The Cheesecake Factory Experience - Blog 3

In today’s world, products are so widespread and attainable that companies need to build customer experiences around its goods and services to give customers a reason to purchase. After all, is there really a big functional difference between an ipod and some other branded touch-screen mp3 player? Do Duracell or Energizer batteries really last longer than generic brands? Can customers really taste the difference between Coke and another soft drink like Pepsi? In an article by Malcolm Gladwell, “Kenna’s Dilemma,” it turns out that most people who claim they can taste a difference between Coke and Pepsi, when put to a blind test, can’t. So what is it that makes a customer worship Nike and not Asics, Oak Farms and not Great Value, or vice versa? Certainly not just because of the functionality of the products themselves. Customers buy or repurchase because of the holistic experience they’ve had with a product or service, which begins when they do research for a product they want to buy down to the experience they have afterwards.

To create more value for the customer, the company needs to help the customer build emotional connections with the product that reinforces positive associations. For example, people who buy Apple products may buy them because of the great customer service they enjoyed while going to the Apple Store, or associations with being cool, modern, and hip. And Apple achieves this through paying attention to SEMs details such as great visuals. Another example - my blog background is plain and unappealing, so right off the bat it might send negative associations to the reader, creating a bad experience.

To better illustrate how customer experiences work, I will discuss a great experience I had at the Cheesecake Factory, using some of the SEMs.



Immediately when I arrived at the restaurant, there was great sensory appeal. I was in Orlando at the time with relatives, and the Cheesecake Factory was located in a mall in the midst of all the theme parks, adorned with lights. As I walked in, the beautifully designed cheesecakes in the lit glass casings provided great visuals and anticipation for what was to come.



Inside, the lighting also created a great mood for dining and carrying out conversation with company. The Cheesecake Factory pays so much attention to the visual appeals, down to design of the menus.



Finally, the main dish arrived. It smelled great, and indeed tasted great, but when it arrived, looked great. Going back to the Coke example, while the Cheesecake Factory does have great food in terms of taste, if customers were put to a blind test, it is likely they would not be able to tell the difference between a marinated shrimp from the Cheesecake Factory and another, possibly cheaper, source. So in these ways, the Cheesecake Factory created a great sensory experience for me.

When we finished dining, the servers, who were just fine to begin with, somehow found out that it was my birthday. I was surprised when a group came over with a cup of ice-cream that mimicked a birthday cake with a lit candle on it. They asked me my name, and sang the happy birthday song for me. I made a wish and blew the candle. This definitely created an experience that was above and beyond what I expected. In this way, the Cheesecake Factory tapped into my feelings and created an emotion experience for me.

Finally, the design and atmosphere that the Cheesecake Factory creates helps its customers relate to themselves in a certain way. For example, the menus don’t show the prices of the orders, which I don’t like, but I can see how it helps create the experience of a certain social class, where price for dinner isn’t so important.

In these ways, the Cheesecake Factory really does use the experience of going to “The Cheesecake Factory” to create value for the customer. Going there is not just like going to another restaurant with good food.

Assignment 3 - or was it 4?

For this assignment I decided to finish up on what I started in assignment 2. I fixed the paint job on the horse, fixed the snapping in one of the back legs, and improved the motion in the movement. Unfortunately, I forgot to not have a black background so you can't see its hooves, which are on separate joints...:(

Untitled from Bruce Li on Vimeo.

Horse Walk Attempt, Assignment 2 for Visual Graphics

Unfinished Horse Walk from Bruce Li on Vimeo.

I decided to play with the parenting tool and animate this horse walking. Of course, I quickly found out that it is much more complicated than it looks to get right, not to mention I used to many joints, even at the hooves...which I guess you can't see well since they are black. So I totally ran out of time, and had to leave the horse as a skeleton instead of painting it in. If you look carefully the loop is also a bit off; there is some minor snapping going on in one of the legs. Finally, I did the front legs first and forgot that the shoulder blades needs to move, so there is no motion there, which as you can see I did do for the back legs.

I'll make it look better in a follow up assignment or something. If you can't see the embed the link is http://vimeo.com/15017800

Assignment 2 - Personas

Marketers create personas to better understand their target customers and in turn design better products and services. Personas go further than just segmentation. Rather than just looking at demographics, a developed persona takes into account details such as a person’s goals, hobbies, etc. By probing deeper into a potential customer’s life, marketers can discover unspoken or even unconscious wants of an identified persona. Based off of this information, they can then develop and design products and services based off of the research.
Formally, developing personas can be a detailed procedure, such as going through the five stages of conception and gestation, family planning, birth and maturation, adulthood, and retirement and lifetime achievement. In the end though, the idea is to discover insights about groups of people who have unsatisfied needs where a product or service might improve their lives.
To create a persona, a marketer will need a wide array of information on a person. For a start, a description of myself might be a good start for a marketer to develop a persona.
The basics: Bruce is a 21-year old male Chinese-American college student. Currently he is a double major in Marketing and Film Production at the University of Texas at Austin.
Bruce is very independent and goal-oriented. He is passionate about becoming a writer/film director, and is not afraid of the difficult road towards that goal. He does a lot of studying and work outside of class regarding writing and film-making. As a senior in college, he is both excited and anxious about what is to come after school, because as exciting as it sounds, it is difficult to get a start in the film industry.
He keeps himself occupied between school and his own studies because he values his time and wants to use it efficiently. Throughout his career in college, he has become disillusioned with the college degree, and is increasingly questioning the importance of it. He likes to live simply. He spends nearly nothing on clothes, haircuts, or material goods that don’t have intrinsic value. He doesn’t believe in “dress for success,” and in fact has never worn a suit in his entire career in business school. He likes reading, movies, and videogames when he has time. With movies, he hates seeing bad films, so he will usually wait until a film gets some reviews before considering watching it in the theaters. He also likes to keep with technology and new trends, but like movies, prefers to wait for responses from other users before trying a new product or service.
He enjoys hanging out with friends, but does not like bars and clubs, finding them too noisy and rowdy. He likes a wide array of music and arts, but has an inclination towards classical music and traditional art because he was trained in those fields. Usually, he listens to his music on his MacBook Pro. He works out to stay healthy. He likes great food, but as he is on a tight budget now, he usually chooses price over quality.
In the future he would like to learn more about the world, the human experience, and do something he loves. He is willing to take the risk on a more precarious career path rather than a sinecure that he is not passionate about.
Using information like that described above, marketers can discover insights about what products/services might improve Bruce’s life, what products/services that Bruce might be interested in, or staying away from.

All three people from different photos, the kid in the middle is me when I was younger.  Tried to give the photo an old look, and in general tried to make it look like it was actually taken with the three people.