Organic Adds 'Experience Lab'

 

Digital marketing agency Organic has launched a new “Experience Lab” initiative to supplement the agency’s 18-month-old Persona Room, which looks at consumers’ media consumption and device usage behaviors.

“Our Persona Room has helped us build rich insight into user behavior; their needs, wants and desires,” Mark Kingdon, Organic’s CEO, told ClickZ. “We address media usage in the context of the Persona Room, but we want to amplify that.”

To build out the emerging media practice, Kingdon brought in Chad Stoller as the executive director of emerging platforms. Stoller will lead Organic’s gaming, mobile, and social networking teams within the agency, as well as lead the development of Experience Lab. He joins Organic from Arnell Group where he was director of communication solutions. He will be based in Organic’s New York office and report directly to Kingdon.

The goal of the Experience Lab will be to delve deeper into the lives of the personas created by Organic for clients. Kingdon said the agency has been using personas in its practice for several years, but 18 months ago began creating real-world rooms, such as a bedroom, office or living room, to help clients and members of Organic’s creative team immerse themselves in the persona’s life.

Experience Lab will go even further and look at a “day in the life” of the consumer, to understand how the consumer uses devices and consumes media.

“The goal of the simulation is to bring the persona to life. We want to show how the core target customer lives and works,” Stoller told ClickZ.

When a team at Organic creates a persona, they take into account all the information the client has about their user, from market research, performance statistics, and other sources. They supplement that with other research and information to form a picture of the user, which they build into a persona. The Persona Room, and the Experience Lab, are additional simulations that can help further round out the persona.

These simulations are especially helpful for clients whose customers are highly involved, or those who tend toward highly considered purchases, Kingdon said. DaimlerChrysler has used Organic’s Persona Room, but Kingdon declined to say whether the car maker had already used or plans to use the Experience Lab simulation.

The results of the simulations do more than just give the client a better idea about its customers, according to Stoller. “It’s one thing to identify opportunities, but everything has to have an appropriate implementation,” Stoller said. “Everything we demonstrate is something that’s applicable to the specific client.”