Adding Organizational Value Through Designed Experiences
You can feel the energy before a BYU football game.
On the west side of LaVell Edwards Stadium, Canyon Road is closed to traffic. A band entertains the crowd while people play cornhole or giant-size chess. Others test golf simulators, queue at food trucks, and pose for caricatures or selfies. Kids slide on inflatables, then get their faces painted as the sugar rush begins.
Festivities peak with the spirited Cougar Walk, when the football team and staff march through the street into the stadium. “It’s exciting. Everyone wants to give the players high fives, the marching band is right behind them, and the coach gets everybody pumped up,” says Sean Firmage, a BYU Marriott experience design and management alumnus. “It’s the premium gameday experience.”
The high-energy event, dubbed Cougar Canyon, wasn’t always the norm. Pre-2019, tailgating was confined to a small area in the stadium’s west parking lot. And while there were booths offering some activities and free swag, it was more understated—with almost a farmers market feel. Firmage worked at BYU Athletics when the in-house marketing team decided to level up the pregame event. “We wanted to elevate that experience 10x,” says Firmage, who spent five years at BYU Athletics, mostly as an account executive. “We wanted to make it meaningful for fans—a top game experience in college football, not a dinky Utah college tailgate.”
Traditionally, tailgating is just as important to fans as the game itself. “We didn’t really have a good option for BYU fans,” Firmage says, “especially since alcohol isn’t part of the experience.”
But once again, Cougars highlighted how stone-cold sober can be fun. “Cougar Canyon is a bigger endeavor, especially closing off the street, but that makes it feel more special,” Firmage says. “I like to get there two hours before games just for Cougar Canyon.”
Firmage is no stranger to tailoring events for peak customer experiences. As regional director of partnerships for Live Nation—a position he landed early in 2023—he’s leveraged partnerships that enhance fans’ experiences at an array of venues across Colorado and Utah, including the Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre.
High-profile events, such as games or concerts, are typically associated with providing multifaceted experiences. However, more organizations—from tech to accounting—are realizing the value of good experiences, whether internally with employees or externally with clients. Internally, experiences can improve employee retention and boost creativity. Externally, experiences can build brand loyalty, and as Camilla Hodge, a BYU Marriott assistant professor of experience design and management, points out, “People tend to spend more money when there’s emotional engagement.”
Organizations are acknowledging this trend by adding chief experience officers to their C-suites. “That role is becoming more and more normal, which is a huge deal,” Firmage says. “BYU was ahead of the curve to establish an experience design major years ago.”
Wearing Your Heart on Your Wrist
On a shelf in Hodge’s Tanner Building office sits a small cube that holds 20 simple black heart rate monitors. They look a lot like fitness trackers, but these bands don’t track calories burned. Instead, they monitor emotional responses.
“The most basic definition of experience is an emotional response—some kind of cognitive or psychological response that drives somebody’s perception,” Hodge says.
The wearables track changes in cardiac rhythm, which is affected by oxytocin—released in the presence of emotional resonance and/or social bonding—and dopamine—released in response to novelty or reward stimulation. Hodge, who acknowledges that the wearables aren’t a perfect measurement tool, has used them to track responses in a variety of settings: online shopping, theater performances, movie premieres, theme parks, and even her own classroom in the Tanner Building.
“Changing cardiac rhythm is representative of this more complex neurological story—the narrative that a person is creating while going through an experience,” Hodge explains. “We can learn how someone is responding in a way they couldn’t fully articulate themselves.”
Experiences are common, says Mat Duerden, a BYU Marriott professor of experience design and management, but unpacking them, understanding them, and designing them is complex. Duerden points to traffic lights. More specifically, the feeling you have when you can’t remember if you stopped at one because you were on autopilot. “There are lots of experiences so ordinary that the attention you pay to them is fleeting,” he says. Capturing attention is important, he adds, but it’s also important that “people feel like the time or the attention they gave to an experience was time well spent.”
Whether subtle or straightforward, experiences—like goods, materials, products, or even services—drive the economy, Hodge says. “We’re in an economy that really values connection,” she continues. “You can create or increase the perceived value of your service, product, or experience by positioning it in a way that meets the need for connection.”
This experience-based economy means that people are interested in not just a staged experience but a guided transformation—time invested in an individual as the product. Duerden notes, “We all want to change and grow and progress.”
Dancing in the Data
For Naomi Clare Crellin, guiding clients to understand experiences “in this wildly shifting landscape of human connection” is her top priority as founder and CEO of Storycraft Lab in Washington, DC.
Whether she’s consulting Marriott International, Google, or a niche museum, Crellin is centered on using audience advocacy insights to inform strategic design—and she knows a good experience when she sees one. Recently, Crellin visited NASA’s Earth Information Center exhibit in DC with her coworker, Katy Mull. “It’s a small display of data, but it’s wonderfully visualized on-screen,” Crellin says.
The exhibit included a room with an immersive video display of Earth from the perspective of a satellite. “Visually, we saw all the data that NASA collects about the planet,” Crellin says. “We were in the dark, and there were projections on the walls. The voiceover was poetic. I felt very present and excited.”
As the presentation continued, suddenly Crellin recognized her silhouette in the video data display—and Mull’s silhouette next to her.
“We started to dance,” Crellin says. “We danced in the data projection. It allowed me to feel this wonderful connection with another human being and with the planet.”
It was a moving encounter for the two. “There are moments where we go into experiences and there’s a message that must be delivered,” Crellin says. “And then there are also moments where it’s okay to deliver a feeling. That can be just as valuable.”
Whether disseminating a message or a feeling, organizations must intentionally craft touch points—customer interactions, in person or online. These touch points help “ensure that you’re eliciting emotions that you want customers to have,” Hodge says.
Experience-centric organizations are more likely to provide uniform service—the experience feels the same across all channels and touch points, Duerden says. “I was talking about this with someone, and he said, ‘I’d love to fly with Delta but use American’s app to manage the process.’ We make those sacrifices sometimes because we don’t have the option of having well-designed experiences across all the touch points.”
Crellin often sees organizations approach experience design from a “What do we want to say to people?” perspective. But for the message to resonate, that goal needs to be paired with consideration of what the audience needs. “There needs to be some kind of intentional understanding of your audience’s humanity so you can successfully deliver,” she says.
An empathetic approach to the customer experience may not be the cheapest or the most efficient option, Firmage notes. “But we need to put customers first, and the more we do that, the more loyal they will be.”
Companies are also examining how they can help people feel like they belong to something exclusive in hopes of keeping them longer as customers, Firmage says. “That trend speaks to the power that experience designers have.” He points to his American Express card. “The fact my card is metal really means nothing, but I love it. It feels different, like I’m part of a club instead of just having a random credit card. I’m loyal to brands based on every touch point they provide.”
Visualizing an experience in terms of individual touch points is known as experience mapping or journey mapping—one of Duerden’s areas of expertise. Mapping doesn’t just apply to the immediate experience, he says. It can be broken out into anticipation, participation, and reflection phases: “What’s happening before an individual engages, what’s happening during, and what’s happening afterward,” he says.
An encounter—like Crellin’s at the NASA exhibit—can nudge people toward seeing an organization as more memorable, meaningful, and even transformative. Interactions can eventually get integrated into customers’ identities and worldviews. “This is why some people are passionate about why they go to Costco instead of Sam’s Club,” Duerden says.
Mandatory Fun
Workplace loyalty runs deeper than a love for free samples, although some experiences can leave a bad taste in employees’ mouths. Duerden’s research looks at how companies bring nonwork elements into the workplace, whether that looks like onsite rock-climbing gyms, cafés, or laundry facilities.
“Research shows there are benefits of allowing people to bring their whole selves to work,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean that you can force people to have fun at work.”
Duerden has found that office activities sometimes feel like assignments instead of amusement. “Employees have talked about this idea of fun-datory, mandatory fun,” he explains. “Experiences are individually perceived, and you have to understand what people’s needs are—not just their functional needs.”
Work became very separated from nonwork after the Industrial Revolution, Duerden notes. “Before that, most people lived on a farm, where work, leisure, and homelife mixed together. Starting in the 1980s, they gradually overlapped more due to technology and societal changes. Then COVID smashed everything together,” he says. “Now we’re trying to figure out how to peel them back apart—or if we need to.”
There’s give-and-take within the employee experience, Firmage says. “You make it too fun, and it’s hard to know if employees are working. You make it too rigid, and no one wants to stay. With more people willing to bounce from job to job, leaders must pay attention to the experience people are having. The younger generations expect some element of experience at work.”
Providing meaningful opportunities for employees—sorry, not everyone enjoys karaoke—pays off in several ways. Hodge says that connection between employees and managers can drive innovation and overall organizational success.
But the benefits don’t just stop there. “When organizations pay attention to employee experiences, they have less turnover, more engaged employees, more creative solutions, and better teamwork,” she says. “Basically, all of those perks then become predictors of revenue outcomes.”
Making the Magic
Whether getting a high five from Cosmo, dancing in a virtual data shower, enjoying “treat day” at work, or simply having an easy customer service interaction, a positive experience can have a lasting impact.
But the experience itself can only go so far. Promoting memorable experiences without intentionally evoking reflection is like planting seeds but never harvesting, Duerden says. “Research suggests that most people aren’t naturally reflective,” he adds. “When we help create moments that produce memories and then give people opportunities to reflect on and gain insight from them, those experiences are more likely to become lasting, meaningful moments.”
Experience designers, Crellin says, are the creators of culture, and she hopes leaders can better support this group of innovators and changemakers. “We help people do new things, which is often not easy, especially within large corporate landscapes,” she says.
Experiences are not just about pyrotechnics, lasers, or goodie bags, Crellin continues. “It’s also about having processes that enable designed experiences as they extend and touch organizational strategy.”
Well-designed experiences can also spark belonging. “They can shift our mindsets to a new way of doing, being, working, and engaging with the world. When they’re done well,” Crellin says, “they can feel like magic.”
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Diversify Family Activity Profiles
If organizations can benefit from well-designed experiences, so can families. Camilla Hodge points to an adage coined by Karen Melton, an associate professor at Baylor University: “Diversify the family activity profile.”
Hodge recommends that families intentionally and continually try new things—but there’s a caveat. “Don’t only do new things,” she advises. “Families still need predictable, consistent elements.”
For example, Hodge’s family loves spending time watching movies together over holiday breaks. “It’s a tradition,” she says. “But is our relationship developing if we’re not actually talking with one another? Not really, but we have this great, consistent touch point.”
To balance familiar rituals, Hodge will occasionally suggest new activities. One year, she proposed a family drive to visit relatives’ graves. The three-hour round trip brought her family closer together as they reminisced, comforted one another, and shared their heritage with nieces and nephews.
“Try to plan a variety of activities,” Hodge advises. “Mix low interaction with high interaction activities and balance novel with familiar.”
Four years ago, Hodge led a research team that focused specifically on siblings—a relationship often overlooked in academia. (In the United States, Hodge notes, people are more likely to grow up in a household with a sibling than with a father.) “The strongest predictor of relationship quality among college-aged siblings wasn’t the number of shared experiences they had, and it wasn’t the type of shared experiences they had,” she says. “It was how many different things they had done together.”
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Written by Emily Edmonds
