In practice, only few industries can construct offerings that support the direct sale of experiences. However, many are aware of the added value in experience-based differentiation and are experimenting with indirect approaches to selling experience. The indirect model aims to craft an experience around products and services, whereby the actual business still revolves around selling the product or service itself.

For example, Tchibo, a German coffee-maker-turned-retailer, runs its non-food offering under the slogan “a new experience every week”. Tchibo’s retail outlets offer a limited range of products each week, launched and marketed under a common theme with a shared motto. Product managers work closely with trend scouts and market research institutes to identify relevant socioeconomic trends and consumers’ shopping habits. Shoppers consequently come to Tchibo over-proportionally often not with a particular shopping list in mind but to explore the experience of the week.

The ICT industry would profit from adopting some of the underlying principles and success-patterns of leading experience-centric and experience-aware industries. A prime example is the migration from the web’s traditional communication services such as email to more engaging social networks. While email is being increasingly perceived as a service catering mainly to time-saver use cases (e.g. B2C correspondence or e-commerce), social networks, such as Facebook or MySpace, are designed as platforms for experience-centric time-waster use cases (e.g. entertainment, photo sharing, or gaming). Thus, users log on to Facebook for the experience of just being there, often without any particular “todo” on their agenda. This matters as advertising revenues are migrating in close correlation with users’ Web browsing habits. The underlying principles of creating an experience akin to the leisure and entertainment sectors are thus also working in favor of virtual services that are (re-)creating similar experiences online. In fact, an increasing share of revenue of Facebook & Co. is being generated by sales of virtual goods in social games and virtual gifts to give to friends online, with no functional purpose but solely for the associated social experience.

How to differentiate in ICT

In fact, many ICT companies have long embraced the notion of crafting a superior user experience. User- or customer experience generally commands high recognition of importance up to top management levels. Operationally, customer experience differentiation strategies tend to aim for optimizing the internal setup of an organization towards improving external customers’ perception of its products, services, brand, and of the company as a whole. However, analysis of leading ICT players reveals significant differences in the way that customer experience is being approached between industries as well as between players within one industry. For this, it is helpful to distinguish two strategically different approaches to differentiation, broadly categorized as process-driven versus technology-driven (Figure 2).