and systems, even customer service procedures.

Well-managed customer experiences offer two kinds of specific benefits. The first benefit is an unexpected (and thus more powerful) refutation of established wisdom from across industries that defines post-merger service expectations as bad. Consider these two examples:

From If more US airlines merge, who would benefit?:

Aviation analysts like Kevin Mitchell of the Business Travel Coalition in Radnor, Pa. ... argues that a flurry of mergers right now would raise prices, overcrowd already-packed planes, and create chaos for customer service for years to come precisely because it is so difficult to merge aviation corporate cultures.

"Of course, Wall Street is going to push it," he says. "What's good for investors, shareholders, and management may not be good for others: Lots of employees will be laid off, and customers can look forward to 20 to 30 percent price hikes and several years of customer-service [misery]."

And this from FCC clears AT&T merger:

Natalie Billingsley, a supervisor with the California Public Utilities Commission's Division of Ratepayer Advocates, which advocates for consumer interests, said the new concessions improved the outlook for AT&T and BellSouth customers. But she said consumers would have been better off if the merger had not been approved and expressed skepticism that customer service would improve.

"You hope that service will improve, but it hasn't been seen with prior mergers," she said.

The second benefit is balancing the service disruptions common to post-merger integration (sometimes collision is the better word) efforts with a positive experience oriented toward the longer term. This is especially important for acquired customers, who lack examples of how the acquiring company handles customer relationships, and need surety regarding it's intentions.

Enterprise business process, information architecture, and technology integrations (your SAP or mine...) are notably prone to conflicts that can disrupt customer experiences in dramatic and unexpected ways. Much of the disruption is easily managed in advance by communicating upcoming changes to customers. The rest is best handled by the customer experience equivalent of the detour. While the details may prove complex behind the scenes, the basic idea is very simple: tell acquired customers that things used to work one way, explain that they now work another, then show them how, and support them through the required changes.

Because the idea is so simple, organizations that fail to anticipate and respond to customer experience disruptions during integration efforts neglect the basics of building sound relationships with acquired customers. Neglecting acquired customers from the beginning is a good indicator that the new organization places low value on customer relationships in general. With bad experiences during botched transitions, customer satisfaction declines, relationships sour, and loyal customers leave.

Snapshot of a Disrupted Experience

AmericanBank recently acquired MegaBank, and integrated the two companies' on-line banking tools. These tools served credit card customers, in addition to banking customers. But since neither MegaBank nor AmericanBank communicated information or plans about the merger (no detour...) to MegaBank credit card customers, the stream of personally addressed emails issued from mysterious sources inside AmericanBank looked exactly like a credit card fraud spam broadcast designed to snare the unwary.

Following the email broadcasts, AmericanBank abruptly redirected traffic from the MegaBank account portal to the AmericanBank website, without notifying MegaBank customers of the switch, thereby mimicking another common tactic in fraud efforts - the decoy log-in screen intended to extract user IDs and passwords from unsuspecting visitors, who do not recognize the difference between the legitimate and fake log-in gateways.

More disruptive for MegaBank customers was AmericanBank's decision to erase their log-in names and then create new user names in those cases where MegaBank log-ins happened to duplicate those of existing Bank of America customers, effectively displacing them. This particular change would have been troublesome with adequate communication, since user names and passwords present extensive usability and memory challenges, but again AmericanBank failed to notify MegaBank customers of the changes.

As icing on the cake, AmericanBank created new passwords for MegaBank credit card customers as well, again without notification. The combination of new log-ins and new passwords made it impossible for MegaBank credit card customers to access any of AmericanBank's on-line account management functions.

MegaBank customers trying to use their normal on-line account management tools experienced this series of integration steps as spam broadcasts, hijacked navigation, recognition failure, displacement, and a password recovery loop leading to account lock-out. The only way to sort it out and regain access was a laborious staged phone call that revealed the regular to customer service channels couldn't handle on-line access problems.

In the end, MegaBank customers incurred direct costs in the form of service charges to make payments by phone while locked out of the on-line system, late fees for missing payments while sorting out the account access issues, and punitive interest rate raises based on automated application of contract rules triggered by late payments. The complete reckoning includes additional indirect costs in the form of frustration, confusion, wasted time, and the effort required to find a substitute credit card servicer.

All in all, the customer experience of the AmericanBank and MegaBank integration provided clear signs of:

• misaligned business structures


• mismanaged integration


• an unbalanced short term outlook


• poor relationship management


• punishing customers for bad business decisions

From the perspective of an acquired customer, it's easy to recognize these as symptoms of internal ill health, manifest as indifference or ill will toward customers. Which equates to strong incentive to leave in 2006, and not return in 2007.

local tags: customer_experience, enterprise, integration, mergers, relationship_management

My New Swedish Friends: Context, Mystery, and Discontinuities in The IKEA Product Naming System, Part 2

For me, the cumulative contextual gap became too great to bridge. The intensity of so many new things made my own substituted context insufficient to maintain the texture of meaning in my home - one of the most personal and significant of settings.

The IKEA Brand

A well-developed brand evokes specific emotional resonances, and does so consistently with each customer's experiences. Brand designers and marketers carefully choose emotions based on the personality the brand should establish, and the business goals behind it. Brands often try to create connections to the deeply rooted psycho-personal concepts and constructs that shape our basic ways of thinking and feeling. Brands attempt to become associated with "identity", "lifestyle", or in the case of IKEA, "home". The IKEA brand is built on associations with cost-consciousnes s, design sensibility, unconventionality, and ecological awareness. Showcased in the IKEA products furnishing one's home, these associations are meant to serve as evidence of an outlook and set of priorities for life in general.

Ambition is one thing, and success quite another. Yet by all measures, IKEA's brand is successful: in addition to superb sales and profitability (secured by the arcane corporate structures that shield IKEA from taxation), it commands tremendous customer loyalty, and inspires irrational behavior that borders on blindly devoted. I create funny stories about the meanings of product names to ease the mysteries of their origins. But other seasoned American retail customers like Roger Penguino and Stacy Powell camp in front of about-to-open IKEA stores for weeks in order to win prizes of modest value.

When Roger Penguino heard Ikea was offering $4,000 in gift certificates to the first person in line at the opening of its new Atlanta store, he had no choice. He threw a tent in the back of his car and sped down to the site. There, the 24-year-old Mac specialist with Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) pitched camp, hunkered down, and waited. And waited. Seven broiling days later, by the time the store opened on June 29, more than 2,000 Ikea fanatics had joined him.

From Ikea: How the Swedish Retailer became a global cult brand

The Flat-pack Religion: Mysterious Faith

Penguino's behavior is unusual by normal standards, perhaps even fanatical, but not unique among IKEA customers.

Christy Powell, 48, camped out for eight nights before the opening of a new Ikea store on Interstate 10 at Antoine in Houston, Texas. Her quest to claim a US$ 10,000 prize meant she sat through sizzling heat, a violent thunderstorm and the din of builders finishing the car park. By the day of the opening, the queue behind Powell had swelled to 700. After a 192-hour wait, she bought just 12 plates and bowls for $18 plus tax.

From Is IKEA For Everyone?

Powell and Penguino's stories make the IKEA brand's capacity to inspire people clear. Inspiration is a rare achievement for many religions, let alone a consumer brand. Inspired religious believers test their faith(s) in ways often incomprehensible and certainly too numerous to count. At heart all these demonstrations address the same goal of affirming the consistency of a system of beliefs through personal experience. Like the pilgrim who travels from afar and waits in penitential devotion for entry to a temple or sacred site, IKEA shoppers endure traffic jams, and long lines (in the parking lot, in the store, in the warehouse, to load purchases into cars...) to pay for the privilege of membership in the global community of IKEA.

Penguino is a citizen of IKEA World, a state of mind that revolves around contemporary design, low prices, wacky promotions, and an enthusiasm that few institutions in or out of business can muster. Perhaps more than any other company in the world, Ikea has become a curator of people's lifestyles, if not their lives. At a time when consumers face so many choices for everything they buy, Ikea provides a one-stop sanctuary for coolness. It is a trusted safe zone that people can enter and immediately be part of a like-minded cost/design/environmentally-sensitive global tribe. There are other would-be curators around -- Starbucks and Virgin do a good job -- but Ikea does it best.

From Ikea: How The Swedish Retailer Became a Global Cult Brand

However well IKEA may understand my lifestyle - or at least the set of products that might fit into my lifestyle and home furnishing needs - my experiences of disorientation and a sense of being confronted with the alien within an intimate setting are not the sorts of emotions customarily attached to a successful brand. To dispel part of the mystery of this persistent discontinuity, I set off to find out more about where my new Swedish friends came from: It's a secretive place, full of interconnected and opaque systems.

A World of Systems

Many religions combine elements of mystery and the inexplicable with high levels of systematicity (a particular recipe the discipline of comparative religion works to understand and articulate). In the same way that brands can parallel religions in their capacity to inspire non-rational behavior, brands parallel religions by showing characteristics of systems. From a systems perspective, a brand is a larger whole made up of interconnected emotional associations and psychologically charged concepts that customers experience through many moments, spread across diverse channels and environments (online or transactional, advertising, services, packaging, language, etc.). IKEA's chosen values - ecological awareness, design sensibility, cost-consciousness - combine together to characterize a modern outlook that balances the enjoyment of novelty and design-enhanced consumerism with longer-term goals. In this system, IKEA partisans can have fun, without sacrificing the future - their own or everyone else's. It's a solid compromise that demonstrates the classic characteristics of a viable system (more on this shortly).

On closer examination, this sort of systems thinking permeates IKEA's enterprise at every level, from design, operations, and logistics to it's financial and legal structures. And it happens on gigantic scales: rather than achieve success in a single category of life accessories, IKEA's avowed is aim to create a comprehensive range of products for the home (perhaps a totality?), as founder Ingvar Kamprad says explicitly in his tract, 'The Testament of a Furniture Dealer'.

"The objective must be to encompass the total home environment; that is, to offer furnishings and fittings for every part of the home whether indoors or outdoors ... It must reflect our way of thinking by being as simple and straightforward as we are ourselves. It must be durable and easy to live with. It must reflect an easier, more natural and unconstrained way of life"
From IKEA: The Philosophy

To realize Kamprad's goal of comprehensiveness on the level of the individual customer experience, IKEA presents products within an enveloping physical environment of massive scale and all-embracing completeness, synthesizing a bizarre Sims-style furnitureverse that customers navigate via pre-determined paths wending seemingly at random through an endless fractal conglomeration of minutely detailed, yet wholly contrived, living settings.

What enthralls shoppers and scholars alike is the store visit -- a similar experience the world over. The blue-and-yellow buildings average 300,000 square feet in size, about equal to five football fields. The sheer number of items -- 7,000, from kitchen cabinets to candlesticks -- is a decisive advantage. "Others offer affordable furniture," says Bryan Roberts, research manager at Planet Retail, a consultancy in London. "But there's no one else who offers the whole concept in the big shed." ...The furniture itself is arranged in fully accessorized displays, down to the picture frames on the nightstand, to inspire customers and get them to spend more. The settings are so lifelike that one writer is staging a play at Ikea in Renton, Wash.

From Ikea: How The Swedish Retailer Became a Global Cult Brand

Overall, one experiences the IKEA store as a self-guided tour through a hybrid landscape composed of deserted last-man-alive-on-earth-sitcom-sets, and impromptu shanty towns created by unseen populations of refugees fleeing brush wars and guerilla conflicts deep in the interior design, home-decor, and catalog-shopping hinterlands. And like all things IKEA, these settings inspire unusual behavior, such as the guerilla filming of Real World satire skits.

Extractive Architectures

Anyone who's visited an IKEA store understands the obvious parallels to other well-known architectures of control, such as casinos (also here, including a comment that cites the IKEA parallel, [found while researching this post]) and amusement parks. I call this specific variant an 'extractive architecture' since the common objective of these forms designed to separate visitors from the outside world - environmental cues like weather and daylight, or social chronological frames of reference - is to cocoon patrons in a fantastical alternate reality that enhances the amount of time / money / attention the creators can extract from their visitors as they pass through.

The logistics behind the massive IKEA stores also reflect system thinking on truly gigantic scales: the IKEA shopping experience relies on a global network of automated warehouses and distribution centers as large as 180,000 cubic meters in size. In aggregate, these buildings - there are 27 of them - would make the list of largest buildings in the world. Naturally, IKEA exerts control over the infrastructure for this strange realm in the same fastidious fashion.

For Want of A Nail, The Kingdom Was Put On Back Order

Given the effort and attention to detail required to create and supply this all-embracing (and also artificial) context and tune it to an extractive purpose, the uncomfortable and challenging strangeness of IKEA's product names seems like a discontinuity in the otherwise smooth continuum of the IKEA brand. Or, if IKEA's product names are not carefully managed - meaning little or no effort goes into choosing them - then the practice of naming products is the one aspect of the IKEA experience not to be thought through and carefully designed from start to finish. Which is a discontinuity at a more fundamental level.

Perhaps the most common form of discontinuity IKEA customers experience is simple lack of product availability.

Ikea owns 27 distribution centres like this across the globe, cavernous warehouses where flatpack boxes make their only stop between supplier and store. The system is designed to operate with mathematical precision to shave away at costs. When a Faktum wardrobe is bought at Brent Park, the cash till registers the purchase; the purchases add up until they trigger a warning that stocks are running low; and the message is passed electronically up the line to the nearest distribution centre, from where more can be dispatched. There is no waste of time, effort, or money. The system is perfect.

Except, of course, that it isn't - or at least it wasn't the last time I tried to buy a Lycksele sofabed. Ironically for a company so committed to tolerating mistakes, Ikea appears to have automated Kamprad's ethic of frugality to such a degree that the tiniest human error now cascades through the system, magnifying itself and sparking havoc. A shopfloor worker at Brent Park forgets to mark down that a box has been damaged and thrown out; the automatic trigger is never sent; a shipment of several hundred boxes remains undispatched from the warehouse - and an angry customer ends up driving back home along London's North Circular, cursing Ikea bitterly once more.

From The miracle of Älmhult

Discontinuities within comprehensive systems, like tax code loopholes, the backdoor in WOPR's programming in Wargames or Neo's special powers in The Matrix, matter because they signal internal inconsistency; and often presage changes in system state from stability to instability. Unstable systems often exhibit low viability, meaning they are not "organized in such a way as to meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment". In simpler language, discontinuity often signals and leads to failure.
Emotional and experiential systems such as brands rely on very high levels of internal consistency. They must exhibit stability and viability at all levels, and across all touch points, especially the context sensitive areas of vocabulary and naming that form much of the linguistic aspects experience of a brand. Given the sensitivity and significance of cultural context, IKEA's refusal to translate its product names seems counterproductive. However, persuading - or compelling - people to speak your language in preference to their own is one step toward persuading or compelling them to think from your frame of reference. Evangelists of all varieties know this well, and so does IKEA.

The Ikea path to self-fulfilment is not, really, a matter of choice. "They have subtle techniques for encouraging compliance," argues Joe Kerr, head of the department of critical and historical studies at the Royal College of Art. "And in following them you become evangelists for Ikea. If you look at [police] interrogation techniques, for example, you see that one of the ways you break somebody's will is to get them to speak in your language. Once you've gone to a shop and asked for an Egg McMuffin, or a skinny grande latte, or a piece of Ikea furniture with a ludicrous name, you're putty in their hands."

From The miracle of Älmhult

Still, forcing me to speak a foreign language at random does nothing to convert me to your way of thinking. Like medieval Catholics who recited the liturgy in Latin without comprehending it, I may appear to be a convert to IKEA's wacky religion by referring to my new Swedish friends using the hard-to-pronounce and impossible-to-spell-properly-with-an-English-keyboard names they inherited from their homeland, when in reality I am merely mouthing the phonemes of a sacrament I do not in the least understand.

With a little research, I discovered there is a system for naming IKEA's products:

"There is a system," Maria Vinka, one of Ikea's 11 in-house product designers, is saying, wedged into an easy chair in Älmhult's own branch of Ikea, as she attempts to explain the fiendishly complex logic by which the company names its products. "For bathrooms, it's Norwegian lakes. Kitchens are boys, and bedrooms are girls. For beds, it's Swedish cities. There's a lady who sits there and comes up with new names, making sure there isn't a name that means something really ugly in another language. But it doesn't always work. We gave a bed a name that means 'good lay' in German."

From The miracle of Älmhult

All of the many systems comprising the IKEA enterprise seem opaque to varying degrees. The ownership structures that channel IKEA's massive revenues and profits to destinations unknown, and shield the interlinked companies from taxation, regulation, and oversight are especially convoluted, and serve to maintain very low levels of transparency and tight control by Ivar Kamprad and his family.

...Kamprad set about creating a business structure of arcane complexity and secrecy. Today, therefore, The Ikea Group is ultimately owned by the Stichting Ingka Foundation, a charitable trust based in the Netherlands. A separate company, Inter Ikea Systems, owns Ikea's intellectual property - its concept, its trademark, its product designs. In a labyrinthine arrangement, Inter Ikea Systems then makes franchise deals with The Ikea Group, allowing it to manufacture and sell products. "The big question is who owns Inter Ikea Systems," says Stellan Björk, a Swedish journalist, who in 1998 wrote a book, never translated into English, detailing the extraordinary opacity of the company's organisation and the extent of its tax avoidance. The answer to Björk's question seems to be that no one knows. "It seems to be owned by various foundations and offshore trusts," Björk says - some based in the Caribbean - "through which the family controls it." The motivation behind all this mystery, the company insists, "was to prevent Ikea being split up after his [Kamprad's] death [and] to ensure the long term survival of Ikea and its co-workers."

From The miracle of Älmhult

And further:

The IKEA trademark and concept is owned by Inter IKEA Systems, another private Dutch company, but not part of the Ingka Holding group. Its parent company is Inter IKEA Holding, registered in Luxembourg. This, in turn, belongs to an identically named company in the Netherlands Antilles, run by a trust company in Curaçao. Although the beneficial owners remain hidden from view--IKEA refuses to identify them--they are almost certain to be members of the Kamprad family.

From IKEA: Flat-pack accounting

A Little Help From My New Swedish Friends
In Part 1 of this essay, I talked about the mysterious context of IKEA product names, how I'd developed a habit of recontextualizing the names of the IKEA products, and ended by noting that after encountering too many at once, the names became a source of discomfort rather than inspiration for whimsical enjoyment.

In this second part, I went looking for some information on IKEA's product naming practices to bridge this gap. I found out that IKEA chooses names as prosaically as most other household accessories designers shepherding a brand experience for retail consumers; by borrowing from the deep and localized reservoirs of their root culture. I also found a series of interconnected but opaque systems - financial, logistical, philosophical, branding, experiential - that show their own strange form of symmetry and internal consistency.

I'm left feeling a bit like an IKEA shopper who's completed their first trip through one of the iconic blue and yellow stores, and is now outside, blinking in the sunlight, bemused and a bit puzzled by the comprehensive strangenesses I've just encountered, but looking forward to spending some time with my new Swedish friends.

PS: If you're wondering what the future holds for IKEA consider this:

The Ikea concept has plenty of room to run: The retailer accounts for just 5% to 10% of the furniture market in each country in which it operates. More important, says CEO Anders Dahlvig, is that "awareness of our brand is much bigger than the size of our company." That's because Ikea is far more than a furniture merchant. It sells a lifestyle that customers around the world embrace as a signal that they've arrived, that they have good taste and recognize value. "If it wasn't for Ikea," writes British design magazine Icon, "most people would have no access to affordable contemporary design." The magazine even voted Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad the most influential tastemaker in the world today.

From Ikea: How The Swedish Retailer Became a Global Cult Brand

PPS: For reference, IKEA names products in the following fashion:

• Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish place names


• Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names


• Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names


• Bookcase ranges: Occupations


• Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays


• Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names


• Chairs, desks: men's names


• Materials, curtains: women's names


• Garden furniture: Swedish islands


• Carpets: Danish place names


• Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, sailors' language


• Bed linen, bedcovers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones


• Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives


• Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms


• Kitchen utensils (cutlery, crockers, textiles, glass, porcelain, tablecloths, candles, serviettes, decorative articles, vases etc.): foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions


• Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames

Translation from original in German by Margaret Marks

local tags: brand, contextualization, customer_experience, ikea, systems_theory

My New Swedish Friends: Context, Mystery, and Discontinuities in The IKEA Product Naming System

I used to think of each IKEA product I brought home as a sort of foreign house guest. They came from a far away country. Each was different than the others in size, shape, and appearance. And all had names I didn't understand and couldn't associate with anything familiar. Some of these guests left soon after they arrived. But many - the ones that fit in well with the rest of the household - stayed longer. These joined the group I call "my new Swedish friends".

A name should carry some depth of meaning; it should tell you about the friend it identifies. But my new Swedish friends had mysterious names that told me little about them. To make up for this disconcerting lack of context, I created my own stories and meanings to enrich their quirky names. Imagining the story behind the name of each new arrival became part of the ritual of welcoming them into the home.

Cast of Characters

Here are the meanings I imagined for the names of several of my new Swedish friends:

Lekman

A comic-book villain in the Swedish version of Superman

Grundtal

Original name of the monster in Beowolf

Kvartal

How you feel after drinking too much and taking a taxi home over a bumpy road.

Anno

The mascot of the Swedish National Park system. Wears a pointy gnome hat.

Noen

Breakfast bread typically served with preserved fruit spreads; popular with retired Uncles.

Aspudden

An unpleasant medical condition treated with pungent ointments

Kvadrant

Quality control instrument for steam-engines used by boiler makers

Expedit

Replaces "Schnell!" when Das Boot is dubbed into Swedish

Stolmen

Botany term identifying a plant part that the Victorians illustrated in comprehensive horticultural guides, but permitted only married scientists above the age of 45 to view while under direct supervision from technical librarians

Variera

The weather in Stockholm during early spring

Rationell

An underground art-film collective active during the height of the Swedish Beat Movement, in the late 50's.

Stave

Notorious industrialist and briefcase manufacturer in the Prewar era

Kludd

A folk-music instrument played by minstrels in the Middle Ages

Komers

Last name of a famous aviator: Tom Selleck met this man with while prepping to film "High Road To China". Like many Swedes, Komers was taciturn; however, this does not account for Selleck's terrible performance.

Snitta

Slang for bitchy

Ordning

Standard name for the Auditing department in large companies

Assigning a story or meaning to each name became an anticipated, necessary step in the cycle of choosing, buying, installing / assembling, using, and then accepting each IKEA product. Whether humorous, whimsical, or simply random, creating context for the products made them ordinary and familiar.

Context Is King
In terms of customer experiences and consumer practices, this behavior is re-contextualizing products with an existing context, one that for some reason is not sufficient or acceptable. For each product, I created a web of cultural associations - albeit fictionalized ones - to replace the expected but missing network of connections I've come to expect and rely on to make judgements about the things I incorporate into my life.

Why does the missing context for simple household items matter? Part of my habit comes from the fact that I enjoy making up stories and speculating about the provenance of all sorts of things: it's part of explaining the world as I find it. Crafting stories for their origins also offsets the frustrations of being a consumer left to manage everyday household needs with strangely incomplete items, like shelves sold without mounting screws, or curtain rods not packaged with hanging hooks. Knowing something's origin - even if I'd just made it up out of whole cloth ten minutes ago - gave me a modest positive feeling of surity and confidence when confronted with the unknown.

Stories About Rome Not Being Built In a Day Were Not Built In a Day: Or, The Effect of Intensity On Cultural Fabrics

The IKEA brand evokes a strong set of values and an outlook on lifestyle decisions that is well known and easily recognized. Those values and the implied outlook successfully transfer to the individual products sold by IKEA. Thanks to the umbrella of the IKEA brand, the lack of context for my new Swedish friends wasn't troubling. As long as we were introduced one at a time.

But ersatz culture is not as durable and satisfying as the real thing, as the creators of fantastic constructs of all types know well [MMOG, Yugoslavia, Iraq]. While moving and fitting out a new living space with home office furniture, kitchen accessories and many other inventive and affordable , I met *many* new Swedish friends *all at once*. Bringing so many IKEA products home emphasized their strangeness in a challenging way. In response, I made up quite a few new stories in rapid succession, to knit them into the fabric of the familiar.

Still, I was troubled because I was aware of having to make up so many stories at the same time. And since I'd just moved, the larger environment that had to incorporate so much newness in a concentrated dose was itself in flux. End result: the influx of the cumulative strangeness of names, the substitution of artificial context for real, and the intensity of newness on several levels outweighed the strength of the contextual associations my new friends retained from IKEA's brand.

To be continued in Part 2

local tags: brand, contextualization, customer_experience, ikea, systems_theory

A Tale of Three Dustbusters

What follows is a brief tale of customer distress and redemption, featuring a cast of characters including several well-known players in modern drama:

• Sir Quality Control Failure


• Queen Fickle CRM


• King Unstable Supply Chain Management


• the Sinister Duke Conflicting Master Data, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder

Fret not readers, for this yarn has a happy ending in a windfall for yours truly.

Chapter 1: Sir Quality Control Failure
For a brief period in 2005, JoeLamantia.com happily relied on a Dustbuster to help keep things neat and tidy. When the machine died suddenly after two months of service, we felt sadness at having placed faith in yet another defective consumer good. These feelings turned to relief when Black and Decker promised to send a replacement within "7 to 10 days".

Chapter 2: Queen Fickle CRM
Four weeks went by. We called again: our records had been "lost", so another order was placed. Emotionally unreliable CRM systems will sometimes decide to break up with you, but - lacking the confidence to tell you directly - leave you find out in awkward ways like this. Not to worry for us, however, we would have another dustbuster in "7 to 10 days".

Chapter 3: King Chronically Unstable Supply Chain Management
Four weeks passed. When we called again, the ordering system was down for the weekend, and no information was available. While their enterprise class SCM system with five nines uptime was out, the magic of post-it notes - which rarely experience down time, except during periods of humid weather - allowed Black and Decker to assure us we would receive a replacement in "7 to 10 days".

Chapter 4: Duke Conflicting Master Data
Four weeks passed, leaving JoeLamantia.com sorely in need of dustbusting capability. We called a fourth time, to learn our replacement was on back order, and would arrive in "7 to 10 days". As a courtesy, we'd been upgraded to a more powerful model - presumably to help us pick up all the dust accumulated over the past three months.

Chapter 5: Windfall, and Happy Ending
The next day, we found three dustbusters, all different models, shipped from different places, with different order numbers, and different customer IDs on the labels, waiting on the front porch.

Windfall

local tags: customer_relationships, enterprise