On Tuesday, July 20th, Schulich welcomed prospective students, current students, alumni, and staff to a captivating presentation and networking session on Customer Experience Design. The guest speaker for the evening was Markus Giesler, Marketing Department Chair and Associate Professor of Marketing at Schulich. Giesler is esteemed for being “one of the best recognized experts studying high-technology consumption” by Wired.

As Ashwin Joshi, Director of the MBA program, noted, this expertise has enabled Giesler to make a substantial impact on the course, vocabulary, and mindset of the teaching practices at Schulich.

 

Professor Giesler’s presentation challenged the audience to rethink how they view Customer Experience Design, emphasizing the fact that “the real experience design challenge is never creation but sustenance.” To guarantee brand success, attendees learned that companies must monitor, invert, naturalize, and transform a brand narrative to ensure that any doppelganger messages – negative rumours, images, or associations that the general public might make – are recognized before they even emerge. To expand upon these concepts, Geisler defined marketplace interactome as being a whole set of cultural conversations about a brand and used real-life examples such as Botox and the newly released Pokemon GO to emphasize the benefits of actively monitoring a brand through real-time analysis.

Not only did Marcus Giesler’s presentation educate attendees on Customer Experience Design, but it reminded the audience that Schulich does not just accept reality or take it for granted; the school utilizes a “platform-based” classroom model that encourages students to share knowledge as well as acquire it.

Professor Geisler is sure to agree that in the world of Customer Experience Design, this type of academic and cultural conversation is exactly what makes change.