The Next Big Thing
By Ernie Chen

Just when we started to adopt the knowledge economy, we are now exposed to an exciting and promising experiential and emotional economy. The focus of leading experiential organizations is beyond selling products or services but consistently build brands that sell relationships. The objective of these organizations is to connect with the customer by establishing true differentiation and ultimately creating brand loyalty.

Experiential organizations continuously work toward:

• Understanding the customers desires, emotions and lifestyles
• Developing passion to increase knowledge and expertise
• Making the “touchable” personalities real
• Building interactive relationships with the customers

A very successful local low budget airlines service provider has truly understood the meaning of becoming a leading experiential organization - Air Asia. Air Asia with it bold and striking brand personality continuously reminds us of the experiences we share with them. With their tagline, “Now Everyone Can Fly” and positioning “The Lowest Airfare,” Air Asia has truly understood their customers’ desire, emotions and lifestyles.

Air Asia is also an organization that has the passion to increase their knowledge and expertise to continuously exceed their customers’ expectations. This is shown in the improvement of their daily operations to increase quality and reducing cost that would means cheaper airfares and better deals for the customers.

In many organizations, it is sometimes ironic where top management is always “too busy” to spend a little time listening to their customers. And yet they make the most important decisions serving their customers. This makes them sitting on the zenith of corporate excellence in which they are far from understanding their real customer desires. Tony Fernandez and many of his earlier success low budget airlines gurus in the world has always been “touchable” personalities in which they would be seen serving the passengers with drinks and sometimes peanuts.

Most importantly, an experiential organization focuses on building interactive relationships with customers. This is important for the purpose of acquiring, growing and retaining the customers. Value-added services are no longer sufficient to customers today. The only way we can keep them loyal is to create a branded emotional experience that will capture their hearts and souls.

Last updated - 30 June 2004