The FIVE ingredients for an experience

Servus Erdnuss,

Last Friday, 21.11.14 we had a very interesting guest lecture of Samuel Röthlisberger, Creative Director of the company Habegger AG about staging.

First of all what can be an experience? An experience can contain the following:

Emotions, positive or negative incidents, it is not daily, surprising and last but not least you can share it with somebody.

According to Samuel Röthlisberger we can stage an experience. How it works? Let’s have a look at it.

To stage an experience it needs the five following ingredients to be an experience:

1. Emotions/Feelings

Emotions can for example be happiness, anger, fear, joy, astonishment, sorrow etc. To stage an experience emotions need to be established. Furthermore the target group as well as the message need to be clear right from the beginning. Last but not least the cannels to generate emotions are the five senses (hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching). To read about an interesting example visit the blog of Franziska and Lara.

2. Tension

It is crucial to generate tension and it needs a structure. Thereby the suspense curve plays an important role. The curve needs a clear slope. The beginning (prolog) is one of the most important part and needs to arouse curiosity and let the spectator know that it is worth to watch further. This is the so called “tension-bathtub”. But of course the end (epilog) is as important as the beginning. The peak/highlight should be in the last third.

3. Risk

In all experiences a certain risk (lower or higher) is mostly involved as well. An example of a higher risk experience is the one of RedBull Stratos.

4. People

The human needs to be appreciated within the experience. He must be part of it. For this purpose interactivity is very important. In the blog of Denis and Remo you can find a good example.

5. Traces

Last but not least, traces or so called anchor points need to be left to make sure that the people hold in memory the experienced. Anchor points at events can for example be give aways, pictures, bracelets etc. On the other hand anchor points can also be generated in the heads of the people, whereby storytelling plays an important role. It means to generate pictures in the head of the people. We have already wrote about storytelling in an earlier blog post.

To remember the five ingredients Samuel Röthlisberger repeated them with the help of a hand as an aide-memoire.

Aide-memoire

Thumb: Emotions (because the biggest „part“)

Middle finger: Tension (if you show somebody this finger you “probably” create tension… :-))

Ring finger: Risk (risk of marriage)

Little finger: People (perceive each and everyone)

Forefinger: Traces (need this finger to find/show traces)

To read more about this guest lecture you can also visit the blog of Daniela and Damia who againg blogged directly from the lecture.  We really enjoyed watching the video of the flashmob proposal. Go watching it and convince yourselves...

See you soon.

And remember: If we can do it you will do just fine. Let's conquer the digital world together.