Experience Matters: How to Create Memorable Moments

[00:00:00.540] - Marlys Arnold

You're listening to The Trade Show Insights podcast, Season 19, Episode 12. I'm your host, and Exhibit Marketing Strategist, Marlys Arnold, bringing you tools to improve your Exhibit results. On today's episode, brought to by the Exhibit Marketers Cafe, we're talking about how to intentionally design memorable moments on the show floor. Well, I am really looking forward to our conversation today. I met Mat Duerden at IMEX in Las Vegas and sat in on his presentation about creating engaging experiences. And so I went up to him afterwards and invited him to be a guest on Trade Show Insights because I know that... I mean, anybody who's listened to me for any period of time, or if you've been to one of my workshops, you know that creating experiential trade shows and trade show exhibits has been a passion of mine for many years. I'm a huge fan of the experience economy, and I recommend that book all the time. But anyway, so I want to tell you just a little bit about Mat before we get started. Mat Duerden is the Department Chair of Experience Design and Management in the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University.

[00:01:54.640] - Marlys Arnold

His focus is on creating memorable and transformative experiences, and he has a keen interest in the neurological link between storytelling and social connection. He co-authored the book, Designing Experiences, which earned a silver medal from the Axiom Business Awards in the business intelligence and innovation category. Congrats on that. In addition to his teaching experience of design courses at both the undergraduate and MBA levels, Mat has worked with organizations from a variety of sectors, including healthcare, education, and tourism, to enhance their experience design strategies. He's a founding member of the World Experience Organization and a certified Lego serious play facilitator. I think that's fascinating. Maybe we'll hear about that.

[00:02:43.280] - Mat Duerden

I'm proud about that one, yeah.

[00:02:46.010] - Marlys Arnold

Mat brings a unique experience and perspective to the conversation about the power of design in shaping impactful experiences. So Mat, welcome to Trade Show Insights.

[00:02:55.970] - Mat Duerden

Thanks so much. I'm so glad to be doing this after we chatted in Vegas this earlier this year. So thanks for having me on.

[00:03:03.890] - Marlys Arnold

Well, let's talk a little bit. As I said in your intro, you are definitely about the merging of storytelling and creating experiences and connection. So Let's just start there. Talk a little bit about the role of storytelling and experience design.

[00:03:21.320] - Mat Duerden

Yeah. I mean, storytelling is a hot topic, right? And as humans, we've been interested in storytelling for a long time. And so I think I want to approach it from the angle of storytelling is an experiential competency. So if we have a memorable experience, that means that we've experienced something that has produced emotions, where we felt angry or sad or excited. And those emotions trigger our brain to timestamp that moment. Remember this thing, because for whatever reason, different hormones are being produced in your body. And the Whether or not those emotions that produce memory, that memorable moment, whether or not that turns into something meaningful or transformative is largely contingent upon storytelling. Because if it's just memorable, like, oh, that was great, and we don't think about it again, right? And not just think about it, but really reflect on it and tell stories to ourselves and others about why it was important. If we don't do that, it it will stay memorable and usually fade. But if we do that storytelling, that's the mechanism why something becomes... We layer meaning onto it and it becomes meaningful and potentially transformative. There's some other pieces to that

[00:04:45.250] - Marlys Arnold

Well, and also it's like making a movie in your brain. It's like you remember back and you actually see this movie, you experience the experience all over again because you're seeing that replay in your brain.

[00:04:58.270] - Mat Duerden

Exactly. Yeah. So if you think about an experience that's been impactful for you, you've usually told stories about it to other people. And what's interesting is research suggests that we're not naturally reflective beings, that reflection wasn't perhaps a necessary evolutionary skill. It was just like, where's the next meal? Where to have a rest? Stay safe. And so from an experience design standpoint, I think it's really important to think about how do we design experiences that are easy to tell stories about? And also, how do we to support whoever our participant or end user or guest or client in their storytelling? How do we help increase their storytelling efficacy so that the experiences that they have with us are stickier and they linger longer and have an impact after they leave.

[00:05:49.430] - Marlys Arnold

Well, let's talk about that, because in your book, you do reference the fact that experience mapping is like storyboarding a movie. So talk about that a little bit about how do we actually engineer or craft these story lines, I guess you could say, of the experience, especially when it comes to trade shows, whether that be the trade show organizer is designing an experience for the entire show or the exhibitor themselves is designing an experience in their booth. How do we go about reverse engineering that experience?

[00:06:24.310] - Mat Duerden

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, if you think about the backstory of storyboards is that they're a technique that Walt Disney invented when he was trying to get investors for Snow White, right? Because people are like, feature length, animated film? No one's going to go see that. Why would you do that? And so he had his animators just sketch up these very low fidelity scene pictures that he could then go to investors, put them up on a wall, and basically act out the whole story to convey the richness of the medium to be able to tell this story. And then, of course, that was adopted It is an industry standard, and now it's spilled over into all kinds of places. When we think about experiences, experiences are very abstract, even if we're telling somebody about, Okay, this is how we want to set up The Trade Show booth, and this is what this is. It's still just this abstract thing, and we only remember about 20 % of what we hear, right? And you say a word and you say a phrase like, oh, it's going to be exciting. That means something different to all kinds of different people.

[00:07:28.870] - Mat Duerden

So storyboarding or experience mapping, right? It's thinking about what are the touch points of the experience that we're going to design? And not just in the moment when they're on the trade show floor, but what are the anticipatory moments? What are the touch points that we want people experiencing before they arrive.

[00:07:46.290] - Marlys Arnold

Leading up to it.

[00:07:47.190] - Mat Duerden

And then afterwards. And it depends on the elevation you're designing at. But really, when you lay out that, and usually, for me, it starts with Post-it notes, or it's on a collaborative white reporting space, but to really say, okay, what are the touch points? And people are always asked, okay, so how do you differentiate? How do you slice and dice and experience in the touch points? And for me, it's any time that you're asking somebody to pay attention to something else, right? When there's a shift in attention, well, then that's another touch point. And we would design each of those uniquely, and they're each going to have a specific job to do. And when you're able to map out and experience anticipation, participation, and reflection phases, then you actually have this concrete thing that you can talk people about.

[00:08:30.470] - Mat Duerden

This is what we want to do, as opposed to just this abstract ideas floating around that are going to be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

[00:08:38.940] - Marlys Arnold

Right. That makes a lot of sense, because it does, like you said, it needs to be a conscience step-by-step process. You can't just hope that people grasp the experience that you're wanting them to, because if you don't have those elements in there... I always tell exhibitors, it's like, you need to really think about how you want to engage the attendees as they approach your booth, or even, like you said, before the show ever even starts, how are you going to engage and draw them in and give them a reason to want to visit your booth?

[00:09:12.580] - Mat Duerden

Totally. Yeah. And I think the real magic of experience mapping is when you not only have those touchpoints identified, and recognizing that most experiences aren't linear, there's going to be branching pathways, they can get really complex. But just conceptually, to start with this idea of sequential touch points to also then say, okay, So usually I have a row of the touch points, and then I'll have a row above the touch points to say, okay, what's the desired reaction at each touch point? Ideally, what would we want somebody to say at this moment when they first see the booth, when they come up and talk to a host, when they take some type of swag or whatever it is. And I really think there's power in articulating specific statements because it gives us this design target We're going to say, okay, the job of this moment is to get people to say this thing like, oh, wow, this this booth really stands out or this host was extremely friendly or they really understood the issue that I'm trying to solve, whatever that is. And then you make all of your when you're designing that touch point, then you say, okay, we're going to connect everything to this desired reaction.

[00:10:22.700] - Mat Duerden

That's our goal. And it gives us this focus as opposed to this creative constraint as opposed to like, well, we'll just This is how we've always done it, or I saw somebody else do this, or, Hey, we got this deal on this thing. We've got a more targeted goal.

[00:10:37.310] - Marlys Arnold

I think that's a problem, at least with a lot of exhibitors I talk to, is that they do go into it, like you said, for the approach of, Oh, well, here's this cool new technology we can use in our booth, or, Here, this is what we've seen everybody else doing, or those kinds of things. They're not looking at it from a strategic perspective of, What is it we're wanting people to do? Even It's just the question of, I ask exhibitors all the time, What are your goals? And they always go, Oh, we want to get a lot of leads. It's like, Okay, well, first of all, what's a lot? And second of all, what are you wanting them to do? What are you wanting them to feel? What action are you wanting them to take. So you got to really dive deeper into what that ultimate objective of your exhibit is.

[00:11:23.180] - Mat Duerden

Yeah, and really, if we're talking about behavior, we say, let's back up and think, okay, what's the emotion that is going to lead to an insight that's going to lead to an attitude change, that's going to lead to a behavior change. There's all of these steps, right? And so, yeah, the overall goal may be, we want 100 leads and defining what that means, then returning learn and buy or whatever, but then backing up and saying, okay, what are all the steps to get them to that point? And then let's design an experience that helps them go on that journey.

[00:11:53.860] - Marlys Arnold

Well, or even like you were talking about with the whole storytelling and having them reflect and tell the story later. It's like even how do you want to design your booth so that the attendees either go get somebody else and say, oh, come, you got to go see this booth. I'm going to bring you over here. Or afterwards, they go back to their office and they say, oh, We went to XYZ company's booth, and it was phenomenal, and here's what we learned, and here's why we need to work with them. So I think structuring those conversation experiences is important, too.

[00:12:28.870] - Mat Duerden

Yeah, I love it. So I And we often think about, how do we help people after the experience? How do we help them co-curate their memories? What are we doing to extend that? A lot of the experiences that I design are learning experiences as a professor. And I really love a work of educational researcher Kevin Pugh. He writes about transformational education, and he defines a transformative learning experience as exhibited by future intrinsic use of content. So it It doesn't matter what happens in the moment in the classroom. You can't tell if it's transformative in that moment. But if somebody leaves your classroom and says, I want to apply this thing that I learned, and they do it, and it makes whatever they're doing better, that's transformative learning. And so from an exhibitor standpoint, it's saying, it's not what happens in the moment where we determine success. It's what that interaction then leads people to do. And I love your example of, how do we design and experience, a design, things that we give people that are going to increase the likelihood that they're going to go tell somebody else about it.

[00:13:36.740] - Marlys Arnold

Yeah. And like you said, sometimes you don't really realize what an impact you've had. I just had somebody come up to me in an event last night and said that something that I said just randomly in a conversation a year ago, how she's taken that and really ran with that piece of advice. And it's really turned into a whole new venture for her. And I was like, I had no idea. It was just a casual conversation for me. So had I been really focused on making that a point, it would have been a very different experience on my end. But anyway, so it is true that you can, if you really consciously think about what you're teaching or what you're telling people, it can make a huge difference.

[00:14:25.590] - Mat Duerden

And there's just such power in having these creative constraints, right? Because it's one thing to say, let's come up with a good idea for a booth. And even though it's like anything goes at that point, it's really hard to come up with ideas. And research shows this. But when you constrain and say, well, what are ideas that we think would cause people to have a conversation about our booth the next week, and that's what we're designing for. Then you start getting really interesting ideas if you can have this more narrow focus of what you're trying to do.

[00:14:56.250] - Marlys Arnold

Or even what can we design that would help them call us to mind six months from now, or even something way down the line, because so many times, exhibitors think that it's all about what happens in that first week or two. And it's like with sales cycles the way they are, sometimes it could be six 10, 18 months. So it's about building, like you said, that long term memory.

[00:15:21.570] - Mat Duerden

And I love that six months. I mean, this is a total random idea, but it gives you these brainstorming ideas of like, okay, we're going to give you this plant. And if you take this home and send us a picture of the plant that is now 10 inches high, it should take about four months. We're going to give you a 15 % discount off or whatever, right? You start coming up with ideas that you want to think of without that really specific target of what we're trying to facilitate.

[00:15:46.160] - Marlys Arnold

Yeah, yeah. And building that long term memory. I love that. Well, one of the stories that you tell in the book, I think is, and you may not have ever thought of it from this perspective, but the story of Tom and the Hummingbird. I read that and I really thought about, this reminds me of attendees at a trade show. So share that story. Now you may think of it in a whole new light.

[00:16:11.040] - Mat Duerden

So this just goes back to some of my previous experience For a couple of summers, I was a camp director of a wilderness camp for disadvantaged kids. My wife and I directed this program, and it was tied up into research and led me on an academic path. Anyways, we had this kid at the camp who we'll call Tom, not his real name, But man, he was just this bundle of energy. He was just bouncing off the walls all the time. He had this big, bushy head of hair, and he was just continuous motion all the time. We had one of the camp counselors who was over environmental education, and he did this unit on birdwatching. And you think like birdwatching, this is not going to capture this 12-year-old hyperactive kids attention. But the counselor, in addition to just being really empathetic and connecting with kids, also gave them this challenge is like, you know what? We have these hummingbird feeders. And if you come over there and put some sugar water on your finger and stand really still by these, there's a chance that a hummingbird will come land on your finger. And for whatever reason, this just captured this kid's attention.

[00:17:15.380] - Mat Duerden

And I remember walking by, this is like 22 years ago, and just seeing for the first time ever, just this kid just standing still, and not for moments, but for like tens of minutes. Wow. Waiting, and this hummingbird lying around, and finally, one actually landed on his finger, and that this was just this experience that had been serendipitously designed by this insightful counselor that totally slowed the world down and allowed this kid to focus and have this very still moment amidst his usual hyper-activity.

[00:17:51.660] - Marlys Arnold

Yeah. And that's why, like I said, I thought so much of the analogy between that and a trade show floor, because every attendee is like Tom. They've got like, stimulus overload. They got things going and noises and color and motion and everything and all this stuff going on. And to be able to design your exhibit so that it's like that hummingbird feeder that people just stop in awe and really are in the moment and in the flow. And so that's why I really love that story, because I thought that's exactly what we're trying to do when we design a trade show experience, is to get people to stop and focus.

[00:18:28.990] - Mat Duerden

I've never thought about that, but I can't think of too many more hyper stimulus settings than a big trade show floor, right? There's so much stuff going on. And what's interesting about, you mentioned flow, right? So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory has a variety of tenets or characteristics of flow. The most common one people will return to is this idea of we experience flow and there's this alignment between skill and challenge. And if there's too much challenge, we get nervous. If there's a challenge is too low, skills high, then we're bored. And so I think it would be interesting to think about from a trade show exhibit or a booth, how do you present opportunities for people to experience a little challenge, right? Or they're like, challenge and skill. How do you promote flow? Because for Tom in this moment, it was like, oh, wow, the challenge is holding still for this thing, but I really want it.

[00:19:28.670] - Marlys Arnold

Waiting for that reward.

[00:19:30.030] - Mat Duerden

Yeah, waiting for that reward. And so I think that's a really interesting way to think about, how could you design for that moment of that somebody could have this sense of stillness and hyper focus in this environment of really stimulus over saturation.

[00:19:47.830] - Marlys Arnold

Yeah. Like I said, you're probably never going to think of Tom and the Hummingbird. I know.

[00:19:52.350] - Mat Duerden

I love it. I love a whole new layer to that story.

[00:19:57.360] - Marlys Arnold

Well, one other thing I want to cover real quick before we wrap up is, in the book, you talk about the importance of micro-experiences. So give us some ideas, some examples of what are we talking about when we say micro-experiences?

[00:20:13.770] - Mat Duerden

Well, I think like every... I mean, we're having micro experiences continuously all day long, every day. It's any time... An experience only happens if somebody pays attention to it, right? So if I'm teaching a class and I'm doing stuff and somebody is in the back row shopping on Amazon, they're having an Amazon shopping experience. They're not having a learning experience in class. So we are paying attention to things all the time, right? And we also live in an environment where everything is calling for our notifications on our phone, and our watches, and wherever, all over. And so those moments of when we want people to pay attention, I mean, a lot of times we're just designing ordinary moments that are just easy. But we have to think about what are we doing to capture people's attention that they are willing... Because John Dewey, who is an educational philosopher, talked about the fact that a lot of the experiences we have actually aren't even experiences because they're not coherent enough. We just pay attention to we're over here. This is like 100 years ago. He's talking about people being distracted.

[00:21:19.110] - Marlys Arnold

He would probably- If he only knew now.

[00:21:22.070] - Mat Duerden

Yes, now I'd be like, oh, my goodness. How does society even exist? But we have to string enough micro experiences together for an experience actually to happen. We all know if you work to Trade Booth before and you say hi to somebody walking by, yeah, you had an experience, but everybody is saying hi. There's got to be a sustained interaction. And so thinking about those little micro experiences that you can then sequence to turn into something where people are like, oh, yeah, I remember. I remember that. I'm going to call them back. I'm going to tell them something about that again. It really goes back to touch point design, right? What are those touch points? If you only know that you're going to have maybe 20 seconds to capture somebody's attention. What are the three things that you want to have happen in that little short window?

[00:22:06.940] - Marlys Arnold

Yeah. And it does come down to, like you said, really being intentional about what experience and what reaction and what the ultimate result is that you're trying to design for. So Mat, thank you so much. We could go on all day talking about this, I know. But how could people best get in touch with you?

[00:22:25.930] - Mat Duerden

So LinkedIn is the best way. I'm always open to LinkedIn conversation. It's my only social media outlet. So that's the best. Just Mat Duerden on LinkedIn, connect or send me a message.

[00:22:38.010] - Marlys Arnold

And we'll put a link for that in the show notes as well. Yeah.

[00:22:41.290] - Mat Duerden

And you can have information on there about my book and other things on my LinkedIn page.

[00:22:46.010] - Marlys Arnold

Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mat, thank you so much for being here today on Trade Show Insights and for sharing about how we can better design experiences in the Trade Show, the crazy, chaotic Trade Show environment.

[00:22:59.580] - Mat Duerden

So Hey, thanks. And thanks for being a great host. Really enjoyed the conversation.

[00:23:10.310] - Marlys Arnold

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