Behavior Space

Play, Pleasure and Discovery as a Model for Business Value

Alexander Manu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409446842
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317175629
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Behavior Space proposes that corporations do not design products or services anymore: they design behavior spaces. Facebook is not a product, not a technology, but a behavior space. Innovation is the creation of a new behaviour space. The product or service is simply the catalyst that enables a new behavior space to emerge. The size of the behaviour space footprint, represents the potential value a product or service offers; the greater the value potential, the greater the monetization potential. Alexander Manu illustrates how these new concepts are transforming design and product development so that the process changes from a static and product-centred approach to one that is entirely centred on the user and their behaviours that emerge as they interact with what they have bought. He provides a new language to describe the way in which the physical, intellectual and emotional features of products and services achieve a relationship between the user and the brand. And he explains the concept of Play Value, which underpins the attraction for customers and depends on compelling experiences that are challenging, rewarding and absorbing; that never frustrate and that encourage repeated use. Designers and brand managers seeking to understand and exploit commercially the fundamental changes in consumers that are driven by technology, experience and social interaction will find Behavior Space a wonderful place to start.

1
The Business of Behavior Space

Introduction

SO WHAT WENT WRONG HERE?

What can we learn from this? And how is it applicable to your business? This was not a mere product launch on January 9, 2007. It was the launch of a new behavior space. The launch of a new ecosystem in the mobile device category, an ecosystem inclusive of new behaviors, new places to play in, and new devices to play on. The San Francisco event was the launch of a new corporate strategy. It was the explicit declaration of a strategic ambition, the ambition of creating and dominating an emerging new space.

The list of what went wrong might include hubris, arrogance, ignorance—the lack of methods and practice in seeing and understanding the behavioral disruption the iPhone represented. Success builds arrogance, and hubris, but it should never build ignorance of the shifting landscape; rather it should build expertise in the analysis, understanding and riding of the shift in one’s own market space. It is common for companies to miss shifts in their business landscape: Microsoft did it with the advent of the Internet, and famously IBM, after the introduction of the PC. Sam Palmisano, former COO and CEO of IBM, declared candidly: “We invented the PC but viewed it incorrectly. We saw it as a gadget, a personal productivity tool. Unlike Intel and Microsoft, we didn’t see it as a platform. We missed the shift. So the lesson to me is you cannot miss the shifts. You have to move to the future.”¹

Indeed, one has to move to the future, fast and furious. But how? And along what coordinates? This book proposes a number of them. And it all starts with understanding the nature of the shift not in product development terms, but in strategic terms. From understanding to action, the path for the incumbents might have looked like this:

• understanding the business of behavior space

• understanding the behavior context

• the design dimensions and the compelling experience imperative

• capitalizing on the need for play

• relearning work, pleasure and motivation

• make foresight a core capability and transformation a daily passion

• make unlearning a core competence

• redesigning the work experience and designing from the inside out

• redesigning the business model

1. Understanding the business of behavior space

The first lesson is that market leaders cannot afford miss the shift in the behavior context, shift that occurs every time a new behavior space is introduced.

Apple’s press release was the precise outline of a new behavior space—a space made possible by the device itself, as well as by the ecosystem that includes the App Store, the SDK (software developer kit), the third-party applications, and a large developer community. Apple defined the blueprint for a space in which devices and their users can now behave in a new way. For any competitor the challenge was not that of competing with a device, but that of competing with a behavior space strategy.

In strategic terms, the introduction of the iPhone was a disruption of an existing behavior space—mobile phone calls, push/pull email messages, web browsing, music and other media on a handheld device. Each of the announced features of the iPhone was expanding the footprint of the mobile phone behavior space, thus creating a new behavior space.

Apple introduced an operating system built specifically for the mobile experience, and as soon as the device became popular, they revealed the next level of the strategy: the App Store. The device was now a mobile computing platform, capable of being customized with any number of free or affordable applications. Each of these applications represents a different behavior: the touch screen invites interaction, the music store invites contemplation, the email messenger invites communication, the Huffington Post invites up-to-date news commentary, and so on. The platform that allows all of these behaviors to take place is the iPhone device, which cannot be seen simply as just a “product,” but it has to be understood as a platform for behavior: a behavior space.

Was the competition up for this challenge? The answer is no. While the iPhone behavior space strategy was transparent from the beginning, the competition failed to understand its characteristics as any different from what they were competing with already. They looked at the iPhone as being just another device.

Most disturbing for a public company, was the complacency of the market incumbents—Nokia and RIM—after the introduction of the iPhone in June of 2007. The incumbents focused wrongly on the volume of sets sold, and on the number of subscriptions signed each month, as measures of success in a market that by now was valuing different metrics: product desirability, ease of use, fun, and pleasure while in use. In other words, the depth of engagement with the behavior space, represented by the device, the applications store, and the applications themselves.

Nokia and RIM simply did not “get” the iPhone, and had a sense of exemption from competing with it. The iPhone was below them, a singular product from a new entrant in the market, and one that had no previous experience in the telecommunications industry. How can you feel threaten by this little toy? Yes, it looks clean and well designed, but it does not look like a “business device.” So, for the first two years of the iPhone, 2007–2009, both companies forgot about it. When visiting one of the incumbents in September 2009, I was stunned to realize that none of my interlocutors—developers, product managers, UI specialists, strategists—had ever used either the iPhone or the iTouch. These products—a worldwide phenomenon by the time of my visit—were no more than a theory to them.

2. Understanding and responding to the emerging behavior Context

The dynamics of behavior form a system in permanent change and adaptation. A new behavior space changes the dynamic, due to both the evolving nature of the people using it, and also with the evolving nature of the device itself. The user and the device are involved in a behavior cycle; the cycle once completed by the satisfaction of a user’s goals, the user is now looking for more goals to be satisfied by the device—or the technology. It is in this “looking for more” goals to satisfy that the economic impact of a behavior space is felt.

The smartphone market shifted again as soon as the Apple introduced the App Store, a move that allowed users to interact with the company in new ways, and for new reasons. The app phenomenon introduced the iPhone as a platform for behavior—more behavior possible through applications, more satisfaction gained by users, and more monetization potential for Apple and third-party application developers. And all of this was not possible yet on the BlackBerry.²

RIM responded with BlackBerry devices that felt like overcooked vegetable dishes, with too many ingredients that don’t work together. To the original secure email device, RIM added lots of new media applications the operating platform was not designed for. It is as if someone at RIM took a look at the iPhone and said “We can do that! We can add applications on our products just like you have.” Problem is that the applications of the iPhone were designed from the inside out, while the BlackBerry developers added them from the outside in. Designing from the inside would have been RIM’s measure of agility, which is an organization’s ability in four domains:

1. The ability to act on intelligence received from the field (from the periphery of the business, from media reports, from unfolding signal maps, from consultants, and so on).

2. The ability to unlearn legacy processes.

3. The ability to reshape legacy supply chains.

4. The ability to reframe and rethink tools and metrics.

When behavior spaces shift, it is critical that competitors shift with them. Kodak invented digital cameras, but tried to defend the film business and lost the new market to Japanese competitors. When the executive suite tries to defend and extend the old success formula after a market shifts, only bad things happen. When new products are designed with the intention of defending and extending old products, new sales do not emerge’.³ Competitors introducing changes in the behavior context kill the pioneer, and a new demographic emerges, which holds new sources of value as prerequisites for a product’s viability. The demographic that embraced mobile computing and communications is the demographic of the millennial. No longer satisfied with products that just work, the millennial is looking for products that allow for self-expression, for participation in their own community of interest, and for new and multiple layers of engagement. What the millennial is looking for is a compelling experience in the products and services they purchase and use.

3. The design dimension and the compelling experience imperative

The iPhone was a shift in what users find of value in a mobile device, and introduced new sources of value at the level of user experience. The incumbent’s first task in connection to this would have been to map and catalogue the elements of the compelling experience offered by the iPhone, and then design equally or more compelling experiences on their own platforms. Equally compelling would have been a minimum—the ideal is to strive beyond competition. But for that, one needs to understand the shift of value from security as a feature, to fun, pleasure and discovery as an attitude. No one buys an iPhone for making phone calls or sending secure transmissions to their friends. Fun, pleasure and discovery are characteristics of the new behavior space the iPhone introduced and brilliantly expanded on. There is a long list of companies in the technology space that have often confused “features” with “value.” The value is the user experience— the what—and not the how it gets to be there. The iPhone introduced a value metric in which hardware, beauty, functionality, usability and application customization all play equally relevant parts, in creating an experience that has but one headline: Pleasure. The iPhone is pleasure objectified.

4. Capitalizing on the need for play

During the Q&A session of the July 2011 RIM Shareholders Meeting,⁴ one investor took center stage by giving a heartfelt speech which ended with the following declaration: “You’re letting Apple and Android eat your lunch, and those are not business devices, those are kids’ games.” To this, the audience applauded wildly.

Unwittingly, this investor hit the nail on the head: Apple and Android are kids’ games, they are invitations to behavior, and this is precisely why they were so immediately successful. Apple and Android devices are fun to interact with, they are pleasurable and playful. Apple and Android products are play behavior spaces. The iPhone pioneered the transformation of a piece of technology into a behavioral object, something that invites playful use, directs the user and responds—providing feedback—to his or hers actions. In the iPhone, play builds a bridge between pleasure and purpose. Achieving purpose with pleasure is the real value of Play Value, described later in this book. Play Value means empowered participation and engagement; empowerment comes in the form of the device, which allows for customization and multiple layers of use through applications. The iPhone is not a tool, and it is not a toy. It is a device for, exploration, surprise, and delight. Play for purpose. The recognition that there are times in which we need to take everything less seriously, allow ourselves to possibility, and to enjoy the journey. The rewards will come, but none more satisfying than our return to the children we always wanted to be. This is a product about the journey. And this is why it is so hard to compete with.

5. Relearning work, pleasure and motivation

The iPhone announced that we are entering an era of play and imagination. The status quo will not be enough anymore. To compete and occupy a place in the new behavior space of mobile computing, your organization needs to imagine and innovate possibility. And this does not come from work, but it comes from play. Playing with ideas, playing with possibility.

The emergence of disruptive behaviors has exposed in many organizations the widening gap between current capability and current possibility. We know what we can do, we understand what we are capable of, and we perform flawlessly within that climate. Yet rarely do we know what is possible. We rarely know how to see what is possible, and act upon what we see. Simply put, people and organizations become limited by what they look at, rather than what they see. The first iPhone released in July 2007, had 11 application icons on the home screen, and four icons on the menu bar in the lower side of the screen. A total of 15 applications. This is what was visible to the eye.

But how much was visible to the imagination? Was possibility resident in the 15 applications you can see, or in the blank display space where nothing resided? While I realize that this is by now a rhetorical question, you get the point: to compete, one needs to see beyond the visible, you need to imagine what would be there in the very near future, and to imagine, you have to suspend reality for a while, and allow yourself to enter the world of play, imagination, and magic.

Is your company culturally equipped to do this? To allow your millennial work force to be themselves, to excel at their passions and produce outcomes that they are in love with? Probably not. More likely, your workforce is told to follow pre-established routines, processes created long before they got there. Millennials⁵ face disappointment when they reach the organization: raised to believe that everything is possible and the sky is the limit, these are people of ambition, purpose, and experimentation. They have grown up in an environment in which technology allowed them early participation in the culture, as well as hands on experience in the creation of a new networked society in which they feel they are in control. At least, this is what they believe. They were promised all the freedom of thought and action worthy of their aspiration, just to discover once they join the organization, that the old structures of the workplace are not as permeable to change as they claim to be. Once in the workplace, they are now part of a system that does not necessarily recognize merit, imagination, play, and the cultural and economic participation that characterized the millennials’ behavior up to joining the workforce. The old structure of the organization does not see empowerment and participation as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: The Landscape is Shifting
• Chapter 1 The Business of Behavior Space
• Chapter 2 The Design Dimension
• Chapter 3 The Play Dimension
• Chapter 4 The Bridge
• Chapter 5 The Business Dimension
• Chapter 6 The Strategic Dimension
• Chapter 7 The Organizational Dimension
• Chapter 8 The Marketing Dimension
• Chapter 9 The Future Dimension
• Afterword: Getting Started
• Bibliography
• Index