a new brand bargain: their own data in exchange for their own experience

are you ready? They are standing at your front desk posting pics of your very long line. They are sitting at a café across the street pinching photos of your bathrooms while texting reviews of their latest favorite cortado, made from beans with names. Their phones are navigating them to their preferred hotels with their special diet room service where they are forming passionate opinions they will share with thousands of friends some 3,000 miles away who look, in real time, at myBreakfast! #yourhotelname.

Your future guests have already arrived, but to what? On one hand, many hotels still charge for WIFI in a world of free access, still infuriate with hidden fees in a world of radical transparency, and in a landscape of unprecedented convenience, still place inoperable alarm clocks on nightstands that obstruct the room’s only outlet. On the other, some hotels have begun to meet the hard question head on: what happens when everyone is always watching? They mine social networks to try to predict how to improve their service. They know their guests better and they know the guests already know all about them. They know the guest has seen the real pics, has heard the real stories, has read the complaints and the raves. They acknowledge the unnerving fact: future guests are a network of

YOUr FUTUre gUeST

rogue researchers who pack an exploding sense of entitlement. Some hotels are beginning to realize that disparate, individually designed moments add up to something bigger—for both the guest and the market.These changes represent much more than free WIFI, more outlets in the rooms and an app for that. Your future guests

are arriving on a tidal wave of data. The same data that has powered a radically different experience

online and is transforming retail. Your future guests bring to your doorsteps expectations

of an endless stream of features and radical personalization. While all this information may seem just increased complexity, an entirely new dimension begins to develop when you bring intimate data into the interaction space between your guest and

your brand. How your brand addresses trust, transparency, control and value will

determine the nature of the relationship. When deeply personal information swirls into remote

databases everywhere, your future guest strikes a new brand bargain: their own data in exchange for their

own Experience. Your response to this request will make the difference in the market.

future guests are a network of

rogue researchers who pack an exploding sense of entitlement.

Your future guests have already arrived,

Your guests choose the brand willing to differentiate, to win them over, and to help them build their own social capital. The bargain made overt: “I know you know the stores I shop, the food I eat and where I eat it, even my current health. Show me you can make up for my tough trip. Customize my experience and personalize my room. Deliver things I didn’t even know about myself.” Customers will expect the ability to participate in designing a unique experience with a hospitality partner. They will assume you have gathered information about how to improve your product. They will offer explicit information and feedback to help you take the customization further. Your guests will not only expect increasing relevance, but experience dissatisfaction and frustration with the less relevant. As irrational as it may sound, they take it personally. They express their personal values in the brands they choose, and the experiences they co-design.

As your product extends beyond the bookends of check-in and check-out, even beyond the planning and unpacking, the moments you need to design multiply. You now have a constellation of touchpoints to design. This new guest path must expand what you currently think of as your product. You must find the flexibility to deliver very different experiences. The previous model accommodates episodic, linear change, not the exploding, splintering new expectations—not useful in predicting future expectations. You will need a new framework to organize and activate the bits & pieces of interactions and outputs that make up your guest’s experience with your

brand. You must architect the sum total of all that enables your brand and service vision--all of the people, tools, technologies, and processes in a moment-to-moment execution. The platform will allow the move from responsive through interactive to predictive. It is an evolution into a new breed of product-customer intimacy. And the resulting experiences will create a sustainable differentiation for your guests, already checked in and unpacked, and appearing on screens to sing lullabies to their children, who are your future guests, waking to a new and improved set of features and their own set of expectations.

customize my experience and personalize my room. deliver things i didn’t even know about myself.

YOU will need a new FramewOrk to organize and activate the bits & pieces of interactions and outputs that make up your guest’s experience with your brand.

frog works with the world’s leading companies, helping them to design, engineer, and bring to market meaningful products and services. With an interdisciplinary team of more than 600 designers, strategists, and software engineers, frog delivers connected experiences that span multiple technologies, platforms, and media. frog works across a broad spectrum of industries, including consumer electronics, telecommunications, healthcare, energy, automotive, media, entertainment, education, finance, retail, and fashion. Clients include Disney, GE, HP, Intel, Microsoft, MTV, Qualcomm, Siemens, and many other Fortune 500 brands. Founded in 1969, frog is headquartered in San Francisco, with locations in Amsterdam, Austin, Boston, Milan, Munich, New York, Seattle, and Shanghai. frog is a company of the Aricent Group, a global innovation and technology services firm.

www.frogdesign.com

© 2013 Aricent Group All rights reserved. All Aricent brand and product names are service marks, trademarks, or registered marks of Aricent Inc. in the United States and other countries.