Celebrating the Heart of Your Audience

As consumers, we sometimes take for granted the experiences we have in our lives, and that some of those experiences were intentionally designed.

The best brand homes and the best experience, the corporate experiences that you look at celebrate the world of the audience. And that’s a big difference, because what you’re saying is these aren’t me messages, but they’re you messages, right? How do we find a way into the heart of the audience? So for us, everything starts with knowing who they are.

Let’s talk about how to design experiences on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

The CX Leader Podcast is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Hello everyone! I’m Troy Powell, host of this episode of The CX Leader Podcast, and thank you for listening. It’s never been a better time to be a CX leader, and we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you develop great programs and deliver amazing experiences for your customers. Think about a time when you visited some place that’s meaningful to you. A special museum, the distillery of your favorite beverage, a presidential library. You walked away from that exhibit or tour with a heightened understanding and appreciation for that particular interest, or possibly gained a deeper understanding of something new. That experience was likely designed to better connect you with the product, person, and or brand. Well, our guest on this episode has helped design experiences for the very things we’ve mentioned. Christian Lachel is the Chief Creative officer at BRC Imagination Arts. Christian, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Troy.

Yeah. Well, it’s great to talk to you and and usually to start out, you know, especially when we have CX professionals on who, you know, we like to ask how they got where they are because there’s not really a program for teaching you, you know, you don’t get a degree in CX. And similar to you you don’t really get a degree in kind of designing immersive experiences. It’s very multidisciplinary, you know, background, etc.. So, um, how is it that you got to where you are?

It’s a really interesting story. And it’s, uh, and it definitely took those, those different pivots along the way. I honestly, it was always creative as a, as a young person, you know, growing up, I creativity was always kind of front and center in my life. But I made a decision after after high school to go into the US Navy. And I spent some time in the Navy, um, and, uh, had some really great training experiences there. And then I had an accident that happened and that sort of pivoted my career out of the US Navy and into kind of figuring out what I was going to do. I was lucky enough to land a job working in marketing in Chicago. My father was a general contractor who was doing a lot of renovations of agencies in Chicago. These, you know, marketing and advertising spaces, you know, warehouses and and one of the guys who owned the agency was an ex-Navy guy said, I’ll give you a shot, you know, just come on in. Um, so I got working in the art department, working with different folks, and this is back when we still had stack cameras and there were no real computers and all that kind of good stuff. The old days. Um, but I got hooked on the idea of creativity and that there was a career, an option to be creative and to do something, um, with that talent and to do it in the work and service of others, right to that service leadership that you have, that you think about.

You don’t do things alone as a, you know, it’s really a team. So with that, I ended up finding a couple of mentors along the way, um, who kind of pointed me towards Art center ultimately. And I ended up going to Art Center College of Design, where I got a degree primarily in illustration, but my focus was really entertainment design, which was not an official program, but it was. This industry was full being here in L.A. and in Hollywood, all these incredible people coming in from Walt Disney Imagineering and Universal Creative and Blizzard, you know, Blizzard and, you know, games and stories and filmmaking and films and, you know, just kind of the creativity of making, um, experiences, whether it was in a movie form and a video game form or in a physical form. And I just got hooked on doing the sort of physical expressions of those and started doing some had an inter, we had a sponsored project with Universal Creative, which really just then solidified the deal, and I started working in the industry even while I was still in school. And I’ve been doing it for now, uh, 26 years and still going\.

Yeah, interesting. Which, yeah, that is a good tie in because there’s that the creativity, but also the, the storytelling piece, which is, you know, big and kind of what you do. Um, well, tell me a little bit about BRC Imagination Arts. So the company that you work with now and kind of, you know, why do you exist? What is it that your organization does for for clients?

Well, you know, it’s BRC is you know, we’re a strategic in concept and sort of production company and agency that really focuses on creating transformative experiences. And we’ve been doing that for over 43 years. Uh, many years ago when our founder kind of started the company, we were working, he was working for Imagineering or Wet at the time on the Epcot, um, uh, project. And he was working on a film that’s still playing today, by the way, at the Impressions of France and the France part of the of Epcot. It’s still we have a world Guinness Book of World record for the longest kind of running show in a single theater. It’s still playing. They still rotate through it. So. But Disney was at the time a little overwhelmed with trying to get that park in Tokyo and some other things going. So they kind of fired Bob and rehired him to create a series of shows for the world of motion with General Motors and Disney. So our start, I always say the DNA of BRC is, you know, we’re kind of born out of the world of kind of expos with Epcot kind of being a permanent World Expo, uh, doing cultural work with different countries and different, you know, um, you know, places and people.

Uh, we work with brands, you know, our first clients for Disney and GM. And at that time they were the largest companies kind of in the world, uh, doing, you know, really amazing work. And then, you know, we still have this great sort of sense of, of storytelling and filmmaking, which is at the, I think, the core and DNA of BRC. We are deep storytellers at heart. There are a lot of people, I think, who use the word story, uh, in many different ways. But there’s a big difference between just a story and something that really moves and emotionally connects to an audience. And we’re in the transformation business. That’s what we do. We create experiences that people love, uh, rave about and ultimately, you know, learn more about maybe themselves or the subject or the brand and share that with others. You know, and I think that that’s the work that that we love doing worldwide. Yeah.

Now, which is the heart of, you know, so much of what we do in business or should be, I would say doing in business and in CX and all of that is, you know, how do we take people from one place to another? How do we transform how they view things, how they get work done, all of those pieces that are pretty critical to to successful, you know, long terme success, I would say in that world, you know, looking through a number of the projects kind of highlighted on your website, there’s just they’re all pretty fascinating and incredible brands and, you know, all of that. So what are some of your favorite, uh, or maybe your favorite one you’ve done recently and, you know, talk a little bit about it and what, you know, you all did to create that transformative experience for the participants.

Yeah, yes. For sure. There’s a bunch of different things that we’ve had the good fortune to work on, and full of gratitude for all the clients and audiences that we ultimately serve. Right. Um, we don’t do this for ourselves. We do it for the smiles and the and the impact we can create in the world. Um, more recently, I would say is we worked on a very large project with Diageo over in Scotland. Um, that work started about in 2018. We started working with Diageo on a, uh, prior to all the COVID and all that, the whole shutdown of the world, it seemed like, um, but we started doing that work to really look at a couple of things. One, how could we shift Scottish tourism and and whiskey tourism, which is a major part of the economic engine of, of Scotland in terms of the types of tours, you know, golf, whiskey, great sites, wonderful hiking, you know, their culture. You know, Scotland’s got a lot going on. But whiskey is a big part of it. Right. Um, and so working with them, it was really important to also figure out, um, not only how we can attract and sort of talk to a variety of different audiences, but new audiences. I think Scotch overall had a lot of old codes that we would sort of say, you know, you have to kind of look like this.

You have to be in a leather chair. You can only drink it after, you know, after dinner, you know, all this stuff, which honestly is, is nonsense. Um, it’s it’s stuff that once you go into the history of, of Scotch, you realize none of that’s true. And everybody was drinking, you know, um, lots of different varieties of things, hot toddies and early cocktails and all kinds of stuff. So our job there was to really look at the whole landscape with Diageo and their teams at what we call Destination Scotland, create a series of different projects that were interconnected around Johnnie Walker being one of the major flagships that we worked on, and that would be a project we called Johnnie Walker Princes Street in Edinburgh. It’s right there on in the heart of the kind of at the edge of Newtown, but it has amazing views. Looking out at the castle back at the Edinburgh Castle, an amazing sort of location on the High Street in Scotland, in the capital. In addition to that, linking that to a series of other projects across the four corners of Scotland on the Isle of Islay, or up in Speyside, or in the lowlands and up in the Highlands, and then also looking at a variety of other projects like Talisker and Singleton and a few other things to really look at this investment, this 185 million pound investment in a Scotch tourism and growing the brand love and thinking about how we could tell stories not only to existing

audiences that love Johnnie Walker being, you know, one of the top Scotch scotches in the world in terms of volume and reach, but also bringing in new, new audiences and having new ways to tell those stories. And so the flagship project for us with, uh, Johnnie Walker, Princes Street, has really been kind of a game changer. We’re seeing a lot of people in the industry now starting to reinvest in tourism, which we hoped everybody would do. You know, it’s important we’ve seen the results of that project, which has eight floors of experiences. Uh, everything from like a journey of flavor that takes you on a very bespoke and personalized whiskey flavor journey. Um, uh, and storytelling environments. Right. But also things for connoisseurs and people who love whiskey aficionados, who want to go a little deeper and have something unique that they can only do there in, in Edinburgh, uh, as well as like an amazing rooftop bar and events and events center, all kinds of stuff that we’ve done and incredible retail space that’s also there.

So we saw it really as this incredible kind of flagship of experiences. And the great thing about all of that is it’s doing, uh, it’s exceeding our expectations in terms of the transformative nature of it, the stories combined with the sensory experience, that level of personalization, not a one size fits all approach, really has, you know, kind of shown guess what we’re indexing really high on the the audiences that we’re after younger skewing, younger skewing, more women, seeing a great transformation of 95% or higher from people who don’t don’t know anything about whiskey, don’t like whiskey to loving or enjoying it. Uh, the numbers across the board have been super great, and I think the accolades around the project, um, it’s not one of a wide variety of industry top industry awards globally. And I think it’s that recognition of saying, okay, if you do this right, you invest in it, you really understand your audience and you design something and create an experience that’s transformative and full of heart and emotion that, you know, magical things can happen for your brand and for and for the visitors who visit, you know, and those memories that you create.

Yeah. For sure. So when you’re engaging in this process of saying, okay, what is that story we want to tell, what is the transformation that we want to see in the people who experience this? Um, that makes it unique and special to that brand? Um, how do you kind of go about that?

Well, you know, Troy, you hit something that really resonated with me, which is, you know, that early conversation with clients and it starts with starts with that brief and really understanding the why. I would say that there is one principle here that’s really important in it. And then I’ll link into the process that we kind of go into to to get there. Um, one is that we’ve, we’ve studied a lot of brand homes and corporate B2B. B2G visitor experiences, innovation centers, flagships, all of that stuff, tours. And what we’ve noticed is that, the, the okay or the good ones. Celebrate the world of the corporation, right? You know, you walk in and you know you’re celebrating the world of them. The better ones celebrate the world of the product. You know, they kind of think about the product, but the best brand homes and the best experience, the corporate experiences that you look at celebrate the world of the audience. And that’s a big difference, because what you’re saying is these aren’t me messages, but they’re you messages, right? How do we find a way into the heart of the audience? So for us, everything starts with knowing who they are and really having a deep sense of what are their dreams, what are their desires? What are the things that you’re the why? What are they trying to. What are you what are you trying to solve as a brand? Um, what are the values that you represent? You know, so the heart and the values of the brand. And then what are the heart and value of the audience? And where do those two things come together? And that’s really where we start, you know, inside, like inside the heart and the emotion. And then we work outward. Okay. Then if that’s true, right. If these are what they’re looking for and here’s our values, here is where they align. What are the stories that we have. What are the what are the real measurable differences that we’re going to create. Right. So not just thinking about the business outcomes and the and things that we can measure the brand outcomes. But what are the community outcomes or is there a play here from that perspective in terms of what’s important, what’s important for the audience? What are the audience, the true audience takeaways that are unique to your story? And I think you hit the nail on the head that has a unique hook, a unique perspective, or is interwoven into the deep DNA or the the ethos of a brand or its stories that it owns, even if it’s a new brand, so that you can really do something that’s special and unique to that particular experience, because it’s so easy to fall into the generic trap and just say, oh, we’re just going to do the top line.

No, it’s it takes work to go deeper. It takes work to get in under the hood and get to the heart. And I think if you do that, if you take that time of deep research and deep storytelling and figuring out really how to do that, um, then magical things can happen, because then you’re really choreographing and creating a series of experiences that link directly to the emotional heart of the audience. And that’s where we see the magic happen and the difference happen. Um, sometimes we’re brought in to which we can talk about a little bit, but to fix things where it doesn’t take a whole lot to kind of pivot that, but it just had the wrong perspective or approach. But we find that that that’s what that’s what really leads to the success of the projects we’ve been fortunate enough to work on with our clients and ultimately the audiences that love, love the projects that we create. But that’s that is the secret.

You know, something you said early on? There was a great, I think, reminder to me for sure too, is we sometimes still get stuck in that, you know, what is the company want? You know, how do they want to be seen? And not even though I’m supposed to be a customer advocate, right, for that company, but I still get stuck in that and not sometimes asking that first question, which is, well, what are customers wanting from you? You know, what is it that they’re looking for from your product and service? What is it that will serve their needs and their life and their kind of ecosystem, which is something that can be easy to miss and therefore you can miss some key learnings there. So that’s a good reminder for all of us.

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You know, you mentioned, uh, this idea of sometimes you get brought in to fix things that are broken. And I think that happens a lot in our space. It’s probably honestly, the biggest thing that happens is, you know, we listen to customers, we find out that, you know, some experiences not doing what it should be. The customer is having a horrible time with it. And so, all right, how do we fix that? Um, and so talk a little bit about that. You know, I know in your case it’s probably, you know, bigger things. But you know, that idea of, all right, something’s not working, right. You know, one, how do you kind of discover that? And then two, you know, what do you do to to fix it? How do you kind of redesign that piece of of the experience?

It’s a it’s different for every project, right? It’s, you know, every one of those, you know, cases in terms of what’s potentially not working. Um, you know, it takes a bit of a deep study. I think part of this starts with, again, that why that you were talking about why what are you trying to achieve and why is it not really resonating with the audience or doing the thing you need to do? You got to get under the hood there and, you know, take a bit of stock and sometimes we’ll do. We’re brought in to kind of do something we talked about years ago, attraction doctor or, or brand doctor, where you kind of come in and you look at something, um, and you know, sometimes it’s just, you know, going through the experience, we don’t let people know we’re coming through. We do a little bit of a mystery shopper, a little bit of a some insight work. We kind of look at what, what what’s happening, what seems to be resonating, and not after that bit of audit work or kind of really looking at it and then sort of asking the team, okay, well, have things changed? Um, maybe when you created the experience, you were thinking you were going to do this, but now the way the market has evolved and your audiences are evolved, they they need something different. Um, so we see it a bunch of different ways and they’re all they’re all kind of linked. Um, one of the bigger examples of this would be like when we worked on the Heineken Experience in 2006, uh, Heineken Experience was looking to, um, they had an existing attraction in, in Amsterdam.

It was doing, you know, it was had a, you know, a pretty decent audience already, attendance. But they realized that it really wasn’t aligned with the brand. The messaging was kind of off. The story was a little bit not quite in the right order. And what we realized really quickly with that project is it was kind of what we called thought disordered. There were processes kind of out of the wrong sequence and needed to be kind of moved around. And, um, and it just it was confusing for visitors. Um, they couldn’t quite hold on to the story. And, and I think sometimes it’s, it’s just looking at how do we pivot and make sure the story is coming through in a way that actually audiences can understand it. Um, so we did a few things in 2006, which ultimately led to a reopening of the Heineken Experience in 2008. Uh, establishing those goals with the client, you know, really looking and seeing, okay, what are those objectives? Let’s verify, make sure we have a clear understanding of the audience objectives and the brand. At the same time. What can we do? What are the places where we can really with the with our investment make a big difference. And we by really focusing in on the audience, which they had not done, they said we’re for everybody. Well that’s great, but that doesn’t really quite work. Um, we need to have a point of view and be very important. Sometimes it’s hard for a client. Sometimes you have multiple experiences and you have different audiences, and that’s okay. But we need to at least have some place where we’re going.

Who are we actually who are we actually doing this for and what do they care about? We did all that adjustment, and the project went from being kind of a marketing drain to a marketing asset. It went from being a four. It basically started to earn revenue, make money for the company, which we go, okay, this is one of the goals. It was, you know, like imagine a chief marketing officer walking in every year and going, okay, I’ve got a loss right here. Then I’m starting with that’s not a great place to be. Um, so I think part of just making fixing the story, uh, finding the right moments of experience, making it personal for for visitors where they could also opt in and create something that is a memory. Um, all those little things that we did in the quick wins and some of the longer, bigger strategic pieces, it completely transformed the Heineken experience. And they went from roughly just under 300,000 visitors to now a million one or million two and a very different. And now they’ve continued to evolve. And of course, the team continues to invest. And I think that’s the other thing you have to put into the business case, how you’re going to reinvest. Uh, experiences are not static. They’re living. So you have to tweak, you’re going to have to make some adjustments. And I think doing that kind of deep analysis work and then some strong, uh, recommendations. Smart investments in the right places can make a huge difference. You can flip an entire project around if you know what you’re doing.

Yes. And that piece of, you know, kind of the the audit work, like you were mentioning up front of just, well, hey, sometimes we do need to step back and kind of experience it as customers are experiencing it. You know, one piece you kind of mentioned early on, you know, things. COVID hit. You know, these experiences shut down. All sorts of things happen. And, um, you know, and then digital, which had, you know, it’s been a digital transformation for 30 years now, not a new thing, but it definitely took on a different context. And, you know, it was accelerated. And so talk about that a little bit of, you know, how do you kind of create these more immersive, connecting transformative experiences via digital channels in a digital experience?

Absolutely. You have to be thinking about these projects both in a physical and a digital form from the beginning. Um, it’s it’s it’s really trying to find, again, with all those objectives, if you’ve got that North Star and you have your kind of key hooks and you have the real understanding of how you’re going to differentiate yourself in the in those goals, then it’s really about, you know, what is that total journey feel like? I mean, in the physical space people pre-book now. I mean, this was a huge difference from, you know, we started working on the Empire State Building many, many, many years ago. Nobody booked. Everybody was a walk up in a ticket. Right. The thing about COVID and that period of time is everybody went digital, you know, and it was already tracking that way. But, you know, the fact of the matter is people are used to booking and saying, okay, I’m going to I’m spending my time and where, where am I going to be doing it and let me get a time ticket. So the digital experience for us often begins right there. And how you start your story. And who is the group that’s coming? What are you interested in? Um, for example, on Johnnie Walker, Princes Street, that’s where we start our flavor print journey. You know, we start to ask some questions about what are your preferences.

You can kind of do a bit of a quiz beforehand. How do we tailor something. So getting early on that, that sort of, uh, those desires can help us steer a client or a visitor, a guest to a very specific type of offer. Um, we have all kinds of things on the digital front that help us with, like, dynamic pricing or also shifting people into times of day that are a little bit lighter so that people can really enjoy the experience. Um, and then there’s that pre journey that happens about the day of, you know, where do you need to be, what’s going to happen. And then post journey, you know during while you’re on the journey itself, there’s lots of things that we’re doing that are digital. You can collect things that we’re learning about if you opt in. Of course, all of this is opt, you know, opt, opt in sort of activations. But if you decide to join in and you had a certain flavor profile, we’ll follow up with you and talk to you about what you enjoyed this. You like that? Let’s, you know, staying in touch. You know, there’s other events that happen in neighborhoods or in your local community, even if you’re not from Edinburgh, but you go back to New York and you say, hey, we’ve got this amazing event happening.

Uh, and then there are additional digital experiences. You know, if you want to learn about your home bartending skills, you know, we have there’s great website tie ins, um, different cocktails and recipes over the seasons. Maybe we’re doing a hosted class with one of the top master distillers, and there’s a gift pack that goes to them and you can join in. There’s lots of things that are they just kind of work kind of across platforms, really both physical and digital. Um, and if you’re not thinking about that holistic, uh, journey, then, you know, then you’re really kind of missing a lot of opportunity to engage and have continued conversations with that audience. It’s not a one and done scenario at all. In fact, it should be an ongoing, to your point, a lifetime or, you know, some period of time, a very nice relationship that you’ve built and that, you know, you’ve made a friend at at X brand. And now we’re going to continue that, that relationship. Um, and if you’re not doing if you’re not doing physical and digital, then you’re probably not right. You’re probably you’re probably missing you’re probably missing a big portion of, uh, opportunity for for your audience and ongoing engagement. Right?

Yes. It’s kind of, uh, this idea read some of your early, you know, articles from a few years ago. One of the things you brought out this idea of, like, be everywhere, like you need to be wherever your customers are. And increasingly that is digital. And so you need to be there. But then also you need to be providing, you know, a kind of coherent experience and a coherent story there that matches with the things are going to have if they call in or if they ghost, you know, to a physical location. So, um, the importance of that is continually growing and it’s easy to lose sight because we’ll have a digital team that’s in charge of our digital stuff, and then we’ll have a, you know, a call center team. And, and, you know, these groups that are in charge of one channel when the reality is that customers are omni channel, you know.

Yeah, exactly. And they don’t know the difference. Right. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own like a curse of knowledge, right, that we have, you know, we know how it’s structured here. But the reality is for, for a, for an audience or for a customer, it has to feel completely seamless for them. You know, there is no this group or that department and all these things for them. It’s it’s all a sort of seamless relationship with the brand and all of those emotional touch points that you create and the reward that you, you give to your audiences to, you know, say thank you, you know, to have gratitude for them being part of your brand and your community that you’ve built. Right. And you want to make sure that that it’s not just, hey, we got you. You know, it’s like, well, how do we respect each other in this relationship? You know, how do we build some excitement? How do we build some rewards? So you have to really think think that through. And it can’t be done in isolation. All these things, to your point, are all interconnected. And and again, for the audience, it’s about creating a very seamless, you know, community and relationship with them that doesn’t have any silos because they can feel it. They can tell when you’re not, um, they’re not together. Yeah. You know what I mean? They can.

For sure. So, Christian, I, you know, read an article of yours in Forbes a couple of years ago about, you know, these seven experience principles for a changing world. And one of the things you mentioned in there is this idea of personalization, basically the idea of, hey, we need to think about not mass audience, but but niche, you know, how are we reaching kind of specific types of people and specific peoples and specific ways is kind of the way I interpreted it. But talk a little bit about that, you know, kind of the role of personalization and the importance of that in delivering an experience.

Absolutely. I, you know, it’s it’s two things at once, right? You want to build experiences where you can bring people together, um, and that they’re communal and there’s people who are interacting and get to know each other, um, in a, in a dynamic way, you know, they learn the story together. That’s quite engaging at the same time, you know, finding a way to also acknowledge that each of us has our own individual sort of expression and things that we enjoy. Um, is a is a good example of this would be in, you know, whiskey or in a beverage category that not everybody has the same flavor profile. You know, my wife and I enjoy different food, although we love the same restaurant. I’m not ordering the same dishes. She’s you know, it’s a kind of an individual choice at that point. What we’ve been finding in experiences, especially in the physical space, is what can you do to keep everybody together in a very communal way, but allow people to express or find their own personality within that. And I think, um, there are things like flavor print that we just recently did at Johnnie Walker Princes Street, where, again, people from all different backgrounds, even in the same group, may have a completely different, uh, serve experience, like completely different cocktails from their from their friends that they’re with because it’s tailored to them. There are other opportunities to why people are going. For example, we’re doing some work in Kentucky on the Bourbon Trail and other things. How do you create something that’s unique for that location? Um, you know, there’s a lot of product that’s out there.

And if you I always say, if you can get it at Costco, somebody’s going to be on their phone and go get it at Costco, right. And or whatever. It’s going to be target what, you know, pick the place. The real trick, though, is to do something that rewards people and gives them a sense of why they made that journey, you know, and, uh, and saying to them, hey, you made this journey. You spent time with us, time well spent, right? It’s important we don’t all have a whole lot of time in our lives. So we want to thank you for being here with us. And here’s things that we can do together that are unique to you. You know, whether that’s a particular special edition, whether that’s something really unique that they can customize, whether that’s a moment. It could even just be a photo moment that memorializes a visit. It doesn’t have to be all big things, but whatever you can do to acknowledge people, give them both that collective experience. But at the same time, we’re we’re make sense. Find something incredibly personal to them that makes a difference. And that’s where that purpose and heart really comes in. Because when you do that, people remember it. You know, we all remember when somebody just did a little bit more for us that day and it made us feel really special. So that’s I think there’s a lot of opportunity there to do that across a wide range of different industries and types of experiences that we create.

Okay. Well, I feel like we’re just getting going, but we are kind of right at the end here. So I could talk to you forever. Lots of more questions to ask, but we’ll have to wrap it up. And so what we tend to do here at the end is we kind of ask all of our guests to give some take home value to our clients. So it’s kind of for a CX leader who’s listening to this, you know, what’s one bit of advice that they can kind of take and, you know, go put into practice right away. So if you had to provide one piece or two pieces of take home value to our listeners around this topic of experience design, what would that be?

Yeah. If I had one piece of advice that we, we, we kind of give this advice to a lot of clients, even, um, you know, long standing clients. It often… We often, you know, forget about, you know, who we’re doing it for. And, um, sometimes we get wrapped up into the new product launch, we get excited about a new campaign. But my, my, you know, my thought again, in the gift I received early days was to really put yourself in your audience shoes and spend time with them. What are their hopes? What are their desires? What are the things that they care about? And it’s good to get outside of the data sometimes and just get to know people. I would say if you run a visitor experience, you’re thinking about doing something like this. Spend time, you know, get out of the chair and go walk the floor. Spend the day being kind of a guide or a guest in your own home, even if you’re a CFO or CEO. Um, so many, uh, of these brand homes and places that we create, it’s amazing for the C-suite or even just upper leadership and management to actually spend time with their audiences.

They learn so much by those personal interactions. And then with that information, how can you create? Doesn’t have to be a super big investment. There are all kinds of small wins every day that you can make. That could be a moment of surprise and delight, a thank you, a piece of gratitude. Thank you for showing up and visiting us today. We really appreciate you where you’re visiting from. Let me give you something as a thank you. Um, it goes a long way. You know, in the world where sometimes we’re we’re so busy to stop and we don’t have a chance to connect people to people. Um, is Frank Capra, who did It’s a Wonderful Life. Said. The thing that interests people most is people. How can you create a human moment with your audience today? It doesn’t take a whole lot. And, uh, if you do that, you’d be surprised at at the delight and also the gratitude you’ll get in return.

Love that. Perfect. Well, Christian, thank you very much for your time. And it’s definitely been an interesting conversation. And if people want to know more, they can go out and see BRC Imagination Arts on your website. Lots of great content there and connect with you on LinkedIn. I’m sure you’d be okay with that. If they want to chat some more?

I would.

So perfect. Christian Lachel is the Chief Creative Officer at BRC Imagination Arts. If you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast, or about how Walker can help your business’s customer experience, feel free to email us at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series, a link to our blog which we update regularly and contact information so you can let us know how we’re doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We’re an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and remember, it’s a great time to be a CX leader. We’ll see you next time.